Announcing the Fourth Annual Global Education Conference and Call for Presentations!

Bienvenue! Welcome! 歡迎! Willkommen! Benvenuto!
환영! Seja bem-vindo(a)! Bienvenido!

We are pleased to announce the fourth (wahoo!) annual Global Education Conference, a free week-long online event bringing together students, educators, and innovators from around the world, will be held Monday, November 18 through Friday, November 22, 2013 (Saturday, November 23rd in some time zones).

The entire virtual conference will be held online using the Blackboard Collaborate platform (formerly known as Elluminate/Wimba) with the support of iEARN worldwide as the conference founding sponsor.

The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity. Last year’s conference featured 400 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins.

To attend this year's conference and to be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please 
join this network.

Presenting:

The conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to connecting educators and classrooms with a strong emphasis on promoting global awareness, fostering global competency, and inspiring action towards solving real–world problems. Through this event, attendees will challenge themselves and others to become more active citizens of the world. Participants are encouraged to learn, question, create, and engage in meaningful, authentic opportunities within a global context!

Keep in mind that this conference is not focused on technology exclusively; proposals must focus on global collaboration and tie to the mission of the conference. 

The Call for Proposals for the 2013 is now open. Presenters can submit proposals for general sessions focused on five possible tracks:  Teachers, Students, Curriculum, Policy and Leadership.
Proposals should focus on ideas, projects, and initiatives that promote global understanding and collaboration. Those who enter submissions that do not relate to the mission of the conference will be asked to revise. The final deadline for submissions is November 8, 2013,  and presenters will be notified of acceptance on a rolling basis starting 
immediately. (Keynote presentations are by invitation only; suggestions can be sent to Lucy Gray at lucy@lucygrayconsulting.com.)

The call for presentation proposals is now live and can be found HERE.

International Advisory Board:

Anyone can apply to be a member of the international advisory board. Advisory board members are recognized on the website and are asked to:

• Participate actively in our online community
• Promote both participation and attendance at the conference
• Help us find additional partner organizations in their region(s)
• Help support and potentially train presenters in their geographical region and local languages
• If possible, help moderate sessions during the actual conference

As a conference that is focused on being inclusive, our desire is to have international attendees see this as a truly world-wide and not a North-America-centric event, and to see themselves as full participants and presenters, not just the audience.

To sign up for the advisory board, please make sure you have joined the conference network, and then see the advisory board information at 
http://www.globaleducationconference.com/group/advisoryboard2013.

Conference Partner Organizations:

Whether you are a small school library or a multi-national non-profit organization, we want to encourage you to become a conference partner. Your work in this area must be non-commercial and primarily or substantively focused on globally connecting students or teachers, or other global competency and awareness education initiatives. Once approved, your organization will be listed with a link, logo, and a short description; and you will be provided with a "spotlight" speaker session in the conference.

Our goal for the conference is to have it continue to be a milestone event, bringing together organizations and individuals from all over the world. We recognize that much (if not most!) of the outreach for this conference will come from libraries, schools, or organizations who advertise the conference to their memberships, and we want to recognize and reward those who do this!

There are no financial obligations for being a partner organization--all we ask is that you actively promote the conference to your membership and network, and encourage participation as well as presentations and submissions. To apply to be a conference partner organization, please make sure you have joined the conference network, and then join the partner group specifically at http://www.globaleducationconference.com/group/partners2013.

Conference Sponsors:

There are opportunities for commercial sponsorship of the 2013 Global Education Conference, and both recognition and authentic appreciation for financial support will be given to those who choose to sponsor. Non-profits who see value in our work and want to support this endeavor are also encouraged to consider sponsorship.  Sponsorship levels and benefits can be discussed with Steve Hargadon directly at 
steve@hargadon.com or 916-283-7901.

More Information:

The Global Education Conference founding sponsor is iEARN (International Education and Resource Network). iEARN is a non-profit organization made up of over 30,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 130 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies. Over 2,000,000 students each day are engaged in collaborative project work worldwide.

We are looking forward to the fourth year of this this terrific event, and to your participation! For further updates, please join our network at 
http://globaleducationconference.com and follow us on Twitter (@GlobalEdCon) and using the hashtag #GlobalEd13.

See you online!

Steve Hargadon
Founder and Co-Chair

steve@hargadon.com

www.SteveHargadon.com


www.Web20Labs.com

Lucy Gray
Co-Chair
lucy@lucygrayconsulting.com
http://lucygrayconsulting.com

http://globaleducation.ning.com

Conference 2.0 News - STEMxCon Deadline, Connected Educator Month, Reform Symposium, Library 2.013, and More

For many, this is the start of a new school year. We hope that, wherever you are, our peer and practitioner-driven professional development conferences make a difference for you. All of these events are free to attend.

"Conference 2.0" is not just about attending and learning (which we hope you are doing!), but also about providing significant encouragement to present. Because an online conference doesn't have the physical and financial constraints (and sometimes the politics) of an in-person event, we can accept the great majority of presentation proposals and allow the audience to decide what they want to attend. This means that the experience of presenting, which can be hard to come by for someone who hasn't done so before, is available to all. The great surprise of having done this process now for four years (hurrah!) is that the quality of the presentations remains significantly high. So we encourage you to be brave and to consider presenting at one of the following conferences.

(And don't miss the training and news sections at the bottom of this post.)

2013 GLOBAL STEMx EDUCATION CONFERENCE
September 19 - 21, 2013
http://www.STEMxCon.com
We've accepted 73 proposals so far and have 26 still to review, which means we're going to have at least 100 sessions for the world’s first massively open online conference for educators focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and more. The proposal deadline is September 1, this weekend, but we know that for many this is the start of a new school year and so proposals can come in after September 1st, but those that do will be approved on a space-available basis. Submit one! It wouldn't surprise us to reach 150 proposals by the time of the actual conference. See the list of GREAT keynote speakers HERE. Please tell everyone you can about this new event, join our outreach and advisory board, become a partner organization, or even (please! :) consider helping to sponsor the conference.

CONNECTED EDUCATOR MONTH
October 2013
http://connectededucators.org
Not technically a Web 2.0 Lab's "Conference 2.0" event, but one which we support whole-heartedly, the second annual Connected Educator Month is a project of the Connected Online Communities of Practice working group formed by the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. With a focus this year on supporting districts and their professional development activities, stay tuned for really fun news about: nightly Connected Educator chats with special guests, a special Connected Librarian Day (we haven't forgotten about you!), special Connected Learners events, and much, MUCH more.

REFORM SYMPOSIUM CONFERENCE (RSCON)
October 11 - 13, 2013
http://www.reformsymposium.com
We are pleased to announce the fourth annual Reform Symposium Conference (RSCON), a free online three day event bringing together educators, students and innovators from around the world and in conjunction with Connected Educator Month. RSCON is a global community initiative to transform teaching and learning, and will be a highly inclusive and engaging event that will encourage students and educators around the world to share and learn about transformative approaches to learning and teaching. To attend this year's conference and to be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please 
join the conference at its new online home, FutureofEducation.com.


LIBRARY 2.013 - THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES CONFERENCE
October 18 - 19, 2013
http://www.library2013.com
Our third annual Library 2.0 conference on libraries, librarians, and librarianship is also totally rocking along, with 80 accepted proposals so far for this terrific two-day event in its third year. There's lots of room--please consider presenting! There are eight conference strands covering a wide variety of timely topics, such as, MOOCs, e-books, maker spaces, mobile services, embedded librarians, green libraries, and more. Proposals can made between now and September 30th. As noted above, we're going to be doing a special Connected Librarians Day for school librarians--more information on that, and some joint conference sessions with the Washington Library Media Association (WLMA) to come!

2013 GLOBAL EDUCATION CONFERENCE
November 18 - 22, 2013
http://www.globaledcon.com
This is the great "mother ship" of our virtual conferences. Coming into our fourth annual event, we are so excited for another five days of all-out connecting and collaborating. If you've never been a part of this event, you MUST find some time to participate. Focused on helping teachers and students connect globally, we're proud of the amazing network that has been formed around this conference. We might just hit 500 presentations this year! The call for proposals will open very soon, and all are invited to participate.

2014 OZeLIVE - ED TECH DOWN UNDER
January 17 - 18, 2014
http://www.ozelive.com (coming)
We're in our early planning stages for an Australia / New Zealand time-zone friendly educational technology virtual conference. There some definite excitement building. More information to come.

2014 RETHINKING HIGHER ED
February, 2014
http://www.rethinkinghighered.com (coming)
Also in the early planning stages, but very excited about this event!

2014 SCHOOL LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
March 27, 2014
http://www.schoolleadershipsummit.com
After a terrific first summit this year, TICAL, the founding sponsor, has enthusiastically committed to doing this again! Look for more news in the fall.

TRAINING:

• With the exception of Connected Educator Month, all of the conferences above are held in Blackboard Collaborate, an online teaching and learning platform. Live and recorded training sessions are held regularly for both presenters and volunteer moderators, and please see the training page on each specific conference site for details.

MORE NEWS:

• We're still making some plans for a worldwide education film festival at the start of 2014. If you know filmmakers (or are one) and you want to talk about this with me, please reach out (steve@hargadon.com)!
• A final tease is for a special event in November, under wraps right now, but tentatively titled "Reinventing K12." Stay tuned!.

REPORTS:

• The 2013 Homeschool Conference, the first ever, was a huge success. Organized and run in just five weeks after being announced, we had 1534 attendee log-ins for 48 presentations and 8 keynotes, all around sharing strategies, practices, and resources for those involved with homeschooling, unschooling, free schools, democratic schools, and other forms of alternative and independent education. . The recordings are all up and available (all free, of course), and plans are being made for Homeschool Conference 2 in early 2014.