Educon in 5 minutes?

So--I've been asked to explain my Educon trip in less than 5 minutes to our PDT (curriculum) group this afternoon. The email asking me to do this was sent at 10:19pm last night! Now, I'm sometimes a late night kind of gal, so I picked it up then and went into panic mode. I immediately turned to my network for help.

Of course, the network came through! First, I received a link to the perfect article about Educon in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Why perfect? It's short, has a nice summary of the history, and includes this quote from Chris Lehman, the founding (and current) principal of Science Leadership Academy It is fundamentally an educational forum that looks at the intersection of progressive pedagogy and 21st-century tools

I've diigoed the article, along with my highlights to share with the curriculum group. More than half of them will have read it by the time we meet. I also made a Wordle out of the article:



I tried making a wordle out of my live-blogs, but there was too much editing required.

Then, @jasonmkern led me to visible tweets. So cool! Not sure what to do with it though. No projector at this gathering.

My favorite Chris Lehman quote is "Technology should be like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible." So there's my starter. It's not a 2010 Educon quote, he's been saying this for a while, but it's worth saying over and over. Wash, rinse, repeat.

While my head is still wrapping around much of what I learned, I did come back with one immediate take-away. Dave Bill and Basil Kolani at the Dwight School led a conversation about creating a model for online participatory learning. Their model + the conversation in the room led me to start bugging a group of our teachers. We're going to start teaching the kids we have in the classroom, online. Next week. Well, later this month anyway. I really like what Bill and Basil accomplished by using online methods with on-campus kids. It makes for a nice transition into the world of online learning.

We know that by the time they get to college, most of these students will take a significant portion of their coursework online. How will they cope? By introducing them to online learning while we still have physical access to them, we can help students with an eye to their developmental readiness. Plus, the students and the teachers can defy gravity but still have a safety net. This image is actually of a trampoline, but I loved it and time pressure means. . .



So there it is! Think I can do it in 5?