Reflections of an Educator

I made my way down to the Boston Park Plaza yesterday for my first EduBloggerCon-East (#ebce09 is the free, one-day precursor to # BLC09 ) . I found some amazing resources, met some great new colleagues, and thought it useful to draw some conclusions to synthesize, find patterns, and make my own meaning. I created a mind map using Mind42 . Best Practices in Textured Literacy - Tom Daccord Essentially, Tom suggests that we can no longer focus on traditional student literacy, but we must also consider multi-modal literacy and texts (pictures and text) Use backchannel Today's Meet to assess previous student knowledge Avoiding multi-modal texts in our schools will leave our students marginalized We must add value to traditional and multi-modal writing by making it: meaningful authentic social Consider the Student News Action Network Tom created the The Great Debate of 2008 ning with his own students New Media Reaching All Learners - Karen Janowski Etherpad is a good place to begi...

I attended the EduBloggerCon-East 09 "Un"Conference on Tuesday, July 28 at the Boston Park Plaza. It was great. Not only did I meet PLN friends in "real life," which was great, but I also learned about new tools for my classroom and met some new people. I created a wordle from the notes I took; I think the largest words is telling about what the focus of our conversation truly was! (One note: I obviously couldn't attend every session! If anyone out there has notes from their sessions they'd like me to include in another wordle, please email me!)

Often considered superfluous, developing the right brain will become an asset with the advent of abundance, Asia and automation. Workers must combat these concepts and be high concept (beautifiers and inventors) and high touch (empathizers) in the Conceptual Age by developing six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. This 50-word mini-saga (synopsis: see below) of A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is proof: I do have right-minded ability! Daniel Pink lays out a thoughtful thesis that I shall apply to the world of education: we must create students (and workers) that can no longer exclusively rely on left-brain analysis and logic, but instead must possess left and right-brained skills. The reason, you ask? With the abundance of "stuff" (cheaply-made and high-quality "stuff" at that - just head to Target to see for yourself), workers who can synthesize, rearrange and create that abundance of "stuff" will be in demand. Further, Mr....