It was great reading your ISTE Reflections. I’ve also listed it here together with other Edublogger’s ISTE Reflections: http://tinyurl.com/2crhazc

My two favorite things about ISTE are Edubloggercon & The Blogger’s Cafe. What a great opportunity to just hang out with people we learn with all year round is what I enjoy the most!

Congrats on your first ISTE presentation and thanks for including a lnik to your handouts. I look forward to reading them. It was great seeing and visiting with you in Denver!

I attended fewer sessions and spent more time in the Bloggers’ Cafe meeting members of my personal learning network (PLN) I conserve with in 140 characters or less. Our conversations extended our learning and our connections were deepened. I met so many PLN members face to face and set up collaborations for next school year.

Last year I connected with many classes across the United States. This year I’m going to try and establish connections with classes in other countries so that my students can be “global”. I want my students to establish blogging buddies and do collaborative work using wikis and VoiceThreads.

I will be doing more research about mobile learning at the elementary level. My school is not ready to go there yet, but maybe I can convince them to let me have a go at it. Since I won a technology model classroom for the coming school year, I am able to do much more than most of the other teachers in my buildiing. My track record shows that I am innovative and use technology to extend my students’ learning experiences.

I paid my own way to ISTE this year because I know how it recharges my “batteries” for the next school year. It is money well spent to allow me to continue to build great connections with so many like-minded educators. Thanks for adding to my learning.

(PS. Loved your book. Thank you for sharing it with us.)

As for the level of knowledge; its a constant challenge for me as I prepare presentations to imagine that my participants won’t already know what I’m sharing. I constantly feel as though I’m “preaching to the choir.” Yet, people come up to me and share that my information was valuable to them.

Although there are many teachers who don’t understand RSS, I’d feel funny spending too much time on it because I tend to make assumptions about those who attend conferences such as ISTE and BLC. It’s these assumptions that help me make the best of everyone’s time; or so I think. How do we include beginners in these conversations while addressing their needs for basic techno-literacy?

ISTE held only a few disappointments for me this year (opening keynote for one) but mostly was a great experience. There were a few outstanding presentations that I attended (yours, Rushton Hurley’s and Chris Lehmann’s) and it was the natural, unplanned conversations (like ours over a late-night burger) that were the best take-aways. There were many educators there from around the world and when you have the opportunity to speak (in person) to these folks, there’s a huge difference than holding a conversation in 140 characters or less. It’s much easier to maintain a more global perpective if you can maintain some connections with others who have very different (and yet many similar) experiences in their educational environment. I think that’s the key to being more globally-minded. Connect online but maintain with equal importance the value of the offline connections. Reach out for every opportunity to maintain and build on those relationships.

I look forward to seeing you again at BLC10.
~Lee

From personal experience (and what stats I have) I can safely say that international conversations about learning happen less and less – the world of edublogging has become highly localised (not necessarily a bad thing and, largely, a very good thing in terms of making messages more relevant) but it has become highly blinkered to what is going on beyond the language and education system in which the educator is based (a bad thing).

While more and more north American teachers hanker after largely North American thinking through and reinventing the wheels that were being invented 2, 5 or 10 years ago – and the SAME, I hasten to add, is replicated in Scotland, England, France… pretty much everywhere – it means that they also reach out to an echo chamber all of their own. I think the days of me regularly reaching out to and being reached out to from North America, NZ, Oz, Middle East are going to get rarer and rarer unless a concerted effort is made by everyone to find ‘otherness’, question their own practice and that of those around them.

That is one of the principle reasons I’m reveling in sharing my own tour this summer/autumn – my own selfless plug: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/06/ewan-mcintosh-edutour-2010.html

The fact that being able to take part in such a tour to find out about how other people are teaching and learning makes a half dozen retweets and no comments, whereas two or three years ago I’d be wrestling with comments, critiques, suggestions and requests, speaks volumes.

Thinking globally is a nice rhetoric, but so rarely practiced by so few. What does that mean for the notion of otherness that our youngsters are picking up on?

While not scientific by any means, all I pick up on is this kind of deaf circle of “wow… I agree… right on… isn’t this a powerful tool” that isn’t prepared – or able – to pick up on conversations that have moved beyond that and in cultures and countries that have chosen to do things in another way.

The result is that swathes of people slave over questions of “assessment versus learning”, when Assessment for Learning has proven largely successful at reconciling this when implemented in depth in NZ, Oz and Scotland in particular: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/assess

Likewise, we don’t do a great job of looking to sectors outside education and translating it to what it means in the classroom, hence lessons from the startup world of digital media, which can be found from reading one or two key sites once a week max, are lost on a world that hasn’t changed that much in 100 years.

/rant over. I get frustrated, as the comment shows, but I understand, too, that no such statements can ever be universal, that great practice does happen and I don’t know about it. However, if I don’t know about it, there’s a good chance, a very good chance, that few of the teaching population and parents do either.