Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

If you are coming to one of these events, please say "hi." I'd love to meet you. ISTE 2012 Schedule  Saturday, June 23 - Event that Steve Hargadon is running (the remix of Edublogger, not sure of new name) Sunday, June 24 - We'll have a booth in the global gallery so you can say hi. Monday, June 25 - 2:30 - 3:30 PM BM117 Wonderful World of Wiki Wiki Teaching (Advanced) with Adam Frey, Suzie Nestico, and Ben Curran running the backchannel Tuesday, June 26 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Collaborative Writing and Common Core Standards in the Classroom . I'll be moderating a panel with Dr. Leigh Zeitz, Jennifer Roberts, Julie Lindsay , Suzie Nestico and again, my friend Ben Curran has agreed to backchannel for us. Tuesday, June 26 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm Bookmarks, PLN's and More: Supercharge Your Learning, Teaching, and Research with Diigo co-founder Maggie Tsai (Ben in Backchannel) We hope to run a Birds of a Feather for Flat Classroom again this year. (usuall...

You are invited to a free presentation through Intel Education.  http://engage.intel.com - anyone is invited to join the community and you are all invited to join the presentation. This presentation is the one I call my "fire code special" as usually when I do it at conferences the fire marshall tells people they cannot come into the room any more!  So, join us. We'll have fun! Differentiating Instruction with Technology Constructing the classroom for differentiation and reaching all students requires involved teachers, IT support staff, and principals. Vicki "Cool Cat Teacher" Davis shares how one can structure a classroom for learning and overviews the support structures required for successful differentiation with technology in this webinar geared to teachers and administrators. See where you need to go so that you can make plans for how to get there. Click the date below to register to attend. Thursday, December 16 th 4pm PDT/7pm EDT

I have been remiss in posting the Flat Classroom events and times for the Global Education conference but Julie Lindsay has collected all of the remaining live events for Thursday and Friday.  Thanks Julie! If you want to hear from students or just a few of our teachers (many have already presented) please do! All times listed below are GMT http://www. globaleducationconference.com/ schedule-gmt.html but you can set your own timezone VERY easily by going to http://www. globaleducationconference.com/ schedule.html Have a great conference day! Julie Lindsay Educator Advisory Board Chair Global Education Conference The following are teachers and supporters of Flat Classroom and we encourage you to attend their sessions! Thursday November 18 and Friday November 19!! Wednesday 9pm GMT - (ok, this is on right now! Make sure you listen to the recording!!) "TITLE: ANSER Got Rights PRESENTER: Jackie Gerstein, ANSER Charter School (USA) ELLUMINATE SESSION ROOM (open one ...

Hello, my friends, I'm in Michigan this lovely evening and just had a delightful chat with my good friends Anne Truger , Hall Davidson , Steve Dembo , and Rushton Hurley - all fellow spotlight speakers here at MACUL 2010.  Attendance is up, which is delightfully great news - about 3,300 will be here tomorrow. I enjoyed dining with Spotlight Speaker Chair, Ren Baldwin today at lunch as he discussed their Mi-champions Program. (See the video below.) The second class of graduates will be graduating at this conference (they have had 300 per "class") and the third cohort will begin.  The year begins and ends with the MACUL conference here in Michigan.  The premise of the Mi-champions program is that teachers of core subjects who are novices at technology education apply to the program and are paired with a "coach." They have extra training in the summer and then coached and encouraged and mentored.  The attrition rate is very slow.  I WANT TO MEET SOME OF THES...

Brain Rules for Presenters View more presentations from garr . I agree with Garr Reynolds , Brain Rules is a great book. I wish more presenters and teachers would read the book AND view this presentation.  Garr is such a great presenter and his book Presentation Zen is an important book for all presenters to read.  I love how he relates presentation skills to the Brain research from John Medina .  Share this presentation! When I see really good presentations like this "Out of the box" presentation, I think to myself "I want to do that." The Box View more presentations from Scott Schwertly . Then, I open up those slides and start editing.  Perhaps one of the most important things about working on presentations was quoted in Garr Reynold's presentation at the top -- that to put together a really good presentation that you must get OFF THE GRID. Disconnect. Think.  Challenge yourself. Often the best content for presentations is written in my journal i...

I promised my new friends from the BOCES keynote last week in White Plains, New York that I'd post these slides. I hate to say "you had to be there" but many of these slides won't make a lot of sense if you weren't there.  Early on is my introduction to the projects.  Then, I have backchannel netiquette rules.  Then starting at around slides 65/66 I have the beginning core of my presentation. I use the Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen method which means LOTS of slides and fast click times (often I'll do 10-18 per minute.) After the Influencer material are the 7 steps to Flatten your Classroom and then some other notes on trends for influencing.  I'll be in Arkansas at TICAL talking about many of these things on February 17th and then at MACUL in Michigan on March 11th with several spotlight sessions as well of course, co-leading the Flat Classroom mini-conference strand at ASB Unplugged in Mumbai the end of February. Twenty First Century Influenc...

Web 2 and Web 3d: To Literacy and Beyond View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: libraries learning ) I shared this presentation last week at the Conference of Media Organizations here in the state of Georgia.  I promised several of the amazing librarians that I met there last week that I'd post a copy of the presentation here on my blog this week. While some of the slides may not make as much sense without my words accompanying them - the point is to challenge our definition of literacy and to encourage those who we need most to be a part of the redefinition of literacy to join in or forever dislike the definition that the world of amateurs imposes upon the amazingly well-educated librarians and media specialists. I appreciated the opportunity to be there with them last week and always love the opportunity unleashed when having to prepare for a new audience.

If you're online -- in about 19 minutes at approximately 11 am EDT, Julie Lindsay and I will be joining Steve Hargadon to do the Classroom Live presentation we've been planning to do for some time. It is free and open and in elluminate. If you wish to join us, come on. If not, the recording will be available later. Hope to see you there.

I had a great time in Illinois (check out the archives on my wiki), but perhaps my favorite presentation was the new one I created for this conference about Technology Driven Differentiated Instruction. Here are my slides: | View | Upload your own Here is the presentation: I ustreamed it and the audio and video is not so great, however, you could take a look at the slides and listen to the preso. Sometimes when we have to think through these things it helps us set in concrete our own beliefs. I've always hated the convoluted charts that didn't make much sense to me and this helped me clarify and better understand it myself. I'm glad they let me do this presentation and I really want to do this one again! tag: differentiated instruction , technology , education , learning , innovation , , Vicki A Davis , coolcatteacher , IL-TCE

I came across a cool post about 13 online alternatives to PowerPoint and decided to play with PreZENt it! I made a slideshow and then shared what I learned. I WISH I could embed the show into this blog post, but it seems that feature isn't enabled. Just remember, if you're ONLY teaching powerpoint, you're missing it. PowerPoint is great, but it is likely that students will have to change software programs as often as they change their hairstyles over their lifetimes. Fluency is technology is very important as students will have to be able to move from not only job to job but platform to platform. Get out there and expose your students to more!

I came across this really cool presentation that is also pretty funny. (hat tip StumbleVideo . (Don't be scared but it is about greasemonkey and firebug -- cool tools.) It is only 3 minutes long and yet I learned SO MUCH! Please watch it. Here are my questions: Fix it, Don't Trash IT- Why don't we use scripts to "fix" the sites for education instead of blocking them? (Although now it is tough and perhaps onesie-twosie, certainly we could use some sort of script to help us with this. It just shows me it is possible so I'm thinking about it.) Micropresentations Why don't education conferences include sessions where people just get 3 minutes and 20 slides like this -- and the slides autoadvance. I wonder how much we could smash into one presentation? How much could we cover. (And could we stand the energy?) I think the presentation is great because it just conveys so much, it is humorous, and it is jam packed with information. What a great teacher! ...

Educating for a flattening world presentation (I will embed the presentation from my ustream later,but you may go over there and view it now .) Alan Preis , Atlanta International School He showed the Did You Know 2 video. From audience response, many people have still not seen it. (Man version 2 of this video is really high quality!! Wow! I like that, we are living in exponential times. 1 out of 8 couples married in the US met online. I like BG - before Google. Such an important message -- we can't solved problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. I honestly didn't realize that the Flat Classroom was in Karl's new video update! I have to show my students this video!!! Wow! ( http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com ) Man, that Karl Fisch is brilliant.) Things have to change. Thomas Friedman says that the real story of the dot com era was the fiber that was being laid during the dot com era. That is the story that few people understand. We...

I had a great time with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's class of beginning teachers recently. ( Read her kind post about it.) I appreciate the opportunity. She recorded the session in Elluminate, it has audio and a screen capture of the slides I used to teach wikis and the voting that we did about the class' wiki use. You can also take a look at the wiki that I created for the class information. I really wanted to model the interactive methods that I believe teach best even though we were in elluminate. Students hunger for involvement and they participated as we discussed learning theories and so many important topics for beginning teachers. Sheryl is doing a great job with this class! tag: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach , Vicki A Davis , coolcatteacher , teaching , education , wikis , pedagogy

Tomorrow I am spending time with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach 's class EDUC 330 Tech Enhanced Learning at the College of William and Mary. I am incredibly impressed with Sheryl's course syllabus and wish that the incredible speakers she has scheduled could present to many colleges at once. She has an incredible line up and I'm going to be listening to her other speakers. I spent today listening to Anne Davis talk about blogging. Wow! I highly suggest that those of you interested in using blogging in the classroom listen to how Anne has been doing it for years with fifth graders. (The recording is in Elluminate.) Anne teaches teachers at Georgia State University and also finds time to spend 2 hours each week in an elementary classroom. She is incredible! The other speakers? Listen to this: April Chamberlain Chris Craft Vicki Davis Karen Richardson Vinnie Vrotny Mark Wagner Jeff Utech Leigh Blackall Aimee Smith Anne Davis Karen Janowski My Presentation about W...