We took part in a revolution yesterday. There weren’t any protests, or weapons, or even any shouting although the exclamations of joy when certain technology worked were audible. No blood was spilled, no country changed hands, but  the landscape of my professional world, the world of education and professional development, shifted considerably. Yesterday was the earthquake, and I am looking forward to the aftershocks.

At noon yesterday around 200 people took part in the first ever Edcamp Home organized by Shawn White, David Theriault, Karl Lindgren-Striecher, and Kelly Kermode who came up with the idea during a twitter chat last spring. They wanted to create an edcamp that people from disparate parts of the country and world could take part in online using google hangouts. So after what must have been a herculean task which included getting people to sign up, finding tech savvy moderators, and adapting bits of technology like lino which they used to create the edcamp board, we all signed on for what would be one of the most inspiring, exhilarating, and wonderful professional development experiences I have had the pleasure of participating in.

Our organizers live streamed their hangout to give the opening statement and provide us with information we would need for the day, and then they stayed online for the entire 3 hours:

Watching the organizers troubleshoot was perhaps the best part of the entire day. When the board creation and session voting took longer than expected, we all kept the energy going on twitter, stayed tuned and positive, and kept the can do attitude that made the day an incredible success. No, the technology did not work perfectly. For example the sign up was a bit difficult because google docs will only allow 50 people on the document at once without slowing down and making the board took a while because so many of us were on it creating as one participant said a “brainstorm” so large that the organizers asked us finally to stop, but it just didn’t matter. Being able to watch our four intrepid leaders figure out the problems and undo the kinks was incredible because it gave us the experience all educators want which is to bear witness to learning in action. Furthermore we also got to see our leaders “fail forward,” a term Karl coined and see the vital role failure, especially when dealing with technology, plays in the learning process and in ultimate success.

For me personally, watching the “hot mess of learning” take place gave me the confidence I needed as a hangout “virgin” to volunteer to facilitate a session on paperless classrooms and ended up doing two. Which again thanks to our fantastic moderator Rae Faering you can watch below:

Talking with other teachers from California and Missouri was spectacular, and I look forward to hanging out again in the not too distant future. There were many take aways from our conversation which I will blog about at a later time, but the most important thing I took away from the experience of the sessions was just how much better we all can be when we are able to share, learn, and engage with other passionate educators. As Karl said in his blog post, we are just all #bettertogether.

The format of  all edcamps is a democratic one and I think that is what I like best and what makes it revolutionary.  Edcamphome gave even more power to the participants because we could engage on so many different levels and in so many different places including twitter, today’s meet, and the website which acted like a hub .  Everyone had the ability to shape the experience of all through their participation. Everyone’s ideas were valued and voices heard either in the hangouts, on twitter, or through the backchannel. We were empowered by each other, by the event, by the ideas we heard, and by participating in a groundbreaking event that is sure to transform professional development opportunities for years to come.  I can’t wait for edcamphome 2, and I anxiously await the other aftershocks of this momentous event.

For Futher Reading:

A Post from Karl about the Day

Simon Miller’s Post About The Day

Kimberly Hurd Horst’s Post About the Day

You can see broadcasts of all the sessions here and here.

You can also visit the google+ page here 

It’s just before midnight the night before #edcamphome and I have just finished the tutorials and skill building with google hangout that will, hopefully fingers crossed, toes crossed, enable me to successfully participate tomorrow. For those of you who don’t know about Edcamphome, it is an online edcamp all can participate in from home.

What occured to me during this evening is that this event is a phenomenal example of why computer technology,despite the very real ethical and pedagogical dilemmas it poses, is such a great thing for the teaching profession. This summer I’ve been completing my 23things course and that has led me to think a great deal about edtech, its ramifications, and my personal educational philosophy with regards to technology. I have questioned

So here is the thing, while I definitely agreee  that it isn’t technology but teachers that are important, I do think that tech is incredibly important for the profession of teachers. It allows us to grow, learn, improve in ways that will make us better teachers and our students will benefit. That is after all the whole point. So I look forward to my online conference tomorrow which I am sure will be a terrific success because of the hardwork of its organizers, and even if I have technical glitches I do believe I’ve already gotten a great deal out of this experience.

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/OTPpN5EeEO

One of the best resources for educators on the Web is the Open Educational Resources Commons there you will find a plethora of curriculums for virtually every subject including American Studies. One of the best resources I’ve found for Our American Studies course is a series of lectures or MOOC by Michael Cohen at the University of Berkeley.  He begins the series with the question “What is Culture and why study it.” His opening exercise where he asks his students to go out and get culture is one we adopted at the beginning of our course to great success. You can see our students blog posts here. Cohen’s way of doing American studies very much jives with our own pedagogy and we used different segments at different times. For anyone looking into adopting an American Studies curriculum or exploring modern American history and culture from an American Studies perspective this is a must watch. You can also find podcasts of these lectures on Itunes U and Youtube. Highlights include a discussion of films Modern Times, Scarface and Birth of a Nation. For those interested in the history of public higher education, don’t miss the teach in broadcast lecture 14.

A very cool tool from a recent #sschat The Political Compass provides a quiz that then measures “attitudes and inevitable human contradictions to provide a more integrated definition of where people and parties are really.”

For our 4th/5th tasks in our 23 Things class we were tasked with signing up for Feedly and develop an RSS reading habit. I had a good deal of skepticism about this task. I consider myself well informed and I rely a good deal on twitter both for news and for shared resources and ideas from my PLN (see my previous posts on twitter here and here).  As I have said before I love twitter and I find it a near perfect professional and personal resource, so I really have not seen the need to add even more to my daily diet of articles, updates, and resources. Nevertheless, I signed up for Feedly, added the app to my iphone, and began the process.

I also began the process of asking my PLN on twitter and my cousins who were devotees of google reader why I needed an RSS feed. From my PLN I heard that mainly that they used rss feeds to keep up with their favorite websites and blogs, and from my cousins I heard their recommendations for following different sites and why they loved google reader. Still I wasn’t really convinced. I did turn to my feedly page daily and I found articles of interest, but frankly I didn’t find it more useful than twitter at least for me.

Then  on the recommendation of my cousin I tried out flipboard,and I became a believer. Although Feedly certainly offers similar  tools and the ability to follow great resources, what I like about Flipboard is the ability to create my own magazines from the articles that come up in my feed. The layout is better and especially on the webtool more visually interesting. I can also add my twitter feed to my flipboard and can easily save the articles and resources I find useful to an unlimited number of my own magazines. Since I mainly rely on my iphone to view my twitter feed, I have found it a bit clunky to save my favorites either to instapaper or diigo and then to Evernote.  With Flipboard, I can save them directly to a magazine to read later or share and that has saved me time and steps which I definitely appreciate.

I quickly found myself addicted to using this tool, and I can now say that I see the value of rss feeds although I still think twitter is a more important tool for me because it has the added advantage of helping me connect with other educators, but I am now likely to use flipboard as my conduit for following my twitter feed and tweetdeck for following and participating in twitterchats.  Here are a few magazines I’ve made already on race and gender and another one where I am saving articles that might be of use in our American Studies class.  I’ll post more as I gather them, but for now I can definitely recommend adding an RSS feed to your daily digital diet and checking out flipboard.

Tech Isn’t Everything – Teachers Are! Applications to Better Prepare Educators for the Digital Age | nytechprepper.