Category Archives: January 2011

My EduCon Eve Post

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Tomorrow, my favorite PD adventure of the year begins. EduCon 2.3, the annual conference in Philadelphia is this weekend and I can’t wait.

Three days of conversation, inspiration, collaboration, learning, and connecting can’t be beat. The “unconference” is held at Science Leadership Academy, an outstanding high school in Philly. One of the best parts is that the event is a community undertaking, with the teachers, parents, and yes students making it all happen. Seeing this great community come together to handle about 500 of us crazed tweeting educators is impressive in every way.  They make us all feel welcome, and we really do.

So I am looking forward to the conversations, both the ones on the schedule and the ones that just happen. I am looking forward to seeing friends that I get to see rarely thanks to geography, and the chance to meet other friends for the first time in person.  I will attempt to blog over the weekend and will, at least, blog some final reflections when it is over.

I will be with a team of 5 from our school. Two of us are admins, and three teachers will be with us. So here we go. See everyone at EduCon.

If you are on twitter, follow the #educon tag. There will be tons of backchanneling.

New Domain!

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As of today, 1/16/11 the new location for Imagine and teach is http://imagineteach.org.  Don’t worry, my blog is still with Edublogs.  If you are kind enough to have this blog on your reader, the feed will work, you don’t need to change anything. Thanks for all who stop by here. I am hopeful that in 2011 I will post more regularly, and with luck, add some value to the conversations on teaching learning, and more.

Mashup -20

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One of the joys in my day is that I teach kids vocal music at second period. As an administrator, I treasure the time that I get to teach each day. But I already did a post about that here.

So as we approach the end of the first semester, it was time to think about a third quarter project for the class. So I posted a topic on the class ning site to get it started. And after reading the kids posts about how they want to be creative perform, and have fun, I got to thinking.

And I kept thinking. And then this struck me as a working idea that I would share with the students. I called it Mashup -20. Here is the outline of what I was thinking:

  1. Groups of 3 or 4, selected by the students themselves
  2. Choose 2 songs that were released at least 20 years apart.
  3. Create a three minute mashup of the two
  4. Use whatever tools you would like.
  • play music yourselves
  • use a karaoke track
  • Go on your voices alone

5. Perform the piece for the class

6. You can add video as well if you would like

So that is the idea. The students are sounding off on the Ning with their ideas, and they seem to love the idea. Once we settle on what we are doing, I will have the students create the rubric for me to guide how I will assess them along the way.

Should be fun and a great learning experience for all of us.

Thanks for stopping by, and please leave a comment if you have any suggestions, ideas, or just want to be in the conversation!