The 2016 K12 Online Conference organizer team is pleased to announce this year’s Call for Proposals.

Please consider submitting your session ideas. Since 2006, K12 Online has offered unique, free, entirely volunteer-powered opportunities for educators worldwide to share and learn together about innovative ways to use technology tools to enhance teaching and learning at all levels.

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE 2016 CALL FOR PROPOSALS! (due June 15)

The theme for the 2016 conference is “Unlocking Learning.” The conference will begin with a pre-conference keynote on Monday, October 10th. The next two weeks, starting on October 17th, 20 presentations will be published in four different strands, with two presentations posted per day. Presentations must be a single media file of twenty minutes or less (but not too much less) in length and meet other requirements specified in the online call for proposals. Presentations are due two weeks prior to the week the relevant strand begins. All presentations will be shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported license. The 2016 conference strands are:

Learning Spaces (convened by Susan van Gelder)
Students today learn in a myriad of spaces from inside the classroom to online communities and online connections, from makerspaces to self-directed learning through online explorations. How are these changes unlocking learning for students? How is it changing the way teachers are teaching?

Student Voices (convened by Karen Fasimpaur)
Having a strong student voice both as an input and an output of our learning environments is a way to unlock learning. How do you encourage student voice? How do you exhibit and celebrate student work? Do youth help co-design their learning? What tools, platforms, methods, etc. do you use? Student-led presentations welcome, as well as those that feature your students’ voices!

Design Thinking (convened by Leslie Pralle Keehn)
What is design thinking? What models for this are being successfully used in education? How is design thinking influencing the ways learning is unlocked for your students? Process is just as important as product. Design thinking highlights process by allowing us to design and reimagine all that is possible. From creation in a maker environment to lesson and systems redesign, this strand unlocks both the mindset and application of design thinking.

Creativity (convened by Carol Broos)
Making, sharing, creating, and inventing are all ways to express yourself. How do you allow students to soar? How do you encourage colleagues to incorporate creativity within the academic lessons? How does creativity shine in your learning environment?

Please see our “Presentation Guidelines” for more information about formats and requirements. These guidelines will be updated by June 30th with a few changes.

Please consider submitting a proposal for the 2016 K12 Online Conference by June 15, and personally invite other educators you know to submit a proposal. K12 Online offers great learning experiences every year because of our fantastic presenters. Your encouragement to others to present, as well as your own willingness to present, will make K12 Online 2016 a fantastic learning experience for many teachers around the world! Click here to submit your proposal!

“Unlock your Future” (CC BY 2.0) by  Images_of_Money 

We are excited to announce our plans for K12 Online 2016!

The conference this year will be about Unlocking Learning and will be held on October 17-28, 2016. Our strands will be Learning Spaces, Student Voice, Design Thinking, and Creativity.

Image credit: sacks08, CC BY

We will also be piloting some exciting new formats for this year’s conference.

Based on your feedback, this year’s event will be more interactive and dynamic. We’ll have more live events and a Voxer channel going throughout the conference and beyond for discussions on each strand. We’ll be encouraging more use and interaction of our sessions throughout the year and more connections to f2f events. We will have fewer sessions to allow more focus and high quality community interactions. We’re open to other experiments as well, so if you have ideas, send them our way!

We hope you will join us, whether as a participant, a presenter, or a volunteer. Stay tuned for our Call for Proposals which will be out soon!