Wow, Teachers are Smart!

I have to admit, talking to a couple hundred K-12 educators scared the hell out of me. I am used to higher education and corporate audience so my talk as the lunch keynote for the Third Annual One to One conference was well outside of my comfort zone. Turns out we are all in the same boat - huge challenges in driving acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of innovation within our environments. I had an hour and fifteen minutes to cram a couple of years worth of content related to web 2.0 and how it plays in the education environment into ... the talk I did was a reshaped version of my "Enabling the New Classroom Conversation" talk I assembled a while back. I had to do some new stuff with it to make it appropriate for the audience, but at the end of the day I think we engaged in some really meaningful conversation.

As always I'll make my slides available as a PDF, but I have to admit that I am disappointed that the talk wasn't captured ... this audience could use some long term take aways to help further their cause. Is it just me or is the notion of recording talks still a big deal for conferences?

I got great feedback and the nods of encouragement left me feeling very good about the state of teachers in our world. These are people who are genuinely interested in transforming what they do with the technology that they do have at their fingertips. Here's a huge issue I didn't expect coming into it -- the notion of schools blocking/filtering access to the tools we look at on a daily basis is disturbing. My big takeawsy is that we all need to be part of the equation and that teachers are working so hard to do great things with their students (BTW, those are our kids). All I have to say is that I wish I would've liked my teachers in middle and high school as much as I loved talking with this group today. BTW, thanks much for the kind words!

Comments

[Jim Gates]

Thanks for posting your slides in pdf form. It was an excellent presentation, and while I'm embarrassed by my hasty blog post, I did blog about it here: http://tipline.blogspot.com/2007/06/tips-excellent-web-20-summary.html.

Your presentation was excellent. But how does one summarize it? Telling what I did was about like someone summarizing JFK's career by saying he was a guy who had a very bad day in Dallas. :-)