Later that year, in SecondLife, the superintendent met the International Society for Technology in Education’s 2007 Technology Leader of the Year, who has mentored him, as the need arose, during a year and a half of his self-directed learning. The superintendent has learned much about the people, platforms, and the pedagogy of this online world with help from people like the mentor who live all over the world and who accepted his invitation to become part of the online network of educators he has developed and nurtured since 2007. What are Ustream, Twitter, YouTube, Elluminate, Diigo, Mind42, Jing, SecondLife, Google Docs, and TED? What do they have to with learning? Our capacity to learn? to share? to invent? Come join the conversation as the superintendent, Dennis Richards, and the mentor, Charlene Chausis, “tell you three stories on the way to one argument.”

They are not communities, in the traditional sense. There is no set membership. Norms and values grow and change in response to our changing understandings and participatory acts. We all see different things and exist in different conversations. Texts are repurposed. We choose whom we read and follow and respond to. In this edited collection of multiple conversations about these issues, the presenter and his guests will share some theory, stories, and ideas about what it means to exist, teach, create and learn in a community of communities, a true personal learning network.

Learn how to storyboard like a pro, choose shots that support the telling of your story, and capture better lighting and sound. Regain lost opportunities to teach media literacy and higher level thinking via video production by empowering yourself to empower your students. Tap into over one hundred years of movie history with this engaging presentation that instructs as it entertains.

The next generation of parents are and will continue to be computer literate. Electronic communications will be one of the ways that schools and teachers effectively communicate with families in the 21st century. By engaging parents using new mediums, schools can help develop a broad base of parental knowledge regarding social media tools. parents that are more informated and have a better understanding of social media technologoes will be better prepared to help their children successed and excel in the information age.

Tools are reviewed for their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats. Resources and teacher examples are also posted. The wiki is only as valuable as the content posted by contributors. The more who participate, the more valuable it becomes.

Retooling our classrooms into learning spaces that effectively prepare our children for a future of infinite opportunity will require a new story about teaching and learning. It must be a story that is so compelling that we forget about our childhood student experiences from decades ago and agree that a different kind of classroom, teaching, and learning experience is required and deserved by our children.

Using monsters as a vehicle, students across the United States exchange written descriptions and recreate their partner’s monster without ever looking at the real thing. Teachers will discover free tools available online, connect drawing and writing tools, learn how to work with multiple files in a wiki, and equate various goals of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy with an electronic platform. Lesson plans, tips, and resources are shared.

It investigates the design of remote mentoring interfaces. It questions ways in which the design of interactive tools can support the remote and synchronous mentoring of a middle school learner by a college student through concrete representation of abstract concepts. It looks at ways in which the design of interactive educational tools can be informed by learning styles and preferences for more more meaningful learning experiences. While this presentation focuses on specific variables such as concrete middle school learners, peer to peer mentoring and science as the subject being mentored, it shows the potential for strategies to be transferred to other educational contexts. The presentation will include demonstrations of ways in which interactivity can promote meaningful learning at the different stages of the learning process as well as ways in which characteristics of social networking portals can be appropriated for remote mentoring purposes.

...addresses the NETS for administrators, teachers & students and is an innovative approach to a collaborative and all-inclusive learning community. Focusing on the process of developing constructivist learning in the virtual world, Sheehy will present the steps her teachers are taking this 3rd year of teaching in Ramapo Islands on Teen Second life to translate their content into the virtual landscape. She will outline best practices that have evolved and the student responses to this 21st century pedagogical shift.

This presentation will discuss the layout of the class setup and background work needed for implementation, communicate the struggles and successes encountered and show examples of student work. Together we will provide educators with an in-depth glimpse of the possibilities that are out there for 21st century teaching and learning. The participants will go away with a wealth of knowledge of different Web 2.0 applications and how to use them in classroom instruction. The participants will see the layout of the class, hear pros and cons of the experience, and gather ideas for “amplifying possibilities” for technology use in their own classrooms. should be considered.