Day four with Warlick

WOW is all that describes Warlick’s keynote. Anytime a keynote speaker can run a half hour late (no fault of David’s…herding teacher’s is like herding cats)and still have teachers talking about his message on an hour bus ride home is an exciting day! Before I get to far here are my notes for the second half of the keynote.

Telling the New Story

Education needs to model what our workforce needs.

Uses Thomas Freidman’s book The World is Flat book and the story of his Dell laptop as a story of our workplace today.

Global cooperation not global competition…and interesting theory.

OK, so I’m not much of a note taker…and as an auditory learner I really shouldn’t be. Now some of the other note takers that where in the audience must be visual…cause man there are some great notes from other teachers and administrators.

The keynote today kicks off our Tech Fest. David has been doing small workshop sessions all week and today spoke to all 400+ educators to move us into our 50+ teacher led technology sessions tomorrow.

At the same time our administration started the conversation this week about our path to 1:1.

I have to say…I’ve been looking forward to this week for over a year. A lot of work has gone into this week. Starting with conversations, visions, planning new buildings that look forward. Surveys, vision statements, meeting with parents, with community members and with teachers. That led to the creation of new positions to support and new hires that understand what it means to use technology in today’s classroom.

All of this is coming together this week….as an educational technologist you have to love it. This is what we discuss, creating change, moving forward, and truly looking at the way we teach. It’s kind of cool to look back at all the steps that have led us to this week. I thank YOU the collective readers of this blog. Most of these steps have been written about here, and your feedback has helped and continues to do so. My administration at this moment is looking at how we want to move to a 1:1 program in the next two years and is monitoring yesterday’s post I made and the comments that you are leaving. What’s really interesting is when we’re sitting in a meeting and either I or an administrator says “I’ll put that on the blog and see what the blogosphere has to say.” That’s the power of connections, the power of Personal Learning Networks, the power of the collective.

Tomorrow I do two presentations RSS Feeds: Quit surfing the web! Where I’ll help 30 teachers set up netvibes accounts and start using RSS feeds. I follow that up with Let’s Blog where 30 teachers will have the opportunity to set up blogs on our schools SAS Blog Headquarter site (already 300+ strong!). All of this and a 1:05am flight to Bali for Chinese New Year vacation. It’ll be a fun filled day!

[tags]SAS, Techfest[/tags]

Technorati Tags: sastechfest, sastechfest07, sas, warlick, jeffutecht, redefine, litereacy