The students at ISB have just returned from their Songkran break (Thai new year) energized and ready for ISB’s Earth Week.Lots of great events going on.

You can find out about them all on the ISB Green Panther Blog : http://isb-green-panthers.blogspot.com/

This year our Earth week will culminate with two concerts, which will be broadcast out to the world via Ustream:

Thursday April 24th

ISB Middle School Concert for Climate Change
Time: 12-2 pm Bangkok Time
Hosted by: Dennis Harter and the MS Green Panthers

Friday April 25th
The ISB Elementary Earth Day Festival for Global Cooling
Time: 8am - 1pm Bangkok
ES Event Guide - http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pj_FYKtjBP-X96A6vKMkjcw

Hosted by: Justin Medved , James Denby and Kim Cofino

You can catch all the action both days at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/concert-for-climate-change

More news to come but a BIG thank you has to go out to Global Cooling Guru Clay Burrell  for all his tireless work in coordinating and getting this off the ground. KUDOS!

ISB is hosting one of first FLNW unconferences. Come join us right now - Jan 16th, 2008 - 2:15pm - Bangkok Time -

http://ustream.tv/channel/isb-edu-stream

We are online right now!

 “Students 2.0 is about quality over quantity - one or two posts will be published every day. Every author will write a post approximately two times a month. Every post is reviewed for quality and grammar by a student editor. In addition, guest posters will occasionally invited to contribute. No matter what, all posts will relate directly to one or more of our topics: leading, learning, and teaching. All authors and editors are students.Authors will also have the option of writing asides: small posts with links to elsewhere in the edublogosphere. These will serve as a method for sharing breaking news while still maintaining a high quality standard.RSS feeds will be offered for a variety of uses. There will be feeds available for posts & asides, as well as both together. We will also have a comments feed available if a lively discussion suits your taste. A conglamerate feed, containing the posts from all of our individual blogs, will also be published, for the truly insane. Of course, there will also be a master feed containg all of our fine feeds rolled into one. Eat up!” Do I need to say any more other than WOW! and big kudos to Clay Burell (the godfather) for connecting with these students and getting this project off the ground. You only need to spend a weekend with Clay to be inspired by what passion, initiative and talent can enable. Can’t wait to watch the words fly!Click here to visit the site.  

This weekend I along with 49 other educators from around ASIA have been invited to attend the Apple Distinguished Educators institute in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a chance to be indoctrinated immersed in all thing Apple through the lense of education.

What really excites me about the institute is that it is project based. All participants will be placed into groups and given themes and questions to explore using the variety of Apple products available to us. Lots of advanced workshops and new stuff to try out.

Some notable edu-bloggers (Kim, Clay) will be there along with MAC guru Steve Clark of Shanghai Community International School.

I’m psyched!

Check out all the action here

Big movements start with small steps……………..

A simple conversation with Scott last week started like most conversations at ISB, passing each other in the hall.

“Hey Justin! I’m looking to get a little deeper with peace day this year, got any ideas?”

Scott is always looking for meaningful ways to get his students engaged in the writing process and reflect on a deeper level. He has been using his classroom blog as a tool in process but up until now it did not really have an audience other than parents. It was time to change that. Together we came up with some questions for the post that we felt would stretch students to think about peace and what it means to them. You can see the post here.

Time was a factor here as Peace Day was the next day. As we know the read/write web is a powerful tool that can quickly and easily bring people from all over the world together to share and collaborate. The only barrier is knowing that each other exists. I decided to reach out to all my contacts and get the ball rolling. I put out call to teachers and coordinators to have their students stop by and share their perspective along with the country they came from. I also helped Scott embed a cluster map on his site so we could track where the hits were coming from. If you don’t have one on your site get one today! The goal of this little post was to get a few different perspectives from other students to create and opportunity for further conversation about peace.

The results…………..112 posts!!!!!

Mark Picketts at Carol Morgan School , Dominican Republic answered the call and got several of his teachers to involve their classes

Mark Dilworth at International School Manila, answered the call and also got his teachers involved.

Kim Cofino at International School Bangkok , answered the call and reached out to her global community to bring in some great comments from the U.S

Carolyn Foote - Librarian, Texas , answered the call and wrote a fantastic post about Scott’s experiment and featured some of her favorite student comments!

Maryland answered the call. Thank you!

Philadelphia answered the call. Thank you!

The list goes on…………….

One conversation…….led to one email………….led to 112 posts………..which led to a global audience and a conversation about peace!

That is what these tools are for. That is why they MUST be BLENDED into everything we do. Because the time invested reap rewards that keep on giving.

All it took was a teacher willing to ask “How can I go deeper?”

If you are reading this and interested in involving your class please drop by Scott’s Learning Blog and have your students post. We would love to read their thoughts!

One small step at a time.

I just updated my blogroll in the first of many steps to overhauling my site. I was going to delete it permanently like David Warlick just did but then thought twice about it. The reason for my hesitation was because without blogrolls I would have never stumbled upon so many of the great writers and thinkers out there. A blogroll says “if you like what you read here, you might like these people too!” and is a nice way of saying thank you to people who you may not have met but certainly have connected with. So tonight I added a few more names to my roll and just wanted to say a little Thank you to all those writers on it. It by no means reflects my entire feed list but…………….if you like what you read here, you might like these people too!
P.S - If you subscribe to 2 Cents Worth but rarely visit the actual site, check out the side bar, it might just point you in some new directions.
and if that does not…………..then this might!

TBC

Did you know that as a city Toront0, Canada has one of the largest Facebook penetration rates in the world. In a recent count the number has been said to be close to 700,000 members. Much has been written about Facebook recently. Big business scorns it; too distracting. Parents don’t like it; too distracting. Schools block it; too distracting. No matter what side of the fence you sit on with regard to this network you may find it interesting that the first Facebook camp was held this summer in T.O.

From what I understand, it was packed!
What is FacebookCamp?

FacebookCamp is an unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform. FacebookCamp brings together developers, marketers, strategists, technologists, and students, in an open and collaborative environment of sharing and learning.

So now I ask…………

What makes applications and communities like this so compelling?

Why has this social network taken off while dozens of others have failed?

Knowing that close to all high school students are a part of some sort of online social network, what responsibility do schools have to teach literacy around these new mediums and skills to safely navigate them?

What do you think?