Today was day 1 of the Randolph-Macon EdTech conference in Ashland. Tomorrow I have the opportunity to present on Moodle and digital learners. I’m looking forward to it.
Today, I had more of an opportunity to visit sessions as an “attendee,” and enjoyed a lot of what I heard and saw.
The keynote speaker Dr. Sara Armstong, VITAL guru Karen Richardson, and Dr. Larry Anderson all mentioned the George Lucas Foundation and their theme, basically, was project-based learning. That if you want to reach kids in the 21st century will skills that will be important, a project-based approach is the way to go.
I also was able to step-out and see some of our own Goochland folks present. Ms. Kuhns got up, and in her loud voice, professed to the attendees in the day’s last session that in her 19 years of teaching, she’d never had all the kids turn in a book report and finish their books on time. But with this lesson inspired by Mrs. Cantor, they had. The kids made mock MySpace pages for book characters. She was excited about it.
That passion folks have is really what’s important about experiencing at a conference. Sometimes we lose our passion. Sometimes we find it in unbeknownst places. In the session with Larry Anderson, he asked if I knew what Twitter was in front of everyone. Maybe I sounded too passionate.
I’ve had an odd relationship with Twitter. It was not that long ago that I actually began to use it. I even have written about it and how it could be used. Yes, this week, the blogging meme was “Twitter is unreliable and lets me down a lot.” And while I have never used it (or Pownce) enough to notice, there’s something I don’t like about it, too. I like the concept, but am not an active cheerleader. Ultimately, I find tweeting very distracting from other work I’m engaged in on the computer.
Sure, educators need to hear about tools like Twitter. I even think that using these tools isn’t a shabby idea. (Link lost, but I read a blog post by a college professor just recently that praised the use of Twitter in his classes to continue and promote discussion after the official class left). And so here is the rub:
- Do we want to use tools that are wrapped in an education(al) wrapper, i.e., Moodle, Blackboard, Angel?
- Or do we want to use tools that are open, free, and ever-growing in number and capability?
To borrow Richardson’s term “pragmatist,” I think using a pre-rolled educational tool like Moodle is easier in today’s school climate. But I love the free, Web 2.0 stuff, too. The perfect medium might be a compromise, where plugins for learning management systems were of equal or similar quality/capability as the onslaught of Web 2.0 tools.
The one message that was clear today was that when you take some risks as an educator, you have the opportunity to really address the 21st century skill set, and that includes making things real, open, and available: student voices through blogs, etc.
I’m hoping other attendees got as much as I did from the experience. When I leave a conference, deeply set in philosophical thought, I know a worthy time was had.
