Educational Technology Weblog

As always, this year’s Educational Technology Conference was a blast and a lot of work for members of our team. When you’re buried in the details of the day it’s easy for us to get lost as the conference organizers, and not get the opportunity to be teachers. That’s why I always make it a point to give at least one presentation at the conference so I get the opportunity to engage with our teachers and talk about some of the big ideas that we see shaping the use of technology in the classroom.

This year the title of my talk was “Digital Literacy in the 21st Century”, but the more I prepared for my session the more drawn I was to having an interactive experience with my group. As a result, I decided to just open with some broad ideas, including the main idea that even in 2009 we still have trouble defining just what 21st century skills our kids really need. We talk about it a lot, but in the rapidly changing landscape of technology and education it’s mighty hard to pin down what the critical skills are. 

Still, we thought we had a pretty smart group of teachers in our session, so using a free application that allows you to create mind (concept) maps on the fly from Bubbl.us, we set about mapping what we thought were the critical skills our students need. You can view the online version of the concept map we created here at Bubbl.us, or check out the image below that is a screen capture of our ideas.

It was a great session with some awesome teachers. If you’d like to add to our ideas please submit your comments from the link just below the article title. We’d love to hear what you think are the required skills our students should have as we continue forward into the 21st Century.

There are 11 days left to our annual Technology Conference and things are really shaping up! We’ve had more folks pre-register than ever before and we’re expecting to have well over 2,000 teachers, media specialists, and school administrators in attendance. As always, it’s been an awful lot of work getting to this point but it will all be worth it come March 27th when people start to stream into the conference site. (Even though pre-registration is over you can still attend the conference. Just show up on the day of the show and look for the “On-Site Registration” signs.)

Now that the heavy lifting is over the conference web site has been updated with lots of information for those of you who plan to attend. Look for the Plan Your Day link on the right side of the page and you’ll find lots of files to download, including the Sessions at a Glance, conference map, and more.

And if you’ve never been to one of our conferences you can get some flavor of the show by watching the video slide show below. You’ll see lots of happy, engaged teachers in these photos. Just what we’re after every year and what we expect to see on March 27th of this year!

Be a part of something huge! Unite with students and schools from around the world to set a new world record! The challenge is to correctly answer more than 182,445,169 questions in 48 hours. Students play against each other in mental arithmetic games. Students are captivated by the fact that they are playing in real time. Each game lasts for 60 seconds, and students can play as many games as they wish. The questions are appropriately leveled for different ages and abilities.

Watch Jamie explain how it all works on this segment from PalmBreezeCAFE: