Category Archives: Announcements

These presentations have been published today! Direct links to the presentation are provided.

1. New Tools: “Learn to Blog : Blog to Learn”

2. New Tools: “Collaborative Concept Mapping – Breaking the Bounds of Location and Time… for $0.00 per Seat”

3. Classroom 2.0: “Design Matters”

4. Classroom 2.0: “If All My Classes Did This”

These presentations have been published today! Direct links to the presentation are provided.

1. New Tools: “LMS 2.0 – Engaging Learners Using More Advanced Techniques and the Odd Mash-up inside Moodle”

2. New Tools: “The Electric Slide! Twenty-First Century Style”

3. Classroom 2.0: “Step by Step- Building a Web2.0 Classroom”

4. Classroom 2.0: “Sustained Blogging in the Classroom”

These presentations have been published today! Direct links to the presentation are provided.

1. Classroom 2.0: “Initiating and Sustaining Conversations: Assessment and Evaluation in the Age of Networked Learning”

2. Classroom 2.0: “Release the Hounds”

3. New Tools: “Second Life: K-20 Educators Exploring Virtual Worlds – Panel”

4. New Tools: “Trailfire”

These presentations have been published today! Direct links to the presentation are provided.

1. Classroom 2.0: “Putting the Pedagogy into the tools”

2. Classroom 2.0: “Motivating student writers by fostering collaboration through tagging and aggregating”

3. New Tools: “Oodles of Googles”

4. New Tools: “Flat Agents of Change”

These presentations have been published today! Direct links to the presentation are provided.

1. CLASSROOM 2.0 KEYNOTE: “Classroom 2.0 or You Live Where?”

2. NEW TOOLS KEYNOTE: “More Than Cool Tools”

3. Classroom 2.0: “Travel Through Space and Time”

4. New Tools: “Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools”

Participants at K12 Online span the globe. That’s why we use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in the publication of all events. Whenever we publish the date and time of any event we consistently link to a time converter that allows you to convert the time to your local time. This can be confusing if you’re not used to doing conversions to GMT; more so in countries that have daylight savings time when the dates of the conference span the change from Daylight (Savings) Time to Standard Time. Matters are further complicated when governments change the dates they observe Daylight Savings Time, as has recently been done in Canada and the USA.

Where this is most likely to be an issue is with our live events and in particular our closing event; When Night Falls. In order to find the difference between your local time and GMT you can visit this site:

Greenwich Mean Time.

Look for the dynamically updating clock that will show you the current time in your time zone and your offset from GMT. The site uses the settings of the internal clock in your computer to generate this data.

If doing the conversion is bothersome or confusing in any way try this site instead:

The Fixed Time World Clock

That last site will allow you to enter a particular date and GMT time and then generate a list showing what time that would be in cities and time zones across the world.

The time converter we have linked to in all our published material is this one:

(UTC/GMT) Time Converter

If you live in a country where they are changing the clocks sometime during K12 Online, check back here anytime, before or after the clocks have been switched, to convert your local time to GMT or vice versa. Our time converters allow you to enter the date you wish to determine the time on and adjust for time changes accordingly.

K-12 Online Conference organizers are pleased to announce the availability of both professional development and graduate credit options for our 2007 conference.

Graduate development is again available (on a paid basis) from Plymouth University.

For the first time (pending recognition of K-12 Online by your local school or district) FREE professional development credit is available for conference participants. This past week, members of the professional development committee updated the recommended rubric (now available in multiple formats) for professional development reflections. To further explain this process, committee members have also created a VoiceThread digital story.

Conference participants will be able to electronically register for professional development and submit individual conference session reflections (as URL links or copied text) to the conference PD reflection archive starting next week, on Saturday, October 20, 2007.

Check out both the VoiceThread explanation as well as the entire K-12 Online Conference Credits wiki for more details. Members of the PD committee hope the provided rubric will assist you in reflecting on and benefiting from the different presentations in this year’s conference, as well as obtaining professional development credit for your participation in the conference.

A “printable” certificate including details of your participation and awarded credit for each session in the K-12 Online Conference will be available from the conference PD reflection archive, starting on October 20th.

Our culminating event, “When Night Falls”, a chain of 1 or 2 hour long Elluminate sessions stretching over a 24 hour period– a 24 hour continuous K12 Online coffee break– is only 2 weeks away beginning at 12:00 AM Saturday, October 27 GMT. You’ll find more information about “When Night Falls” here and here.

We need moderators for each hour of the 24 hour event!

What could be better than moderating a session of this 24 hour opportunity for participants of the 2007 K12 Online conference to gather in an Elluminate room to reflect and connect with friends, both old and new, about their experiences at K12 Online 2007? Please consider extending your conference participation by taking on this role.

What are moderator responsibilities?

• moderate an Elluminate session for 1 hour (or more if you choose) — if you don’t know how to do that, we’ll teach you!
• record the session– if you don’t know how to do that, we’ll teach you!
• record reflections from participants on the “When Night Falls” wiki and write a summary of the conversations from your session.
• encourage everyone to register their participation by entering their location and blog address on the Conference Attendr Map.

To become a moderator for “When Night Falls” click here to sign up. You’ll arrive at the wiki sign up page. Click on Edit Page and enter your information into the hour of your choice. The Live Events committee will contact you with additional information.

In the coming weeks, when night falls, the virtual K12 Online Ning community will rise, extending opportunities for conversations and collaboration. We hope you’ll become an active member when that becomes available.

image source

As you are listening to and reflecting on David’s wonderful pre-conference keynote as well as the presentations coming up the next two weeks, please take time to “tag the conference.” By adding some short HTML code to the end of blog posts you write, you will be virtually “flagging” your ideas so that others can easily find and link to them. Technorati is one website which aggregates blog posts under these common tags. As an example, this is a link to all the posts currently aggregated by Technorati which have been tagged “k12online07.”

The Hitchhikr website is an aggregator of blog posts about a wide variety of educational conferences taking place around the world. By clicking on the Hitchhikr link in this post or elsewhere on the K-12 Online Conference blog, you can view blog posts of other teachers about the conference and its presentations. Hitchhikr uses Technorati to index photos posted to Flickr as well as blog posts. To tag the K-12 Online Conference, add the following HTML code to the end of your blog posts:

Technorati Tags:
k12online07

In addition this year, following the lead of the 2007 National Education Computing Conference (NECC), we have created unique session tags for each presentation of the conference. These are visible in the right column of the conference schedule, which is one of our navigational links located at the top of each page of the main conference website. Just substitute the appropriate session tag for the text “k12online07” in the example above. It is a good idea to tag your posts both for the conference and for the session you’re reflecting on. So, the Technorati code to use to tag BOTH the conference overall AND David’s pre-conference keynote specifically would be:

Technorati Tags:
k12online07, k12online07pc

Conversations in the blogosphere can seem messy and disorganized at times compared to a threaded discussion in a learning management system or other online conversation tool, but “tags” help the ideas and information take on an organic organizational structure. For more insight into how this works, check out Dr. Michael Wesch’s excellent video “The Web is Using/Us.”

Let’s tag the conference! 🙂

Technorati Tags:
k12online07, k12online07pc