Now for some House Cleaning

It is the summer and I am the daytime caregiver for my wonderful 3 boys. This means that computer time is between the time before they get up and breakfast. After that it is go go go with the list of items we need to fix around the house and finding activities that are interesting to them.

I have a few loose ends to tie up before the next year starts.

• The first is to wrap up the CIU20 Math Conference I keynoted in June.
• The second is to reflect on my year and all that happened.
• The third is to go about setting up 8 blogs for the grade 7's and 8's this upcoming year.

This post will be about the experience I had in Pennsylvania in June.

I was asked to keynote and provide 4 sessions to math teachers in Pennsylvania in December last year. Enthusiastically I said yes to this en devour. I would provide these teachers with a Keynote. (Warning the slides and the audio do not match. I have 100 slides and am unable to sync them all to the audio. I have chosen to evenly split the audio and slides so that you are at least able to follow along. Sorry for the shoddy job.)

What message does the "way" you teach convey to your students?

view presentation (tags: 21stcmathciu20 charbeck chris harbeck presentation)

and also go about preparing 4 sessions based on the work I do in my classroom . I thought this would be easy. I was to do this presentation during the last week of school for my school division. This meant that all of my year end duties had to be done well in advance. This part of the story went off with out a hitch.

Arriving in PA I set to work finalizing the keynote and making sure that the other presentations were worthy of a performance. Much to my dismay the wifi in the hotel was weak and working on presentations online was difficult. I overcame this obstacle with some pain (working early in the morning) and was able to create a wiki for all participants.

http://21stcmath.pbwiki.com/

All of the material I created for the participants is here. Some of the comments I received in the evaluations of this conference need to be shared because it shows the weakness of my presentations.

A common comment was that participants wanted more hands on time to create and work on blogs. I would have loved to provide this but in just an hour per presentation this would have been difficult. Another problem was that only 1/3 of participants had computers with them. What would the other 2/3's have done. I hope that my style of showing how to quickly for the 1/3 and explaining for the other 2/3's was not too stale.

If I was to do this again I would ask for an entire half day to explain and provide hands on techniques to participants. In 3 hrs one could accomplish quite a bit and give the needed first steps to participants.

Another common comment was that "My district does not allow..." for all the tools demonstrated during the conference. My recommendation for all of the participants who mentioned this is to talk to their tech people. They will listen and show you what you can use and cannot use. Show them the possibilities of 2.o applications and set your students on a course for learning.

My hosts were gracious and nice and I hope that I provided valuable information to the participants in my presentations. I am glad it is over and am ready to do it again if anyone wants to hire me...

Hey I made it to Allentown PA

Made it to Allentown. Nice city. Got through the airports and made it to the hotel Got to go and have a run and then got down to business.





Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

When one is in a hotel it is important to check out the wifi. Very small band width capacity when the hotel is full. I had a hard time getting stuff done as I was kicked off all the time.

Procrastination. Bites me in the butt. Ah well Tomorrow will be fine.

Going to be a keynote

Sitting on a United Skywest Filght to Chicago and the having a working layover of 5 hours until a flight to Allentown Pa has finally given me time to write a little. I have been hard at work over the last 6 weeks trying to get the school year done and complete a Keynote Address for the CIU20 in Pennsylvania.

Exciting and scary at the same time. The amount of year end tasks that pile up like a bad disorganized wood pile. Oddly enough I just pushed them aside and got down to business writing a Keynote.

This was the difficult part. When it come to the pedagogical applications of using technology in the classroom I can crank off an hour without thinking. Good thing for me the nice people in Pennsylvania want 4 of those sessions.

I will show how to start using the tools of the trade. How to set up blogs and wiki’s to hook student engagement and harness the social networking jugernaught already in their classroom.

I will give a couple of sessions on E-portfolios and Unprojects. These are my favorite subjects and I will show my audience large or small the benefits of “Releasing the Hounds”.

The Keynote is based on Marshall Mchlluans “The Medium is the Message”. Mchluhan was a brilliant Canadian academic that took the communication world by storm in the late 1960’s and 70’s. His fame really occurred when he started talking about the changes that television was making in the world. His statement ”The Medium is the Message” talks about 2 things Medium and Message.

A medium is anything that we create from inventions to innovations. TV was a radically new beast at the end of the 60’s and was rapidly shrinking the world. A medium is also an extension of ourselves. Like a hammer in our hand or a wheel under our feet. Technology is a medium. Mchluhan had no idea about the internet but everything he described about television can be applied to the Internet and how it has revolutionized communication.

Mchluhan’s message is the change brought about by the medium. “McLuhan tells us that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs."

Never having done a keynote before I started creating the slides that would take this Mchluhan idea and make it relevant to education. I made the slides alright. All 100 of them. Whether this is too many or if I am going to run out of time is not known at this moment. I have practiced for the past 3 days and am under the 60 minutes given to me.

On the upside Darren came by and showed me some of the great bells and whistles include in Keynote software. My presentations look sharper and more appealing.. Taking this new found information I reworked the other 4 presentations from K12 last year to make them more eye appealing.

I was going to ustream the keynote but it is too much of a risk. I do not want to blow up this Macbook and have the presentation fall apart around me. I will be recording the audio and then making a slidecast of the presentation. Uploading the 100 slides to slideshare should be interesting.

Time for a break before landing in Chicago.

bye.