By Brad Flickinger of SchoolTechnology.org
Some of the 200+ who attended EduBloggerCon 2011.
Here are five take-aways from Edubloggercon, which was held on the Saturday before ISTE at the Pennsylvania Convention Center: :
1 BYOD IS UNSTOPPABLE (Bring Your Own Device): Five years from now we will be laughing about how we wanted to buy all students a district-owned laptop for 1:1, when all students really wanted to do was to bring their own devices like iPods, iPads, and smartphones. We need to let them store in the cloud and not on our networks and let them use cloud-based apps like Google Docs.
2 TEACH WITH PASS ION, LEARN WITH PASSION: We all crowded around a local 16-year-old student named Jeff who taught us that he wants to learn from teachers who are passionate about their subjects so that he can be passionate about his learning.
3 STUDENTS SHOULD HELP STUDENTS: Before a student gets help from his teacher he should ask 3 or 4 of his classmates. I don’t know how to use Prezi, so should I ban my students from using it? No. Instead, we should let them teach each other technology that we don’t understand.
4 STUDENTS WANT SOME AUTONOMY: They want to have a little choice in what they do. If we give an assignment, we should let them pick their own method of learning proof—sometimes. You could really be surprised by what you get back (good and bad).
5 MAKE A GOOGLE CLASSROOM: Google has an 80/20 rule. Employees are to give 80% of their time to current Google projects, the other 20% of the time they can work on whatever they want. Imagine if we allowed that at school. Just think of the cool projects that kids could work on during this free learning time.
T&L Names a Winner
Congratulations to Katie Neville, a technology resource teacher in the Loudoun County (VA) Public Schools. Katie’s name was drawn as part of a contest at Tech & Learning’s booth, where we asked visitors to scan a QR code, which linked to our Twitter page, and then re-Tweet an ISTE-related message. Katie will win a Livescribe Echo smartpen.
