(Almost) all our content from 2006 to 2017 is archived and available online under a Creative Commons license. Please read this post from June 2018 for more background and updates about our conference and current status.

Announcements

K12 Online Conference Updates

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Incredible!
That is the one word that describes the presentations so far! The keynotes and presenters these first two days of the K12Online conference have simply done an incredible job. On behalf of the conference conveners thank you so much for your hard work. It certainly shows in the quality of your presentations. If you have enjoyed yourself so far– the rest of the week’s presentations are just as good! You are in for a treat. If you want to refer back to any previously presented sessions we have made the agenda linkable. Simply click on the AGENDA tab on the conference blog.

Fireside Chats- Virtual Style

Join the conference organizers and the keynote speakers in free wheeling open-ended chats in Eluminate. These are open to anyone interested in participating. Ask the keynotes about their presentations or share your thoughts and ideas about the other presentations seen this week. This is an opportunity for all presenters and participants to get together and get to know one another.

Because we ran out of seats in Elluminate during David Warlick’s fireside chat, we have made provisions to make sure that doesnt happen again. There will be a space for everyone who wants to attend.

Do I Need Special Software?
Nope! All you need is a computer with a microphone and speakers, a head-set works best. Then on Oct. 26, 2006 at 7pm Eastern (what time is that where I am?), after you have watched almost all the Week One presentations and keynotes, simply CLICK ON THIS LINK and the Elluminate software will load and then drop you into the virtual meeting room.

Someone will be in the room an hour early to help you check your mic and give a quick overview of the very intuitive tools used in the Elluminate environment. If you have any questions ahead of time email Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.
The Fireside Chat Schedule is below:

Fireside Chats via Elluminate

Archives
Each session will have an ARCHIVE of the chat which will be posted under the Live Events tab on the conference blog.

Take Away Wiki
Another tab you may not have noticed on the conference blog is the one labeled wiki. It has a link to our Take Away Wiki for conference participants. This is the collaborative space where YOU enter the conversation. This is YOUR wiki. Our hope is that conference participants will add resources, links to presentations, materials, and other items that relate to the strands of the conference. Help add to the value of this experience. None of us are as good as all of us!

When Night Falls
We’re in the midst of planing the final event for K12 Online 2006. It’s called When Night Falls. The idea is to have a 24 hour long worldwide skypecast – networking – and Tapped In chat experience. As night falls across the planet, educators across the globe will come online to connect and reflect about their experiences at K12 Online 2006. For this to work we’re going to need some help to keep things going for 24 hours straight. Everything you need to know is on the When Night Falls Wiki. We even have screencasts on skypecasting and other tips and tricks for moderators and participants. Check it out and get involved. You need to join Tapped In too. Once you are a member, instructions for joining the K12Online room are in the Welcome area of Tapped In. Help Desk staff will be on hand to answer your questions for the Nov. 4, 0:00 GMT (Nov. 3, 7:00pm Eastern) kick off.

So take some time and explore the Tabs at the top of the K12Online Conference Blog. There is much that awaits you! And while you are at it… click on the Frapper Map tab and add yourself to the community.
Darren, Sheryl, and Wes

2006- Basic Advanced Training

Basic/Advanced Training”All About Internet Audio (Advanced)”

Published by:

Lee Baber
Shenandoah Valley, VA, USA
Blog: http://web.mac.com/lbaber/iWeb/LeeBaber/Blog/Blog.html

Presentation Title
“All About Internet Audio(Advanced)”

Bio
Lee has a degree in Production Management and Music with a focus on Audio Engineering. She has managed the UMBC recording studio called Studio 508, started the Blue Ridge Recording studio in Shenandoah Valley, VA, and has had clients such as National Geographic and General Electric as well as hundreds of remote recording projects. Lee currently teaches Computer Literacy and 2D Art to 8th graders and utilizes audio and multimedia for almost all their projects.

Description
This session will introduce participants to a variety of audio recording applications and hardware one can use for audio to be used on the computer. It will cover topics such as “Basic Audio Editing in Audacity” to “Compression – Whats the Big Squeeze?” Learning what to use and how to end up with good signal to noise ratio, how to edit at a variety of levels (compression, multitrack, panning, eq, boost, trim, conversion), how to create everything from a simple webpage to more advanced flash players to house the audio for internet use to name just a few topics we will cover.

Presentation
http://www.newmediaguides.com/files/LeeBaberK12online.mp3
http://www.newmediaguides.com/Audio

2006- Week In The Classroom

Week in the Classroom”Who’s Teaching Who?: Are We Ready”

Published by:

Chris Kaminski
Fairview Park, Ohio, USA
Blog: http://nlcommunities.com/communities/ckaminski/default.aspx   

Presentation Title
“Who’s Teaching Who?: Are We Ready” 

Bio
Chris is in his tenth year of teaching and finishing up his Masters in Educational Administration. He currently teaches High School Graphic Arts, Photography, and Web Design at Fairview High School in Fairview Park, OH. Chris is also the district webmaster. He currently uses Blogging, a Mac OSX podcasting server, Flickr, and other multimedia tools to promote an on-line communication learning environment.

Description
Throughout the history of education, the role of the teacher has been the all-knowing and center of educational knowledge in their content area. I would like to present a different side of learning where students create a presentation on how technology (specifically WEB 2.0 and multimedia) can change the role of the teacher and the way information is gathered and disseminated. It is my belief that the role of the teacher has potential to become that of a facilitator of knowledge. Keeping students on track, within a structure and guided toward an end goal. We have to embrace the power of learning from one-another and understand that each individual can be a contributor to the creation of the learning process. I believe that the Web 2.0 can afford them and others around the world the tools to build such a collaborative learning environment. The means to take ownership in not only their own, but others learning as well. The culmination of a week in my classroom will revolve predominantly around my web design students and their thoughts on topics relating to technology, specifically web 2.0. There will be daily discussions via BLOGS, postings on what the students did that day, and a video that showcases these student’s thoughts. The plan is to not stop there, but to continue having dialogues via BLOGGING and PODCASTING.

Presentation
http://k12online.wm.edu/k12conference_kaminski.mp4

Supporting Links
Blog Category for Week in My Classroom
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/ckaminski/archive/category/6153.aspx 
Please read the student comments to the daily postings

Podcast Category for Week in My Classroom
http://moodle.fairview.k12.oh.us/weblog/ckaminski/K-12OnLineConference/
Location for Week in Classroom VIDEO

Classroom Blog
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/ckaminski

Student Blogs
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/ckaminski/linklist.aspx

DEL.ICIO.US
http://del.icio.us/ckaminski

Student Flickr Art Gallery
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohioartguy/

School Web Site
http://www.fairviewparkschools.org/

2006- Basic Advanced Training

Basic/Advanced Training”TIGed Basics: A Beginners Guide to Social Networking in the Classroom (Basic)”

Published by:

Luke Walker
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
http://www.tiged.org 

Presentation Title
“TIGed Basics: A Beginners Guide to Social Networking in the Classroom(Basic)”

Bio
Luke is the Education Program Manager at TakingITGlobal, a Canadian charity focused on empowering young people to learn about and take action on global social issues. Luke has presented at education-related conferences around North America and throughout the world.

Description
Luke will lead viewers through the basics of TakingITGlobal’s TIGed.org environment, a secure virtual classroom and collaboration space that focuses on global education. TIGed combines blogs, podcasts, photo sharing, mapping tools, and live and asynchronous discussion tools with TakingITGlobal.org’s thriving community of 125,000 young global leaders. The presentation will be appropriate for those who are new to TIGed, or new to social networking altogether. All participants will be provided with access to TIGed, and will be challenged to find and share creative uses of the tool.

Presentation (all files should be linked from index but are listed here as a back-up)
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/index.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/tig.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/introtiged.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/signup.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/maps.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/chat.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/collab.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/tigeddb.html
http://k12online.wm.edu/tiged/tiged/edcentral.html

2006- Week In The Classroom

Week in the Classroom”Using Web 2.0 Tools in a Grade One Classroom”

Published by:

Kathy Cassidy
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada
Blog: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337

Presentation Title
“Using Web 2.0 Tools in a Grade One Classroom“

Bio
Kathy is a grade one teacher who is very interested in the ways in which technology can support student learning. She began building her website several years ago and was able to do some unique things applicable to her grade level because of Grassroots funding. This is Kathy’s third year of blogging with her class. Last year they also used wikis and began podcasting.

Description
Kathy will share the ways in which she has used blogging, podcasts and wikis to support the grade one curriculum. She will also mention using tools such as Bubbleshare and Flickr.

Presentation
http://k12online.wm.edu/GradeOneClassroom.wmv

Supporting Links
My Webpage
http://news.mjsd1.ca/%7Ekcassidy/cassidyhome.html

Blogmeister
http://classblogmeister.com/index.php

My Blog
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337

Karma’s blog
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=23811

Kid Pix
http://www.learningcompany.com/jump.jsp?itemID=87&itemType=CATEGORY

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/

Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Bubbleshare
http://www.bubbleshare.com/home

Wiki
http://room4-wiki.wikispaces.com/

Dinosaur Info Wiki
http://room2-wiki6.wikispaces.com/

Chance’s blog
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=23802

2006- Basic Advanced Training

BASIC/ADVANCED TRAINING KEYNOTE “I Did Not Know You Could do THAT with Free Web Tools”

Published by:

Alan Levine
Phoenix, Arizona
Blog: http://cogdogblog.com
Twitter: @cogdog

Presentation Title
“I Did Not Know You Could do THAT with Free Web Tools”
….. a web dispersed presentation of unleashed potential for the 2006 K12Online Conference

Bio
Alan Levine is the Director of Member & Technology Resources for the New Media Consortium (NMC, (http://www.nmc.org/). Before this, he spent 14 years evangelizing technology for the Maricopa Community Colleges, where he first hosted a web server back in 1993 on a Mac SE/30. While at Maricopa, Alan was a key contributor to significant efforts such as Ocotillo, a faculty-led initiative that promotes innovation and drives change, created the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), a virtual warehouse of innovation that pioneered the use of RSS in syndicating learning object content, and developed Feed2JS, an open source software shared for allowing people to easily incorporate RSS content into web pages. Alan works from home in Phoenix, Arizona and publishes his work on CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/)

Presentation
There are more than enough blogs, conference presentations, and Big Name EduPundits, extolling the future of the Read/Write web tools like blogs and wikis (hey, they are almost “old” technologies in internet time!). Here, I am trying to demonstrate some lesser known things that you can do with common web tools or some specialized web tools that do things that would perhaps spark the interest of an educator. The only requirement is it must be completely free to use. The bits I have cooked up include:

All of these will be intensely interconnected. Each one actually uses the tool of the topic as the presentation platform (flickr is demo-ed in flickr, del.icio.us content is hosted in a del.icio.us tag set…) While billed as “Advanced/Basic Training”, rather than providing 1-2-3 recipes for these sites, this “presentation” assembles a varied collection of what is possible, with the examples and linked resources where available. I tend to aim for a more exploration mode of presenting than just showing and nothing shown requires advanced technical skill.

Finally, for each section, I am linking to an open WikiSpaces site where I invite you to add more examples, ideas, etc. Let’s see what we can build.

To get started, my intro about web video tools is of course… sitting in a web video site, YouTube: I Did Not Know You Could Do THAT With Free Web Tools!

For the YouTube-less, a QuickTime version is now available at
http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/k12online06/k12online-you-tube.mov

You can find the next step in the presentation there, or from the presentation wikispace: http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/k12online06

2006- Week In The Classroom

WEEK IN THE CLASSROOM KEYNOTE”Journey through the Week as I Journey Up (or Down) the Road”

Published by:

Bud Hunt
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Blog: http://budtheteacher.com
Twitter: @budtheteacher

Presentation Title
“Journey through the Week as I Journey Up (or Down) the Road”

Bio
Bud Hunt teaches high school language arts and journalism at Olde Columbine High School in Longmont, Colorado.

(Since this presentation is audio-only, a YouTube version is not available)

Presentation
http://k12online.wm.edu/a_journey.mp3

While it’s certainly an honor to have been asked to deliver the keynote for the “A Week in the Classroom” portion of the first of what I hope will be many K12 Online Conferences, I have to admit that, after the excitement of being asked to contribute, I was a bit perplexed. Still am. Sure, I’m using this new web in my classroom when I can, and I am fascinated by the blurring of the borders between my classroom and pretty much the entire rest of the world, but I’m not an “expert” when it comes to Web 2.0. None of us are. That’s one of the best parts of exploring these spaces with our students — they and we and us are all traveling together, on a real exploration of a new frontier, a frontier of ideas.

I certainly hope that we don’t tame this frontier too much, and that there are always wide open spaces in some parts, sandy beaches in others, and, not to take this metaphor too far, a few rocky peaks always looming in the distance, transfixing us with both their beauty and the horrific jagged edges that they add to the horizon. Some folks, many of them my teachers, have been living in this space for some time. Lots more folks enter this world every day. Everyone, novice and experienced, teacher and student, brings their ideas and experiences with them, ready to share with the world. As problematic and essential as school, education, teaching, and learning are, there’s plenty of room — and some real, legitimate need — for all of that conversation and learning and juxtaposition and re-mixing of ideas. If you haven’t already, make sure that you know how to contribute to the conversation, David Warlick suggested several tutorials for getting started.

I hope you’re enjoying your exploration of the Read/Write Web. I hope you’re learning. Better still — I hope you’re sharing what you notice as you travel along the road . . . or leaving the (t)rail(s) entirely. Teachers do not traditionally have voices outside of their classrooms. We sit, alone, in little rooms, studying and grading and feeling lonely. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have to be that way.

My last hope for you, whoever, wherever, and whenever you are, is that you’re doing good work, with your students, and that you’ve discovered that the work that you are doing is so important, so vital and so necessary that you shouldn’t keep it to yourself. The Internet won’t run out of room anytime soon.

When Robert Fulghum (http://www.robertfulghum.com/) ended Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door, he made mention of the fact that Pueblo pottery contains a particular line break in every pattern to represent that, while a particular piece might be completed, the life of the artist is not. “A ritual sign of continual possibility,” he called it (246). To model that same idea, he ended his book not with a period, but a semi-colon. I shall do the same here, but for a slightly different reason. For me, I do so as a reminder that, no matter how many words we write, speak, draw, sing, or otherwise utter, there still remains much to discuss;

Works Cited
Fulghum, Robert. Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.

Links Mentioned (or neglected) in the Podcast
A Conversation about Elgg in the Classroom
http://edtechtalk.com/node/254

Blogessor
http://blogessor.blogspot.com/

Elgg
http://www.elgg.org/

EducationBridges.net
http://educationbridges.net/

My Learning Network
http://www.bloglines.com/public/budhunt

Olde School Space
http://www.oldeschoolspace.org/

Teachers Teaching Teachers
http://www.teachersteachingteachers.org/

Will Richardson
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

Worldbridges
http://www.worldbridges.net/

Youth Voices.net
http://www.youthvoices.net/

All music in this podcast by the group “La Grosse Couture,” via BeatPick.com (http://www.beatpick.com/).

2006- Basic Advanced Training

Basic/Advanced Training”Blog if You Love Learning: An Introduction to Weblogs in Education (Basic)”

Published by:

Mark Wagner
Irvine, California, USA
Blog: http://www.edtechlife.com
Twitter: @markwagner

Bio
A former high school English teacher, Mark has since served as an educational technology coordinator at Estancia High School, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, and the Orange County Department of Education. He now serves as the president of the Educational Technology and Life Corporation, which provides professional development and consulting services to schools, districts, and other educational institutions. Mark has a masters degree in cross-cultural education. He is also working towards a PhD in Educational Technology at Walden University, and expects to complete his dissertation in early 2007.

Presentation Title
“Blog if You Love Learning: An Introduction to Weblogs in Education (Basic)”

Powerful teaching and learning tools for both students and teachers, blogs can be used for student reflection, class webpages, professional development, and much more. This session briefly introduces participants to the read/write web, and to weblogs, or blogs, specifically. A live demonstration of WordPress will illustrate that… “If you can email, you can blog.” This will be supported by an overview of best practices and inspirational examples of actual student and teacher weblogs. These will include individual student reflections and learning logs, team blogs used for group work, teacher blogs, class blogs, blogs used for professional development, and blogs used to reach out to parents and the community. The session will leave participants inspired to take their next steps with educational blogging, whatever their level”¦ just beginning their own blogging journey, ready for their students to join them, ready to implement new best practices, or ready to innovate and lead the way.

Presentation

Originally posted on:
http://k12online.wm.edu/BlogIfYouLoveLearning.mov

Supporting Links
http://blogifyoulovelearning.wikispaces.com/

2006- Week In The Classroom

Week in the Classroom”Wiki Collaboration Across the Curriculum”

Published by:

Victoria A. Davis
Camilla, Georgia, USA
Blog: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Presentation Title
“Wiki Collaboration Across the Curriculum”

Bio
Vicki Davis is a teacher and technology administrator at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She has taught for four years at the high school and middle school level. For ten years prior, she taught professional development courses for teachers and college level adult computer literacy training. She is known for her award winning class wiki, wiki-centric classroom structure, and use of broad scope of Web 2.0 tools to improve student performance. She is a graduate of the Leadership Georgia program and graduated first in her class from Georgia Tech. She actively blogs her experiences at the Cool Cat Teacher blog and has been cited in the Boston Globe and Wired News for her work with wikis.

Description
Vicki loves it when she gets students excited! She loves it even more when she know that she has covered difficult material and the students had fun and retained the information. Vicki has become convinced that research-based think-pair-share and post lesson summarization are employed effectively whether you use paper, oral discussion, or online collaborative learning tools such as the wiki. The basic methodology (and result) is the same although the medium is different.

Last November 2005, Vicki was a scared beginner when she ventured out onto this new Internet that experts call Web 2.0. Within one month, her class wiki was named wikispace of the month and was being recognized as a model classroom for wiki use. But the most profound change was inside her classroom. Her classroom went from a challenging, rigorous curriculum to a challenging, rigorous, and fun curriculum with increased student involvement. Vicki will share what she has done with you in the hopes that you can learn more quickly than she did.

Vicki has done this in two ways: a video with show notes and a live wiki project for YOU to join in. So, if you want to learn something new (and have a sense of humor) we hope you’ll join the presentation. Vicki welcomes feedback on this blog or on her Cool Cat Teacher blog.

Video Presentation Outline:

  1. Wiki Background
  2. Why students need to know how to wiki
  3. A brief overview of the active portion of this project
  4. The pedagogical use of wikis in the classroom
  5. Wiki assessment strategies
  6. Common questions from school administrators

Note: To show you how rapidly things change, this presentation was finished on Sunday, October 15th and on Monday, October 16th, wikispaces has announced a new feature to help with the concurrent editing problem of wikis.

Presentation

PC users right click, Mac users control click to download for viewing …
http://k12online.wm.edu/k12wikipresentatation_LowRes.wmv 18 MB
http://k12online.wm.edu/k12wikipresentation_highres.wmv 41 MB

Supporting Links
Show Notes
http://k12online.wm.edu/K12shownotes.pdf

Wiki Grading Rubric
http://k12online.wm.edu/WikiGradingRubric.pdf

Components of an effective Web 2.0 Classroom
http://k12online.wm.edu/Web20classroom.pdf

Active Project Outline: The K12 Wiki Project
1 – Sign up to participate at the conference wiki project wiki – http://k12wiki.wikispaces.com/
Our live wiki project. Sign up and request to join the space before 8 AM EST Wednesday, October 24th. All project instructions are on the wiki home page.

2 – Team Announcements
You will have your team assignments posted on the wiki Thursday, October 26th.

3 – Wiki on your topic for up to 20 minutes
You will have until Saturday, October 28th to spend two 10 minute sessions editing your wiki. (Vicki will have volunteers on the wiki to answer your questions and help you.)

4 – Awards
Three Amazing judges, Andrea Forte (wiki researcher), Stewart Mader (wiki author), Jennifer Wagner (international collaborative teacher projects) will evaluate and judge the best wiki of this project. (See the K12wiki for their bios.)

5 – Listen in on the skypecast
Winners will be announced at the concluding skypecast (https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=45270%29 on Monday, October 30, at 8 pm EST (October 31 at 1:00 am GMT). Some of the judges will join us and we will give you some ways that you can match your classrooms to wiki with others that match your objectives.

Announcements

The Blind Peer Reviewers

Published by:

You know who you are …. Thank You!

We had almost 70 different proposals submitted for K12 Online 2006; 36 were selected for the conference. The Keynote presenters had been solicited before K12 Online was announced on September 1. We wanted to ensure that every proposal would have a fair chance of being selected for the conference. This is how we did it …

Each convener found 3 or 4 volunteers to act as peer reviewers in their strand. When the close date for submissions arrived, midnight of September 30, each convener sent the peer review committees a summary of the proposals that had been submitted. Each convener organized this a little differently. In some cases the committees knew the other reviewers for their strand, in other cases they didn’t. The peer reviewers, based on the titles and abstracts submitted, chose the best 9 proposals in their strand. In most cases this was a very difficult thing to do. My committee was asked to pair down their choices three times and finally a fourth person was called in to make a tie breaking decision. Also, keep in mind, this entire process began on October 1 and had to be concluded by October 5 so that we could send out letters to everyone who submitted a proposal on October 6.

We structured the process this way in order to avoid both the appearance and possibility of bias by making the selections ourselves. I suppose we could be accused of bias in the selection of our committees. However, we did our level best to avoid it. In my case I chose classroom teachers who were diverse in terms of their teaching subjects, levels and geography. My colleagues also did their best to stay away from exercising any bias in the selection of presentations in their strands as well.

All along we’ve discussed how can we properly thank the people who agreed to be blind reviewers for K12 Online 2006. (Their identities are not being published in order to side step the possibility of hard feelings from anyone not selected to present this year.) Given the way we’ve structured this process, there is no adequate way to thank them. Nonetheless, inadequate though it may be, we wanted to publicly thank the people who agreed to act as blind peer reviewers … thank you; without you this whole thing would never have happened. You played an integral part in bringing it to fruition and we are very grateful for the work you have so selflessly done. We wanted to say it publicly.