This is the closing keynote presentation given by Les Foltos, Director of the Puget Sound Center for Teacher Learning and Technology, at the Microsoft Innovative Educators Conference held in Winnipeg on May 29, 2008. (The site appears to be down, or broken, now. I thought it was supposed to serve as a commons around which a growing network of teachers was going to built. I wonder what happened?)

This is the last podcast from the from the conference I recorded. It's a little noisy to listen to. We were all talking in small groups trying to crystallize what we had learned over the previous two days. The good news is we talked about many of the same things that we had discussed in the previous day's Ustream. The voices you hear talking in our little group are me, Clarence Fisher, Chris Harbeck, John Evans, Andy McKiel, Kathy Cassidy, and another lady whose name, unfortunately, I've forgotten. She was sitting in a neighbouring group and kept looking over at us, interested in what we were talking about. So, I invited her over and I'm glad she joined us. I think we all got a lot out of this conversation. Give it a listen and add your own two cents in the comments below.

(Download File 30.0Mb, 62 min. 30 sec.)

UPDATE

Great news! Chris found the Ustream recording!! Good on ya Chris. ;-)

Watcher beware: a surprising amount of time is devoted to discussing Dean Shareski's eating habits and his coffee mug — we had a lot of laughs. ;-)

Time: 36 min. 13 sec.

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This is the audio from Richard Van Eck's breakout session at the Microsoft Innovative Educators Conference. It's full of very practical ideas for how to incorporate using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games in teaching a variety of subjects in the K-12 curriculum. Rick's presentations are very grounded with very little flash in his slides but lots of good concrete ideas to take back to the classroom. The night before this session Rick gave a keynote presentation on games based learning. He was asked if the kind of learning kids do in games based learning transfers well to the content areas. He looked the questioner straight in the eye and said, loudly and clearly: No. Then he fleshed out that answer. I still might be able to track down the audio from the keynote. If I can get it I'll publish it here. In the mean time this is a very practical talk about how to begin using COTS games in your classroom.

At about 19 minutes in Rick tried to get online but was locked out. Thankfully, Chris Harbeck was there and had the password. ;-)

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(Download File 14.6Mb, 30 min. 30 sec.)

I've come close a couple of times but this is the first award I've ever received. I was nominated by Andy McKiel. Andy was unanimously voted in as the new President of ManACE tonight. They also honoured Cheryl Prokopanko (provincial coordinator for Literacy with ICT for the Ministry of Education) with a well deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Cheryl is a passionate educator committed to helping other teachers learn how to weave technology into their teaching practice and create more opportunities for students to become successful, ethical, lifelong learners. Last year John Evans was the recipient of Educator of the Year Award; I'm in some pretty august company.

This was also the ManACE Annual General Meeting. I got to observe some of the inner workings of the organization. I mentioned to John, as we were leaving, how I was struck by the dedication of this group of educators. Brian Metcalfe, who retired last year as the technology consultant for my school division, was also there. It was wonderful to see him again. His presence really underscored the commitment folks have to ManACE; retirement is no obstacle to the work they do together. In my brief acceptance comments I encouraged the membership of ManACE to participate in the upcoming K12 Online 2008 conference.

I'm honoured to receive the Educator of the Year Award and wanted to publicly thank the board of directors and members of MANACE. In particular, I wanted to thank Andy McKiel; for nominating me, for the kind words he shared about me, and his continued efforts in helping make 21st century education accessible to teachers and students across the province. We've already begun talking about Manitoba EduBloggerCon 2008.

This is the Keynote presentation given by Arnold Wasserman on the second morning of the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Conference last week. The venue for the conference was the Red River College downtown campus here in Winnipeg. It was a beautiful place to hold the conference. The architecture is an innovative marriage between old and new.

This keynote was immediately followed by a presentation given by Ken Zorniak of Frantic Films. It was an interesting view inside the work that goes into the computer generated visual effects in the movies but we really needed some time to decompress and talk about the things Arnold had said in this talk. Several of us were struck by the many similarities between what Arnold talked about here and the conversation we Ustreamed the day before. Although we didn't record the Ustream we did capture many of the ideas that came up in that session at the end of the day in the session facilitated by Les Foltos from the Puget Sound Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.

Here is the podcast recording of Arnold Wasserman's Keynote. Give it a listen. I'd love to hear what you think after you hear Arnold speak.

(Download File 14.8Mb, 61 min. 30 sec.)

I've long held a ravenous appetite for learning how the brain works and how those capacities can be leveraged to help kids (and me) learn. I recently bought the owners manual. A few days back Jeff Utecht tweeted about a Google Talk by John Medina, authour of the book Brain Rules. John is blogging and sharing some great stuff.

Garr Renolds adapted some of the Brain Rules for presentations. As I've blogged earlier presenting information is something teachers do every day and we need to learn a lot more about how to do it more effectively. So, for my own future reference, and yours if you like, here is John Medina's Google talk, Garr's presentation, and a seemingly unrelated presentation by Dean Shareski whose K12 Online presentation on Design Matters continues to push my thinking every day. Look at how this presentation of Dean's adheres to many of John Medina's Brain Rules; and Dean hasn't even read John's book yet.

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In future posts I hope to share how what I'm learning from all this is making it's way into my classroom. I'd love to hear how others incorporate these ideas into their work as well; in education or elsewhere. When we share these ideas and applications, whether they work or not, it helps us all learn.

UPDATE

Dean referenced this video at the end of his presentation; it's well wortht the 4 minute look:

I had the good fortune to be invited to attend Microsoft's inaugural Innovative Teachers Conference this past week. As always, the highlights for me were the people and the conversations we had in the hallways and over good food.

By far, the best part was meeting face to face for the first time with Kathy Cassidy and Ben Hazzard. When you mix in Clarence Fisher, Chris Harbeck, John Evans, Joan Badger with an open Ustream feed to bring in Dean Shareski, Alec Couros, and a wider network of passionate educators via twitter you get some of the best professional development around. Unfortunately we didn't record it. However, about 100 seconds were captured by Rodd Lucier, thanks for that Rodd!

Lesson Learned: Always record in Ustream. And if you're watching and wondering if you should screencast, the answer is: yes!

The conference opened with a keynote presentation by Arnold Wasserman from The Idea Factory. His presentation was titled The Culture of Innovation. It was filled with thought provoking ideas but I strongly disagree with his essential message in this first presentation of two: It is impossible to innovate your professional practice unless the organization within which you work is an innovative organization.

Here is the podcast recording of that presentation. Give it a listen. I'd love to hear what you think after you hear Arnold speak.

(Download File 21.4Mb, 44 min. 40 sec.)

I captured three other podcasts during the conference which I will share here over the next few days: Arnold Wasserman (part 2), Richard Van Eck (on educational gaming; he was the highlight presenter of the conference for me), and Les Foltos' closing session that had several of us brianstorming around the idea of what the ideal innovative classroom would look like: physically, pedagogically, and with an eye towards teachers professional development.

In this episode of Student Voices three Advanced Placement Calculus students, Chris, Craig, and Graeme, talk about a wiki assignment they did to prepare for the exam. Then the conversation transitions to a discussion of the many things they learned while doing their Developing Expert Voices project. It ends with a challenge, the result of which will be featured in a future podcast.

You can find their project on this year'sDeveloping Expert Voices blog or scattered across YouTube; it's called DEV: Watch and Learn; soon to be aggregated on the project blog.

Let Chris, Craig, and Graeme know what you thought about the podcast by leaving a comment here on this post or on the mirror of this post on their class blog.

(Download File 31.8Mb, 26 min. 30 sec.)

The video mentioned near the end of the podcast is called Daft Hands. Here it is: