by Marc Nobleman
In case you haven’t heard, Jared Slayton is now the proud owner of his very own pink unicorn.
Blackboard’s annual education conference, BbWorld, drew record numbers in 2012 (over 3,500 participants!) Jared, LMS Admin and Help Desk Manager of Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, MI was one of those attendees, and one who participated in the BbWorld scavenger hunt. (No, a pink unicorn was NOT on the list. Stay with me…) Jared became the grand prize winner through his immaculate scavenger hunt skills. When
@blackboard tweeted congratulations to the winners, they forgot one… Jared. And Jared, we learned, is not one to take such an oversight lying down.
He tweeted this:
by Annie Lewis
I was lucky enough to attend the “Julie and Julie” session at BbWorld 2012! Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow, and Julie Young, President & CEO of Florida Virtual School shared their thoughts on Personalized Learning. Both agree that students are looking for ways to use technology in order to make learning more relevant and successful according to their own individual needs, goals, and preferences. And, both mention that children are using mobile phones, social networks, and the internet with such increasing frequency that it is becoming a must for schools to incorporate these tools into a student’s learning, instead of shutting them down.
Can you guess what student profile this describes?
by Jenn
Not only was this year the BIGGEST BbWorld to-date, but it was the best (or at least that’s what we heard from Fernando Valenzuela, President Cengage Learning / National Geographic Learning Latin America).
@FerVal100 Want to see how the World has changed? Just compare the tweet activity from #BbW12 to #BbW11 you will be amazed @Blackboard @michaelchasen
Last week was a whirlwind of fun activities, engaging sessions, and keynotes full of big announcements. So, we thought we’d refresh your memory with highlights – and if you weren’t there, hopefully this will make you feel like you were a part of BbWorld 2012!
by Travis Sowders
For years it seemed, the rest of the world was hooked on SMS – while Americans were slow to adopt the technology. But is that really true today? Is the US still behind, or have we caught up?
Consider: of the 5.6 trillion text messages sent around the world last year, 2.3 trillion were sent by Americans – that’s over 40 percent of total global SMS traffic.
Consider: the average US mobile subscriber sent over 660 texts annually – that’s more per capita than any other country on Earth.
Those are some of the remarkable statistics you can find in this infographic from Blackboard Connect, “Rising Text: Do you have the tools to meet the challenge?”
A seismic shift has occurred in the way Americans communicate – and it’s happened while we weren’t watching. Sure, if you pay a teenager’s cell phone bill, you won’t be surprised to learn that young people send over 3,400 texts every month. But did you know that 65 percent of Americans say they ‘need’ SMS, and 45 percent say they can’t live without it?
by Andi Perelman
Guest blog post from BbWorld 2012 Blogger, JD Ferries-Rowe. For additional content, click here.
Harnessing the Power of Social Media with @NMHS_Principal
Talk about a change…this session is what keynotes should be: focused on education, challenging and inspiring, with real-world examples and a smattering of sappy inspirational videos.
The lead in was a challenge: It is a problem that those who are tasked with leading our schools, with developing 21st century skills are sometimes the least knowledgeable. While a few schools are reinventing themselves for the digital age, most are not.
We want our teachers to be adapters, communicators, learners, visionaries, leaders, models, collaborators, and risk-takers. — whew. When you look at that list, it is overwhelming. But imagine if we created a system where the teachers who left the profession left because they did not fit that model, not because they were drained from 45 days of examinations per year or because their checklist evaluations combined with a metric of student-value-add indicated that they were only so-so. Its a stretch goal, but its achievable.
How do we start? We start by getting teachers to share their visions…by getting teachers to converse with others…by using social media.
Interesting point: Education is changing (collaborative, student centered), the landscape is changing (content overload, distributed learning opportunities, free sources), the learners are changing (connected, social learners, gamers, tech-as-default) — but education keeps looking the same.
He preached the #digcit mantra and talked about PLNs
