Day 2 - MassCUE 2013 Conference

Another inspiring day, lots of information, ideas and contacts.  My head hurts from so much data!

Keynote speaker for today was Chris Lehman, the founder and director of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA., who focused  on how we get kids excited and engaged about learning and discovery.  He conveyed a couple of key themes:

• public school 2.0 is less about new ideas of education and more about new methods and tools (including technologies) to execute.
• our focus needs to be on teaching how to learn, how to create and innovate.  What we teach today may will be obsolete tomorrow.  He showed an interesting quote
  
  "the illiterate of the 21st century ... are those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn...[as rapid change takes place]." - Alan Toffler
  
• our dilemma - the 'factory' model of the traditional comprehensive high school doesn't work for the modern world of rapid change and obsolescence, of data everywhere anytime.  We are trying to create new ways and we are measuring out progress using the old yardstick.

He also gave a serious pep talk for inquiry-based and project-based learning.  It's not just about assigning a project to a class, it's about a whole culture shift of the school.

One thing that struck me as very interesting, and refreshing, about both keynote speaker was that neither of them focused on technology, per se, but rather on how our concept, organization and execution of education must fundamentally change.  And it is technology that in part has created this circumstance and in part will be an essential tool to help make the transformation.

I will look for video recordings of both and if possible post them.

For the workshops of day 2, I focused my attention to the things - tools and techniques - to help the classroom teacher right now.  Student portfolios, flipping the classroom, screencasting, Homework 2.0, and tools to manage grading and feedback were among the top ones.  Of the numerous things inspiring about these workshops was that most of them were conceived and conducted by classroom teachers, often with the help of their school's tech support team.  Hands-on, practical application.




This weekend I plan to write up a more formal debriefing of my adventures.  I'll also share a lot of the handouts and presentation materials and, even for sessions I was not able to attend, gather useful materials and share them to folks.

Here is a link to the conference agenda so you can see the breadth of topics and speakers.  And here are some of the publicly available materials.