My Network and Me at ASCD in San Antonio

This morning I had the very great privilege of presenting at the ASCD Annual Conference with two vital members of my Digital/Personal Learning Network—Paula White and Becky Fisher, from Charlottesville Virginia.  I'd like to note that we planned the entire session online in virtual environments and did not meet face to face until we got to San Antonio.

Our Session was entitled Learning For All: Conversations, Collaborations, and Choice Through Technology. Our intention was to showcase collaborative technologies for our participants in an overview session and leave our participants with a playground in which to come back and continue to self-develop at their own paces.

But that’s not what happened.
What happened was better.

We started by engaging the participants in a couple of the technologies we intended to highlight, specifically TodaysMeet and Tweetgrid. The audience conversation quickly turned into one of how to relate these to learning and what their usage might mean for student engagement and achievement. We were still able to show our playground, but we were also able to direct the workshop to the needs of the participants—modeling exactly what should be happening in our classrooms with kids.

We expected learning to take place. But the unexpected happenings raised the level of learning for everyone involved. That was a little slice of awesome.

We were also able to interact with other folks in our network, in real time, via Twitter, Today’s Meet, and Skype, and it made our presentation that much more rich and multi-layered in a way that showed participants exactly how powerful networking and collaboration are.

I’d like to thank the members of our network who were involved in this morning’s session by posting their twitter IDs. There’s no greater group to have in your own networks!

@langwitches
@pammoran
@antoesp
@plnaugle
@ascd
@pamb
@linda704
@Doremigirl
@jasonflom
@darahbonham
@aleaness
@paulawhite
@beckyfisher73
And mine too: @fisher1000

Other links to presentation resources are embedded above, including an archive of our session and resources.  Thanks again to all involved this morning.  We really showed the power of the network and collaboration!