Calgary City Teacher's Convention - February 2009

It was a real treat to be able to present a session on Passion, Curiousity-Driven Learning and Web 2.0: What's the Connection? for the Calgary City Teacher's Convention in February, 2009. I learned how easy it is to take bus #18 from Mount Royal College to the Telus Centre and I also learned about the barriers K to 12 teachers encounter when attempting to have their students utilize Web 2.0 tools.

I had a full-house and 75 minutes for the session (I had originally planned for 45 minutes). This provided lots of time for the participants to work in groups on learning activities and issues for my 8 categories of Web 2.0 tools (i.e. social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, social networking tools, synchronous communication tools, media sharing applications, mashups and virtual worlds). I've now got a pretty good handout for this session and I've created a wiki using SHex to post new resources and ideas that are discussed by the participants.

Many in the audience did not have "first hand" experience with these tools - so from my perspective the debrief about the group work was very valuable. Not sure if many of these teachers will actually get to use these tools as there are LOTS of Freedom of Informaiton and Privacy (FOIP) and technical issues associated with teaching in a K to 12 school :)