The organizer team for the 2012 K-12 Online Conference is pleased to announce our lineup of keynote speakers for this year, as well as a downloadable/printable conference flyer we invite you to share with other educators you know. In addition, we invite the K-12 Online Conference community to tweet about this year’s conference using the hashtag #k12online12. As we have in the past six years since K12Online started in 2006, our conference will continue to be primarily asynchronous, offering downloadable videos for participants to view at any time. We will also host several live events during this year’s conference weeks at the end of October. All conference dates are listed on our 2012 Schedule.

This year’s conference will kick off on October 15th with a keynote from Kevin Honeycutt. Kevin is currently serving his ninth year as a Technology Integration Specialist at Education Services & Staff Development Association of Central Kansas (ESSDACK). Kevin spent 13 years teaching art K-12 in public school and for 17 years spent summers leading creative adventure camps for kids of all ages. He is currently serving his second term for his local school board in Inman, Kansas. For the past four years he has hosted a creative learning site called ArtSnacks where he shares 150+ ten minute drawing videos that support standards curriculum. Kevin is an extremely creative, dynamic, and passionate educator and will inspire us with his pre-conference keynote as we explore new ways to learn, share, and remix in this year’s conference. Follow him on Twitter @kevinhoneycutt.

Gail Desler and Natalie Bernasconi will keynote our “Getting Started” strand, one of two strands to be shared the first full week of our conference October 22 – 25. For the past year, Gail and Natalie have been collaborating on and curating the Digital ID project, a wiki that provides students, teachers, and administrators with a toolkit of reliable information, resources, and guidelines to help us all learn how to be upstanding 21^st century (digital) citizens – with students stepping up to “be the change.”  Gail is a technology integration specialist in the Elk Grove District in Elk Grove, California. Natalie is a middle school ELA/ELL teacher for the Salinas Union High School District and a UC Santa Cruz professor. Both are Teacher Consultants for the National Writing Project [Area 3 Writing Project (Gail); Central CA Writing Project (Natalie)]. They also participated in the 2011 MERIT program, where the seed for the Digital ID project was planted. Follow Gail and on Twitter @GailDesler and Natalie on Google + 

Karen Fasimpaur will keynote our second strand for week one of our 2012 conference, “Visioning New Curriculum.” This is a new and exciting strand for K-12 Online this year.  Karen has worked in education, including software and textbook publishing, for over 15 years, and also taught overseas in Africa. She is the creator of the Kids Open Dictionary Builder. The confluence of her experiences in educational  publishing and software development with the current state of technology, with massive collaboration and with circumstances in her own life have led Karen to become an outspoken advocate for open educational resources (OER) as the founder of K12OpenEd and the P2PU School of Ed. Read more about Karen’s ideas on her blog on K12OpenEd. Follow Karen on Twitter @kfasimpaur.

Mathew Needleman will keynote the “Kicking It Up a Notch” strand of our 2012 conference in week two, which will run Oct 29 – Nov 2.  Mathew has been integrating video production in the classroom for over a decade, focusing his work on low-income students and English Learners in the elementary grades.  He has been a teacher, literacy coach, reading intervention coordinator, and currently serves as an Instructional Technology Specialist for LAUSD.  He has presented for K12online twice in the past, sharing “Film School For Video Podcasters” in 2008 and “Steal This Preso! Copyrights, Fair Use, and Pirates in the Classroom” in 2009. Learn more about Mathew’s ideas on his blog, Creating Lifelong Learners. Follow Mathew on Twitter @mrneedleman.

Tiana Kadkhoda, aka “Paul,” will keynote our “Student Voices” strand during week 2 of our 2012 conference. Tiana had Eric Marcos as her middle school math teacher in Santa Monica, California, and developed skills in screencasting and publishing web videos alongside math skills as “Paul” on MathTrain.tv. Tiana and Eric have shared keynote addresses recently for educators at the Mobile Learning Experience 2012 Conference in Phoenix as well as the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston. If you think Sal Khan of Khan Academy is the primary model for digital learning in K12 schools, you’re in for a surprise. Tiana will share stories and experiences about how student-created videos and media can transform learning and equip students with digital literacy skills alongside traditional curriculum skills. Follow Tiana’s former middle school math teacher, Eric Marcos, on Twf

Please download and share our 2012 K-12 Online Conference Flyer via Scribd!

Also, please consider presenting for K-12 Online this year. We still need several more presenters in some of our strands, so we are keeping the proposal application form open through August 31st. We’ll announce presenters in our strands on September 15th.

k 12 Online Conference 2012 Final Master