Friday, June 08, 2007

BITE: Beaver Information for Teachers and Educators and KIT: Kayak Information for Teachers

If you are visiting the blog from our newsletter please take a look around. Feel free to email any questions you have or leave a comment. You can do so by clicking the comment button under each post.

Over the course of the summer we will be working through some new programs with Kayak and The Beaver magazine, so check back often and follow along. Check out the links below as well to some great conference information.

Every two months we send out an online newsletter for Teachers based on The Beaver and Kayak magazines. The newsletter contains lesson plans, articles from the magazine, and links to other great sites. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter just send me a quick note with your name, school, province, and grade level and I would be happy to sign you up.

Monday, June 04, 2007

The Future of Education

Today I attended the first day of a five day online conference "The Future of Education." It was a terrific series of thought provoking seminars on how technology is being used in Education around the world.

Ironically enough this world wide conference is being organized from right here in Winnipeg by George Simens, the associate director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba.

Presentations are run through Elluminate and are being recorded so if you missed anything you can check out the saved editions. I found the program surprisingly well suited for online discussions and quite flexible, despite some sound issues. It was really fascinating to see other websites, youtube videos, and blogs being brought into the discussion as we were listening.

I was particularly interested in the presentation by Professor Sugata Mitra who studies education technology in the UK. His discussion of information technology in remote and rural Indian communities was an important reminder about how technology should provide opportunities as opposed to barriers based on geographic and social exclusion. His study of self-organizing structures is particularly suited to the online community, and would be of great benefit to help groups across Canada connect.

Dave Cormier's presentation was also excellent and I was particularly interested in his discussion of Disposable Learning objects as it pertains to history books and websites. I still have to go back an listen to the presentation again to get the full scoop, but after sitting in I felt like my technology grasp went up tenfold in a short period of time.

Still so much to learn, so little time.

The Conference goes on until Friday and all the topics are being posted online. Looking forward to more great discussions!

Friday, June 01, 2007

K12 Online Conference

The K12 Online Conference has just released it's 2007 info. It is an online conference held in October 2007 that explores using technology in the classroom.

I'll have to do some exploring of my own through the site and you can view all of the 2006 presentations as well. A great site and one definitely worth taking a look at.