Conference highlights include:

NEW @ FETC 2013
Tues., Jan. 29, at 2 p.m.

New to FETC or just want to hear about what is new this year? Attend the FETC 2013 First Timers’ Session to learn important information about the conference and maximize your professional development opportunities. Learn how to download our mobile app and build your personalized conference schedule. See how to interact and enhance your networking experience with Edmodo. Get the most out of FETC by following tips from veteran attendees! First time attendees will receive a special gift.

It provides content and exploration of today’s toughest technology issues facing campuses around the world, and convenes some of the brightest minds in the community.

When colleagues from around the world converge with some of the most innovative corporate solution providers, attendees have an event that creates invaluable networking opportunities and professional development.

At EDUCAUSE 2012, attendees will…

• Network. Engage with peers who share similar interests and challenges.
• Focus. Sort the program by topical themes and domains, speakers, and relevant interest areas.
• Discover. Engage in affinity group sessions, special topic discussion sessions, and lightning rounds.
• Influence. Combine experience with the expertise of forward-thinking speakers to challenge and shape the future.

The online conference will include 63 webcasts and over 30 exclusive online sessions.

Those who attend will experience dynamic keynote speakers and break-out sessions chosen to meet the specific challenges facing school and district leaders. The conference takes place Oct. 10-13 at the InterContinental Hotel in Miami, Florida.

Pre-conference Site Visits To High Performing Miami-Dade County Public Schools

A highlight of the 9th Annual ALAS Summit on Hispanic Education is our Miami-Dade school visits to see first-hand “what works: in urban education settings. View listings, schedule and additional information.

Online registration for site visits

If you have already registered for the summit and would like to be a part of the school visits, please go back to the registration page and add your site visit option and pay the additional $30. Please note that Imagine Learning School visit is complimentary. To register for this school only, go to www.imaginelearning.com/alas.

Keynote and Featured Speakers Include:

•        Dr. Bill Daggett – Founder and Chairman, International Center for Leadership in Education
•        Mr. Alberto Carvalho – Superintendent, Miami-Dade County Public Schools
•        Mr. Tony Plana – Movie and Television Actor and International Speaker
•        Dr. Joanne Urrutia – U.S. Department of Education
•        Ms. Martha Kanter – Under Secretary of Education
•        Ms. Jeannette Torres-Alvarez – Author and Television Personality – sponsored by Discovery Education

For more information, on summit, hotel, sponsorship, visit us online at www.alasedu.net

Part of ISTE’s future, Lewis said, involves finding other organizations with similar mission objectives.

Strong leadership to guide policy, and a voice to speak for education stakeholders nationwide, are essential to discussions about school reform, according to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)—and this fall, ISTE will turn to a new leader for these in Brian Lewis.

Lewis, who will take over as CEO of the ed-tech advocacy group for long-time CEO Don Knezek in September, has a 25-year career in both the public and private sectors as an association leader for a number of nonprofit organizations, an education advocate and reformer, and an elected school board member.

“[ISTE’s] unique work spans the entire education landscape, touching everyone who cares about, works in, or volunteers in education,” said Lewis in an interview with eSchool News. “Most importantly, ISTE is focused on the right thing: serving students. Because of all this, ISTE is well poised for its next chapter. That’s very attractive to a lifelong education advocate like me.”

ISTE board president Holly Jobe told eSchool News that the organization wanted a CEO with association experience, who knew education, and who was an “entrepreneurial visionary and strategic leader.”

Because ISTE is currently transitioning to a new strategic plan that will drive the organization’s work, the board also wanted a leader who had business acumen, who was collaborative, and who could lead the organization “to the next level,” she said.

See also:

ISTE 2012: Educators seek the brass ring of student engagement

Lewis said that as the organization transitions to the future, its board of directors has set a number of goals, including an introspective look at governance, how it advocates, how it listens to and communicates with members and stakeholders, and how it partners with other organizations.

“I’ll be working to position the organization for the future it sees for itself,” said Lewis.

Part of that future, he said, involves finding other organizations with similar mission objectives, while keeping the focus (resources, volunteerism, staff, and money) on students.

“The need to … work collaboratively to achieve common goals couldn’t be more pronounced,” said Lewis. “We’re living in a new world where education nonprofits know they can’t do it alone. So we have to ask our fellow organizations and ourselves how we can collectively be wiser, thriftier, and more strategic in how we fulfill our unique, but aligned, commitments to students.”

ISTE’s board is currently focused on best practices in nonprofit governance, and Lewis says this is noteworthy because pursuing these changes in nonprofits is difficult, often controversial work.

School librarians, with their specialized training in collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating information, now must teach their patrons to perform these tasks.

According to Joyce Valenza, teacher librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania and author of School Library Journal’s “Never Ending Search” blog, this is the golden age of librarianship.

Co-presenting a session at educational technology leader Alan November’s 2012 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference on July 19 with Shannon McClintock Miller, district librarian and technology integration specialist at Van Meter Schools in Iowa, Valenza outlined five areas in which K-12 schools should turn to their librarians to empower learners with valuable 21^st-century college and career readiness skills.

“Librarians are in the sweet spot of education,” Valenza said.

Given the unprecedented quantity of information learners are exposed to, the librarian’s role is more important than ever. Librarians help all students gain access to, evaluate, ethically use, create, share, and synthesize information. These skills are easily grouped into the following categories, she and Miller said.

Curation

Students have long documented their research in notebooks, bibliographies, and research papers, but the presenters described these containers as inadequate for the digital landscape. In the 20th century, content was king, but in this millennium, curation has emerged as the new monarch.

Valenza and Miller highlighted emerging technologies that help students showcase their progress as they acquire, organize, contextualize, and archive both existing content and new learning. Transparency is a critical component in growing what media scholar Pierre Levy calls knowledge citizens. The presenters stressed the value of teaching learners to purposefully contribute to society’s collective intelligence.

For more news from BLC 2012, see:

New project aims to transform the ‘first five days’ of school

How TED-Ed is helping to amplify instruction

BLC 2012 Conference Information Center

This concept is fleshed out in Steven Rosenbaum’s book, Curation Nation. School librarians, with their specialized training and background in collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating information, must now teach their patrons—students and educators alike—to perform these tasks.

The following curation tools were referenced during the presentation: Diigo, LiveBinders, Paper.Li, Pinterest, PearlTrees, Posterous, Scoop.It, Sqworl, Storify, Symbaloo.

Citizenship/Compassion

“With great power comes great responsibility,” said Valenza. Building society’s collective intelligence requires contributors to respect its infrastructure. This is the essence of digital citizenship.

Students must be taught how to publish their work for the real world, with their real identity (not anonymously), to build their digital footprint with purpose. This approach embeds authentic learning about the importance of intellectual property. If “public is the new default,” as Valenza prescribes, accountability is built in. When their own work is public, students better appreciate the cost of having published work repurposed without permission, particularly if they are taught to license their work under Creative Commons or other intellectual property licensing systems.

The First Five Days project aims to start an international conversation about how to make the start of the school year the best it can be.

While there is general agreement that the first five days of school are “absolutely essential” for establishing a culture of learning that will set the right tone for the rest of the year, there is very little research or discussion about how to make these first five days the most relevant and productive they can be, said ed-tech thought leader Alan November.

Kicking off his Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference in Boston July 18, November announced a new project to change that. Called “First Five Days,” the project aims to start an international conversation about how to make the start of the school year the best it can be, to foster the greatest chance for success.

November invited educators to share their ideas and experiences on the online professional development community created by his consulting firm, November Learning. To participate, go to http://blc.vxcommunity.com, click on “Register,” then click on the “Five” tab.

There is also a new Twitter hashtag, #1st5Days, that educators can use to share their ideas via the popular micro-blogging service.

In announcing the project, November introduced Greg Whitby, executive director of schools for the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, Australia, who discussed why the project is important to him.

“What do we currently do in the first five days of school? It’s usually about control, organization, and administration,” Whitby said. “The first thing we do is set the ground rules: This is how you learn. But what if we flip this around?”

See also:

How TED-Ed is helping to amplify instruction

How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool

BLC ’12: Full coverage

Whitby said he knows a principal whose students look forward to the first day of school, because they realize it will be something special. This educator looks for an initiative with a big impact to challenge or inspire his students on the first day, Whitby said, such as inviting firefighters to come to the school—and fostering a culture of learning by inquiry.

Marco Torres, a teacher, filmmaker, and media coach, showed a film he made during the pre-conference workshops at BLC in which educators shared their best ideas for the first five days of school.

One educator talked about the importance of getting to know each student personally and making a connection that will help nurture deeper learning. Another said she aims to have student feel “fun, safe, and part of a community.” A principal from Australia said she has her students get to know their teacher and make a short, two-minute video about their teacher in the first week of school.

The First Five Days project is about “imagining a different way of doing things,” Whitby noted. If you don’t get those first few days of school right, “you’ve buggered the year.”

Anderson said TED-Ed offers teachers a “magic blackboard” that pairs them with animators to create a six-minute video of their best lesson.

Technology can extend a talented teacher’s reach to thousands or even millions of kids around the world, said Chris Anderson, curator of the nonprofit TED project—and during an education conference in Boston July 18, he described how the newly created TED-Ed website is doing just that.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is a global set of conferences created to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” Its open-access website, www.ted.com, publishes TED Talks in video format for anyone to watch.

Earlier this year, TED launched a version of the site for education, TED-Ed, that includes a number of useful tools designed to help educators incorporate the videos into their instruction.

Yesterday, at the opening general session of the 2012 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference, hosted by ed-tech thought leader Alan November and his consulting firm, November Learning, attendees learned how TED-Ed is making an impact on education in just its first few months—and they also got a preview of what’s in store for the site.

For more coverage of BLC ’12, click here.

Anderson said TED-Ed offers teachers a “magic blackboard” that pairs them with animators to create a six-minute video of their best lesson. Teachers submit their ideas to the site’s administrators, who then choose which lessons will be converted into animated videos.

“We live in a world where one teacher’s voice can spread out throughout the world,” Anderson said—and students worldwide can learn from the best teachers in each subject.

In a demonstration, Anderson showed a short snippet of a video created by teacher Aaron Reedy, who explained how the sex of a clownfish isn’t determined until later in its life. He then shared a tweet from Reedy that speaks to technology’s power to amplify instruction: “7 years as a teacher: I explain sex determination to 1,000 students. 3 days w/ TED-Ed: I have explained it to 13,000!” (As of press time, Reedy’s video reportedly has been viewed nearly 750,000 times in all.)

But technology doesn’t just amplify ideas, Anderson said: It also can boost instructional time.

“This is why the idea of flipped learning has gotten so many people excited,” he said, noting that when students watch lessons outside of class, it frees up the teacher to lead a deeper discussion or exploration of concepts during class time. And TED-Ed contains a number of features to help educators do this.

Learning how to filter through tweets will bring clarity and meaning to Twitter and will get you past the mosh pit of random thoughts and lackluster chitchat.

(Editor’s note: This is part three in a series of articles about how to build students’ web literacy and research skills. In case you missed them, here are parts one and two.)

On Feb. 10, 2011, the world was transfixed on the protests raging in Egypt. We all watched as thousands gathered in Tahir square, where they had been for the past several weeks, to listen to a speech by President Hosni Mubarak. Many figured this would be his resignation speech. Instead, it offered the citizens of Egypt very little in the way of change, even if it was being presented as something positive. For outsiders looking in, it seemed that the situation would only get worse.

What Mubarak might not have known is that while he was trying to maintain his iron grip on power, thousands of Egyptians were tweeting about their frustration with the dictator. Eventually, the people on the street, armed with nothing more than a cell phone and a free social media site, changed the course of history.

If you are a middle or high school social studies teacher, and you wanted to provide your students with a close-up view of the events unfolding in Egypt, you could turn to a traditional news service. Or, you could follow the hashtag #Egypt on Twitter and tap into the real-time pulse of unfolding events by people on the streets of Cairo.

Through our previous articles, we have introduced you to three pillars we believe are essential to be web literate. We have shown you how to use advanced search techniques to raise the quality of information found on the web, and we have explained how the information you find can be organized into a comprehensive library of knowledge using powerful web tools like Diigo. In this final part to the series, we will demonstrate how tools like Twitter can allow a researcher to share what is learned with the world, tap the knowledge of others to help make even stronger connections with the material, and even provide students with real-world problems at a moment’s notice.

Attend Alan November’s premier ed-tech conference and get $100 off the cost of registration!

For more information about Building Learning Communities 2012, to be held in Boston July 15-20, click here. Get $100 off the cost of registration when you enter the promo code eSchoolMedia12.

At first glance, Twitter doesn’t appear to hold much value. Who cares about Justin Bieber’s haircuts! In fact, we both saw it as a waste and quit using it two or three times until we truly understood the organizational structure of information within this tool. Learning how to filter through tweets, organized using hashtags, will bring clarity and meaning to Twitter and will get you past the mosh pit of random thoughts and lackluster chitchat.

A hashtag is nothing more than a word or phrase (with no spaces) that is preceded by a # symbol. Examples include #edchat, #london2012, and #youthvote. Simply type a hashtag like one of these into Twitter’s search box to immediately generate results that are focused around the topic of your choice. Tagging is a beautiful thing, and a tag is something you can invent at any moment.

If you’re interested in a topic, but you don’t know of a hashtag that will be helpful with your research, simply do a search in Twitter using a keyword rather than a hashtag. Then, scan the results to see what hashtags people are using when they are discussing that particular topic.

For example, Brian did this the evening of President Mubarak’s speech, and he discovered that the two most popular hashtags being used at that time were #Egypt and #Jan25. By looking through the resources he found, he was able to see what the world was saying about this event. But then, Brian took it a step further.

Robinson pushes for more personalized education.

“Redefining horizons: Encouraging students’ passion to achieve” is the theme for this year’s International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference—but in what looked like a scene that was more appropriate for a rock concert than an ed-tech show, it was educators’ passion that was evident in the overflowing crowd that appeared for the opening general session on June 24.

Though ISTE traditionally has been the largest educational technology conference in the U.S., with dwindling school budgets and the growth of online options, attendance has been down at national education trade shows in recent years.

But at ISTE’s 33^rd annual conference, held in San Diego, the surging crowd and squished-in volunteers holding signs reading “Hey, it’s crowded” outside the opening general session suggested that educators are eager for new ideas in their classrooms.

And from the Spanish flamenco music beating from the ballroom to the bright red flames on the signage next to the ISTE stage, it seemed educators were ready to take student engagement by the horns.

“It’s investing in these professional learning opportunities now that means you’re investing in the future,” said Holly Jobe, ISTE president. “21^st century education excellence is a race, and the only way we can win this race is by holding hands.”

The night’s main attraction was provided by Sir Ken Robinson, a world-renowned expert in creativity and innovation, and author of the book Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (one of many), who argued that education is at a crossroads as one of the most hotly-debated issues in the world. In the U.S., specifically, the future of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is one of the country’s most contested topics.

“Before I moved to the states [from the U.K.], I was told that Americans don’t understand irony. But that’s not true. And I found that out as soon as I heard about NCLB,” joked Robinson.

Robinson argued that school reform is never going to work through more impersonalization and standardization of education, because “humanity is based on the principle of diversity. For example, if you have two or more children, you know this to be true. You don’t say to one of them, ‘Wait, remind me who you are again? I can’t tell you apart.’”

One of the most important steps in making education more personalized and successful is to create a systemic shift that focuses on student engagement, Robinson said.

 Watch Robinson discuss education:

“I urge educators and those in Congress to really think about: What does it take to truly engage students in their own learning? What is the role of technology in engagement? And, what are the implications for practice and policy?” he said.

In an effort to explain student engagement from a cognitive angle, Marc Prensky, the author of two works on digital natives, discussed a concept from his new book that he calls “digital wisdom.”

“There’s a balance between what we keep in our heads versus what we can delegate to the machines,” explained Prensky. “We should connect our brains to the technology, but only in a wise way. This is called digital wisdom.”

Jasmine Redeaux (left) and Nakesha Wilkerson (right) team up to finish a worksheet in their "flipped" chemistry class at their Macon, Ga., high school, while other classmates work on a lab. (Sarah Butrymowicz/MCT)

When Portland, Ore., elementary school teacher Sacha Luria decided last fall to try the new education strategy called “flipping the classroom,” she faced a big obstacle.

Flipped classrooms use technology—online video instruction, laptops, or DVDs of lessons—to reverse what students traditionally have done in class and at home to learn. Listening to lectures becomes the homework assignment, so teachers can provide more one-on-one attention in class and students can work at their own paces or with other students.

But Luria realized that none of her students had computers at home, and she had just one in the classroom. So she used her own money to buy a second computer and begged everyone she knew for donations, finally bringing the total to six computers for her 23 fourth-graders at Rigler School. Her students now alternate between working on the computers and working with her.

So far, the strategy is showing signs of success. She uses class time to tailor instruction to students who started the school year behind their classmates in reading and math, and she’s seen rapid improvement. By the end of the school year, she said, her students averaged two years’ worth of progress in math, for example.

“It’s powerful stuff,” she said, noting that this year was her most successful in a decade of teaching. “I’m really able to meet students where they are, as opposed to where the curriculum says they should be.”

Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that flipping classrooms is a more popular practice in wealthier suburban communities, where nearly all students have internet access at home and classrooms are more likely to have computers. Some skeptics worry that the new practice—so dependent on technology—could end up leaving low-income students behind and widening the achievement gap.

“It’s an obstacle,” said Karen Cator, the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. “We do need to figure out ways that students, regardless of ZIP code, regardless of their parents’ income level, have access” to technology both inside and outside of schools.

For more about the flipped learning approach, see:

Engaging Students with ‘Flipped Learning’

The flipped classroom can be traced to a 2008 experiment by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, chemistry teachers in Woodland Park, Colo., who were quick to take advantage of the ability to post videos online. The concept is one simple way that technology can transform how students learn. Research on the effectiveness of flipped classrooms is in the early stages, and it’s not known how widespread the practice is.

Bergmann and Sams argue that there are ways to overcome a lack of computers or internet access at home. “Teachers are giving flash drives to students who have computers at home, but no internet access; burning DVDs for students with no computers, but DVD players; and providing additional access to computers either in class or before, during, or after the school day,” wrote Sams and Brian Bennett, who teaches biology and chemistry in Evansville, Ind., in a recent article. “Equity is a very important (and a legal) consideration, but creating equitable access to instructional tools is not an insurmountable hurdle. The issue surround equity can be solved with a little creativity and pooling of resources.”

At Westside High School in Macon, Ga., more than 85 percent of students are minorities and 78 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Chemistry teacher Jennifer Douglass estimated that about half are so transient they don’t have guaranteed places to sleep each night. Members of feuding gangs are placed into classes alongside pregnant teenagers, she said, and parent involvement is rare.

With the help of a federal grant that provided netbooks for all students, a handful of teachers in different disciplines at Westside flipped their classrooms and reported that doing so improved students’ grades and their level of engagement.