ISTE 2011 Reflection

Chris Lehmann concluded with the perfect message for the final keynote of ISTE 2011.  He told the stories of real students and their successes and real teachers and their successes.  He said that technology should be like oxygen.   He concluded by saying that it is “Time for us to work together and be one community to transform education now.”  You can hear the Chris’ keynote here and notes from Wes Fryer here and a visual from David Warlick here.  It was nice to have a speaker who knows the community of people who attend ISTE and is in the trenches.  Well done.

I was happy to learn that the various Tweets and blog posts were useful to others.  In particular, my friend, Alice Keeler.  She sent me this Wordle of the tweets and blog posts she used from ISTE.

 

The best part of ISTE 11 for me were the various conversations in the hall ways.  I really liked the structure of EduBlogger Con.  You can read about the various EBC sessions here.  I also attended the Online Learning Institute which provided a series of round table conversations which were useful.   Many important conversations and documents were shared as part of the roundtables and posted on the OLI wiki.

Some key ideas I will remember and use:

“Technology should be like Oxygen.”  (Chris Lehmann, Keynote)

“Access to the Internet should be like access to water in the U.S.” (Kwasi Asare, Dept. of Ed. from Online Learning Institute)

“Seat time attendance requirements = we’re teaching to wrong end of the kid” (Allison Powell quoting Michael Horn from Online Learning Institute)

“Students without a high school diploma (dropouts) have the skills for only 10% of the available jobs” (Former Gov. Bob Wise, Online Learning Institute)

“Tech in a classroom doesn’t improve learning any more than rubbing Einstein’s head makes you smarter.” (Vicki Davis via Twitter from a distance)

“Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools”  (Steven Covey, Keynote via video conference)

“Poor pedagogy + technology = accelerated malpractice” (Daniel Pink RT Joe_bower via Twitter from a distance)

“The brain is a survival instinct machine. Teaching to the test is a survival strategy” (John Medina website, Keynote Recording)

“Our children have digital limbs we cannot amputate them at the front door of the school” (Via Alice Keeler posted from a tweet by Brendan Murphy at EduBloggerCon)

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the Virtual School Symposium in November and then ISTE12 in San Diego!