My presentation went live yesterday a.m. I’ve already received some positive feedback from some of my Twitter followers/friends, and that’s been nice to hear/read/see, especially given my anxiety over this particular event. I really enjoy presenting my work to the public; in fact, the larger the audience the better for me. However, this form of presentation is completely new to me. Preparing a “packaged” multimedia presentation turned out to be a ton of fun, but a ton of work. As I become more facile with the technology, I imagine I’ll be less anxious doing this sort of “digital storytelling.” And, I can imagine myself doing more and more of this sort of work to integrate into my courses as well.
As I wrote on Twitter, this a.m., I’m finding the K12 Online conference to be like Chanukah only longer. I get new gifts every day; in fact, four new gifts every day for two weeks. And that doesn’t count the fireside chats and other “live”/synchronous aspects of the conference. Speaking of which, I hope you’ll join me and the other presenters from this week at the fireside chat this Saturday, October 25 at 11:00 a.m. EST.
No point in re-creating the wheel, so I’ve copied the e-mail I sent to my faculty colleagues below (he only difference is that I embedded my teaser video into this post instead of just providing a link):
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Dearest colleagues,
If I told you that there is an extraordinary educational conference that you can attend at no expense to your travel budget, (or to any other budget, for that matter) and that you could attend largely at your own convenience, you’d listen, right?
Well, beginning on October 13 and continuing through the end of the month, the K12 Online Conference 2008 will be taking place…well…everywhere and anywhere. As it is written on the homepage of the conference:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.
To learn more about the conference, I would suggest reading and clicking through this site. Basically, though, presentations are made via prerecorded videos and broadcast at specific times. There are also opportunities to “meet” and “talk to” the presenters at a webinar called a Fireside Chat.
The schedule of events can be found here. You will notice that yours truly is one of the select presenters and my presentation airs on Tuesday, October 21 at 12:00 p.m GMT (which, if I’m correct, is 8:00 EST). You can view a “teaser” of my presentation [below], and teasers for many of the other presentations are being added to the conference blog every day.
I can’t recommend this conference enough, and please pass along this information to your students. This is a FREE conference FOR educators BY educators. It is a 21st Century conference about 21st Century teaching and learning.
Thanks for considering this extraordinary learning opportunity and I hope to “see” you at the fireside chats!
