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Unsurprisingly, I had yet another amazing time at EduCon. It was so good to meet with old friends again and make some new ones. More than anything else the thing that continues to impress me about EduCon is how there’s a real sense of community amongst the 500 educators there. Especially when you consider that these people have come from all over the country or the world to be there it’s something really special that I think other conferences still have a hard time matching.

Of course, the other really impressive thing about EduCon is the quality of conversations available. Every single one I went to this year was at a minimum good and many of them were indeed great. Of all the ones that I attended,I have to say that my absolute favorite one which I had the most fun with was the HackJam. It’s something that I want to steal for myself. Don’t be surprised to see me running one at an Edcamp near you in the future.

Needless to say, I was completely blown away by the attendance at the session that I ran, “What Should Every Citizen Know?” The conversation itself was rich, and to my mind, satisfying. It pleased me to see people really wrestling with ideas that I presented, and struggling to distill the things they felt most important for students to know upon graduation from high school. I didn’t expect the group to come to any kind of consensus because I really think that there is no answer to this which will satisfy anybody let alone everybody. I myself am of two minds when it comes to this. As I stated at the beginning of my conversation, I really do believe that there is value in the liberal arts for everybody. On the other hand, I question how much of it will be of value to people in the lives that they choose to lead in society today. Needless to say, one of the reasons that I chose to run this conversation because it’s something that I’ve been struggling with myself for the past couple years.

I greatly appreciate all the people who came to the session as they had much better things to go to and people to learn from than myself. Here’s the amazing Google Doc they created with tons of great ideas about the things we value for our students today. I’m humbled and honored to have spent an hour and a half in conversation with a great group of people. Thanks for making my first EduCon conversation a success.

PS: This is the first post that I’ve written on my iPhone using Siri.  Highlights include “educon” coming out as something obscene in reference to male genitalia, and “HackJam” coming out as “half chicken.”

The demand for technology in classrooms has given rise to a slick and fast-growing sales force. Makers of computers and other gear vigorously court educators as they vie for billions of dollars in school financing. Sometimes inviting criticism of their zealous marketing, they pitch via e-mail, make cold calls, arrange luncheons and hold community meetings.

via Silicon Valley Wows Educators, and Woos Them – NYtimes.com.

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It got me thinking about the nonverbal messages that we send in our day to day interactions with students and other teachers. What are the implicit perspectives you’re pushing out to the world?

I started thinking about this because of a couple of really nice sessions that I chose to go to, somebody pointing out ways that I modeled for others in my own presentation, and interacting with my colleagues during downtime.

At the first session I attended on Media Literacy in the Elementary School, Katya Vigil‘s modeling of thoughtful reflection on her own practice really impressed me. At so many of the sessions you go to at a conference, the person presenting their work feels a need to put on an air of authority. Everything is wonderful, and that’s why I’m here in front of you today! In contrast, the presenter actively discussed throughout the presentation what she liked or didn’t like about the units that she planned. She told us explicitly what she felt did not work, improvements that she would make the next time, and research that she still needed to do before deciding on other improvements. I don’t know about you, but I respect that a whole lot more than the person pushing their own perfection. I’m glad that she had a few minutes of commenting and questioning in the end so that I could tell her that I felt that way.

At the other session I attended (more on that in a moment), Suzy Brooks ran a fabulous, fast-paced session where she modeled the value of choice for people. Instead of body-slamming through a ton of topics in the order of her own choosing (like I did in my presentation, of course), she had a list up on the screen and encouraged people to call out the topic they wanted to hear about. It kept audience engagement high through the presentation, people heard what they wanted to hear about, and yet she still somehow hit almost every point that she wanted to. I’ve already assured Suzy through Twitter that I plan on stealing her format at some point.*

At my own sessions, I’m fortunate that I had Jeremy Angoff** there to point out my own modeling for me. With some technical issues popping up, during the presentation, he pointed out to me afterwards that I modeled how to handle that well. I did my best to make light of the situation, and to just keep on moving. If something didn’t display right, I’d do my best to describe what it should be.

Before my second session, a woman politely told me that she would be leaving it early, and assured me that I should not be offended. Jeremy was sitting right behind her, so I asked him if I, a person who runs unconferences in my free time, would be offended in the slightest by somebody leaving my session. In the funniest moment of the whole two days, he replied, “He invented leaving sessions. Wait! I didn’t mean it like that!”

Of course, I did skip a whole bunch of sessions. I took the time to gather my thoughts and have meaningful discussions with my colleagues. I know many people who left sessions multiple times to find something more useful to them. When a bunch of us realized one session had slim pickings for us, we decided to meet up together and run a mini-edcamp in the middle of the conference. We’ve had enough unconference experiences at this point that we just ended up modeling the most basic principles of it just by second nature.

So when you get back to school after reading this, think about those messages that you send out. It may be easier at first to observe others and think about the messages they send. Do they model collaboration or do they send the message that working together with you is a waste of their precious prep time? Do they value student voices, or do they insist on compliance at all times? Do they demonstrate that learning happens constantly by sharing their own learning, or do they represent themselves as the authority at all times? Is learning messy student-driven or perfection and teacher-driven? Look at these things, find the ones modeling the things you value, and try to pick up on ways you too can send those kinds of messages. It takes purposeful effort at first, but the more you practice the modeling, the less you have to think about it. At some point, if you keep acting like the teacher that values collaboration, student voice, and honest sharing, you actually become the teacher that implicitly and naturally demonstrates those values.

*I swear to God that my blog series on remix teaching is coming! When a big idea rattles around in my brain, it can take ages of me wrestling with it to form some sort of coherent thoughts. If you don’t believe me, talk to my wife sometime about how long it was obvious that we would get married before I actually proposed to her. Fortunately, I make up for it by acting rapidly once I know exactly what I’m going to do.

**Jeremy is also totally my hero for coming over during my presentation to troubleshoot a display issue so I didn’t have to bring my presentation to an extended dead stop while trying to figure it out myself.

• Better battery life. My iPhone 3GS is definitely feeling it’s almost two and a half years of life in the battery department. Unlike when I first got it, I need to charge it every single day without fail, and it’s frequently been near death by the time I get home from work. Since I switched to iOS5, I’ve had a little more juice at the end of the day.

• iCloud. Everything on my phone backs up over the air and just works? Yes please. I had constant problems trying to get over the air calendar syncing to work with my Google Calendar, but everything works fast and flawlessly over iCloud. If I need to restore my phone, I don’t need to be at my home computer any more, since it all backs up to the cloud. Apps that store things in iCloud are starting to drop now. GoodReader updated today, and Apple’s apps are updating tomorrow. Expect an avalanche of updates over the next couple weeks.
• Wireless syncing. If you’re still storing stuff on your computer, you can now have the iDevice in question sync over wifi. This feature will be hugely useful for classroom teachers with small classroom sets of devices (2-5 devices, say).
• Twitter integration. Easy sharing to Twitter from any app. Of course I’m going to like that.

• Notification Center. I always hated how notifications took over my screen in iOS. Now they don’t, they sit nicely and wait for me to act on them.
• iMessages. Thanks to my school building and my wife’s hospital both being built as bomb shelters, we get terrible cell phone reception at work. Now we send texts through Apple, so they work over WiFi. Bonus: No need for me to upgrade my texting plan any time soon.

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Pine Glen was very fortunate to receive 60 iPads this school year on two Bretford Power Sync Carts! The Carts will make management of the iPads easier, because they provide a central place to store, recharge, and sync the iPads to the iTunes library on my laptop. It was quite a bit of work to get the iPads ready to go for the students. I made a few mistakes a long the way, but here’s the most efficient method that I’ve found for getting all the iPads up and running in a uniform manner, particularly if you already have a bunch of free apps and apps purchased from the Volume Purchase Program:

1. Unbox all the iPads and place them in the cart.

3. Rename one iPad and disconnect it from the cart. This will be your primary source iPad for the initial setup.

4. Send the iPad cart off to your super-nice librarian who will barcode them all and tag them by whatever naming convention you decide on. We numbered each device and assigned them a color depending on the cart they were in.

5. Move apps to appropriate pages and folders. Sign in to any accounts you want to set up on all iPads. Set up wi-fi.

6. Reconnect the iPad to your laptop. Encrypt iPad backup! This saves all your passwords so you won’t have to type them in on each device!

7. Pull the connections for each iPad on your cart and then connect the cart to your laptop.

8. Plug one iPad in on the cart. Right click on the iPad in iTunes, and choose to “Restore from Backup.” Choose the backup for your encrypted primary iPad, type in the password, and let it do its thing. Note that this is much faster than using the Restore button on the main screen and would have saved me tons of time if I’d found it sooner.

9. Rename the iPad to fit your naming convention.

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for each iPad until done.

11. Change the wallpaper on each iPad to fit your naming convention. I’m trying to build as much redundancy into the system as possible so the children can always locate the iPad they previously used.You can access all of the wallpapers I created here, if you don’t feel like spending an hour or so creating them like I did.

a. Visit that page in Safari http://bit.ly/pgipadwp

b. Find the wallpaper you want, tap and hold a couple seconds to save the image

c. Go to the Photos app, choose the image, hit the arrow, select “Set as wallpaper.” Set it as both.

12. Collapse. Smile. Get them into the kids’ hands.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

This series has been one piece of the puzzle ruminating in my head on that promised blogpost about teaching and remixing.

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I have a lot of thoughts about mixing and how it related to education that I’ve been wanting to write for some time, but haven’t quite pulled together yet. I think that will probably happen after school gets out.