Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Call for Presentations on Open Source at CUE and NECC

Two educational technology conferences that have been SUPER supportive of Open Source Software and Open Technologies are CUE and NECC.  Both sponsor "Open Source Pavilions" with Linux labs, and both have speaker tracks on Open Source. 

If you are interested in speaking at either the CUE or NECC 2009 conferences on Open Source Software, Open Content, or Open Technologies, I'd like to encourage you to submit speaking proposals.  

CUE:  Due this Friday, September 12th!  http://www.cue.org/conference/present

NECC:  Due Wednesday, October 8th.  http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/program/

I hope you will consider participating!

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Wikis in Education Celebration September 11th, 2008

(Cross-posted from www.stevehargadon.com)

Wikispaces has given away 100,000 ad-free educational wikis, and has just announced they are going to give away 250,000 more. We're going to celebrate the general use of wikis in education and Wikispace's amazing milestone by having founder Adam Frey and the Wikispaces team join us Thursday evening, September 11, 2008, for an open Classroom 2.0 discussion of the use of wikis in education.

If you are using wikis in education, or if you want to learn why you might consider doing so, please join us at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / Midnight GMT in our Elluminate room. We'll have lots of time for Q&A, which you are welcome to start beforehand in the forum discussion on Classroom 2.0.

If you haven't used Elluminate before,.you can use the following link to verify your system compatibility with their online meeting tool: http://www.elluminate.com/support/. If you are not in the US, here's a time-clock link.

Kudos to Wikispaces, and to all educators who are exploring the use of Web 2.0 in education!

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Live Web Meeting and Q&A with Creators of PBS Election Education Resources

(Cross-posted from Infinite Thinking Machine)

On Wednesday, September 10th, at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern, the creators of the PBS multi-media AND social-media "Vote 2008" curriculum will take part in a Classroom 2.0 Live Conversation. You are invited to participate in this (free) Web event.

We'll first be given a personal tour of "Election 2008: ACCESS, ANALYZE, ACT: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement", the latest multimedia curriculum, which was developed in partnership with PBS Teachers and Temple University’s Media Education Lab. The project is aimed at encouraging teachers to experiment with social media/Web 2.0 tools in the classroom in order to promote both civic engagement and critical 21st century skills. Educators will be able to help develop students' understanding of the Presidential campaign process by harnessing the power of Web 2.0 for teaching media and information literacy, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and technology skills. There are more than a dozen social media tools showcased in this curriculum to engage middle-school and high school learners in the political campaign process.

Following the overview of the resources available, there will be a question and answer session. You may want to preview the "Vote 2008" election resources at PBS by going to http://www.pbs.org/teachers/vote2008/. You might consider taking the quick political quiz yourself (see below)! A wiki for the project is located at http://21stcenturycivicengagement.pbwiki.com/.

To join the event on September 10th, check the instructions on the Classroom 2.0 Live Conversations page at http://wiki.classroom20.com/live+conversations/. This event will also be recorded and a link to the recording will be posted soon after.