Live blogging ATT conference (finally updated at 3:00 pm)

I'm in the outer burbs today, attending the culminating "celebration" of the Awesome Teaching Techniques (not its real name) program. We've spent a lot of time and energy on the program, most of which has been engaged in trying to accomplish the goals of the program without participating in the program itself. The goal of the thing is to bring, to use their parlance, "21st Century Tools" into schools and into the classrooms.

The scene here resembles nothing so much as a science fair, with tables set up with decorated posterboards and computers. Will check back in soon.

Update 1
The science fair aspect of this has actually been kind of fun. Walking around and seeing what other schools and teachers are doing is kind of fun. For the most part, though, I've mostly walked around talking to people I already knew. Our table has gotten a lot of attention, because we had a nice-looking poster and a blue tablecloth. The table next to us is from a school for deaf children and one of the people is signing everything that gets said, and the schools are playing pass the microphone and introducing themselves. Everybody works at a school and the people in their group haves names and teach something and everyone is very happy to be here. We just gave ourselves a round of applause.

Now come the speakers, whose main goal seems to be to get people to sign up for another year of the program. We have an agenda, my favorite item being "Unconference Breakouts." If part of the goal is to make people look at the agenda and say "Huh?" they've succeeded. Oh, and later we're going to "leverage the wisdom of the crowd."

Update 2

There's a woman presenting now who finds herself very funny. Nobody else is laughing. Fortunately she doesn't have an unpleasant laugh. I didn't notice what the presentation was about. Probably something about introducing new technologies to schools. Nobody at my table is really listening to what's going on.

As usual, nobody is talking about students. It's all about teachers. I don't understand this. You would think that, considering that teachers have no purpose without students, the topic might come up.

Jargon watch: Islands of Excellence (meaning isolated groups of effective teachers). In this particular jargon set, the only thing worse than an island is a "silo," which means being completely closed in and unaware of what's going on around them.

Curriculum netting. I have no idea what this means. I think you use a curriculum net to capture unsuspecting teachers and force them to do your bidding.

Update 3

Just finished unlistening to the Unconference Breakout. I chose my group because unlike all the other groups that were sitting in a circle, this one was arrayed so I could sit in the back and read.

We are currently enduring what was introduced as a "short but powerful" presentation about something. I think it's supposed to be powerful because it concerns a blind person who likes video games (really), but the general rule is that when you refer to something in advance as "powerful," it usually means that the power is not evident to the listener.Or in other words, it isn't really powerful.

Willful inattention is a skill I've been developing and honing for years now. It takes, well, powerful concentration to totally ignore everything going on around you and focus on whatever else you want to do. I began to learn this when I realized I understood stuff that we were being taught in school faster than some of the other kids. So what do you do when the teacher is repeating his or herself? Until 6th grade, I would mostly disrupt the class, another skill I've continued to practice. But then after I got kicked out of school for doing that, I had to be more flexible and sophisticated.

The related skill is to be able to sound like you're listening when you're not. The trick is in catching key words. Listening to the way people speak, it's not hard to catch what they're trying to emphasize and listen to only those parts. That will give you enough material to give a non-stupid answer if you get called on.

"Your classroom will be a node in a network of learning."

Update 4

Having finished lunch, it's time to leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

I learned a new word: amenuensis. It means a scribe or stenographer.

Update 5

We are now doing something with the unappetizing name of "chunking." It involves writing things on post-it notes and sticking them on big pieces of paper. Now we're going to stick dots on the post-it notes. It's called "Voting Your Passion."We get to represent our passion with dots.

Update 6

Last time checking in from the eduverse. We're wrapping up, talking about our new collective sense of purpose and how we'll always be connected and we should all be Facebook friends. Oh, and the camp reunion is next fall at the Cherry Hill Bowling Alley.