Global Education Conference is This Week
This week is the Global Education Conference and there are presentations lined up at all times of the day and night sharing the wealth of collaborative efforts throughout the world.
If you’re interested in seeing what sessions are going on while you’re awake, this handy guide lets you scroll down and pick your time zone to get the schedule in your time. The conference runs from noon (EST) today through noon (EST) Friday but will be five awesome days of global education. My students will be presenting Friday at 9am EST along with Jeff Stanzler’s students from University of Michigan. Most of your favorite global collaborators will be there to share!
Plan your participation: To me, because it is so overwhelming, it is best to go through the schedule and select what you’ll attend and pick at least 2-3 to attend this week to help you learn. I’ve got several people I follow and want to learn more from and am putting them on my Google Calendar. Remember that you can also watch afterwards.
Build your PLN: The hashtag is #globaled13 use hootsuite or another service to make a column in your Twitter for this week so you can see the trending topics.
Follow the event: @globaledcon
Encourage your school to participate: Ask each teacher to pick one session and then come together next week to share the best ideas. Remember that sometimes 2-3 sessions are happening simultaneously so if one doesn’t meet your needs, exit the room and go into another.
If you want to know more about connecting your classroom to the world, I recommend Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds: Move to Global Collaboration One Step at a Time, a book I coauthored with Julie Lindsay (a keynote at this year’s GEC conference).
Stop talking about the world and start collaborating with the world. It is hard to claim you’re a 21st century school if your students are in a silo and never connect. There is an option that will work for you, so take the time to join in and encourage your teachers to as well.
Breaking News: Open Ed API will allow wider distribution of Open Education Resources
In other note, Open Ed released an API this week. I believe this will positively impact education in the future and I hope that all of these resources will be added to the open ed database.
While most non programmers may not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you’re developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.
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