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I had to leave early, but I do think this is such a great idea. Having so many talented people contributing to the cause is outstanding.
I do hope that we can somehow collectively come up with a successful strategy for getting school districts to be more open to the social phenomenon going on. As I had said, almost all of our districts block anything that even smells of a blog, including the Google Earth blog, googlesightseeing blogs, and others of that kind. They also block Google Earth for some reason, and many block anything with the word google in it. ARGH!! We've even got some local districts that make their teachers sign a document saying that they will NOT blog. Period. Penalty for disobeying is dismissal! It's SO frustrating.
And so, it's my hope that many thousands of teachers will hear of this onine conference and check it out. Perhaps the best way to change policy is from within, as pressure to use the tools grows.
Congratulations to the team that conceived this online conference idea and for pulling it off. Here's to MANY more to come! **cheers!**
I too applaud the organizers. I would also double-click on what I said last night. The earliest books were chained to the walls. But we got over it. My main fear is that we will get over it too late. The longer that we ignore this "new shape of information", the longer we will seem entirely irrelevant to our students. It is not a good thing for classrooms to be, irrelevant!