Connect, Learn and Grow

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the NYTimes Schools for Tomorrow Conference yesterday and listened to a whole host of inspiring speakers. The theme for the conference was “Building a Better Teacher.” I thought it would be appropriate to include some items from the conference in this week’s missive.

•  This first item is actually the conference itself. All of the panels were streamed live and can be watched now on the conference website. The sessions that I found particularly interesting were:
  • How do we measure teacher performance?
  • How can we better support teachers to deliver better instruction?
  • Keynote from Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra), the former Chief Technology Officer for the United States.
• Looking for a way to ramp up your Google searching skills? Why not take advantage of a MOOC (a massive  open online course). Daniel Russel, the uber tech leader from Google who spoke at the NYT conference, offered a course on Power Searching with Google this summer which had over 150,000 people register and take the course. He is running the course again starting on September 24. You can register for the course here. I have registered for the course myself so perhaps we can form a study group!
• At one point in the conference, the audience was polled about what they thought was the most pressing issue with regard to supporting teachers to deliver better instruction. The overwhelming “favorite” was ongoing professional development and the importance of being a connected educator. As I listened to the panel, thought about the response and tweeted out some ideas to the Twitter hashtag for the conference (#NYTedtech); I was reminded of how significant Twitter is in my ongoing PD and ability to connect with fellow educators. For those of you who have read my Friday Fours in the past, you know that I am a big fan of Twitter as a way to connect with fellow educators and share ideas. If you are not a Twitter user, I would encourage you to at least go to tweetchat.com and follow a hashtag for 10 minutes and see if you learn something new. There are hashtags for any and all interests. Here is a link to a page listing the education related hashtags that are commonly used. (Thanks to Jerry Blumengarten a.k.a. “cybraryman” for the list) You just may be surprised with how easy it is to get free PD whenever you want.
• My last find this week is actually a piece published this week in the NYT by LC alum Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz). He is a Mathematics professor at Cornell and is “wicked smart” to use a phrase my students are fond of. He has the ability to make math accessible to those of us who are not mathematicians, no easy task if you ask me! Not quite related to the theme of the first three finds of the week but a great find nonetheless.

As always, I welcome your comments or suggestions.