SAT02RM208

=Claiming What We Imagine Wiki=

Hello!

Dennis Richards, Superintendent Liz McGonagle, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Falmouth, MA Public Schools

Liz and I have worked hard to make your experience in this session a positive one. Liz will be away on vacation during EduCon so I will carry the load! We hope you will accept our invitation to join us in our work to //**Claim What We Imagine**//.

Dennis and Liz

About Me:
~ Superintendent, Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA ~ President, Massachusetts affiliate, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD International) ~ Leadership Council, ASCD International ~ Massachusetts Working Group for Educator Quality ~ Massachusetts High School Redesign Task Force, Leadership ~ Former Co-Chair, Northeast Massachusetts Regional STEM Network

We have exciting things going on in Massachusetts and in Falmouth that we can speak about when it seems appropriate, but you can feel free to ask as we interact during our time together.

A former English teacher in urban and suburban schools for many years, I have always gravitated toward K12 leadership, learning and technology topics. I have graduate degrees from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English and Harvard University's School of Education. I am married with three children and four grandchildren. In addition to the above, I love running, cycling, contemporary poetry, photography and the outdoors.

Last summer my professional life changed when I attended the Building Learning Communities Conference 2007 and in three days experienced, for the first time, the power of Web 2.0 tools and their potential for transforming schools and learning. That experience was dramatically developed during the many sessions I participated in over the three weeks that the 2007 K12 Online Conference was active in October. In fact, I continue to visit the site to "re-attend," by watching presentations again or for the first time. It was a physically and mentally exhausting experience because of its intensity and my desire to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn so much from the cadre of generous people who created and participated in the conference; what a wealth of shared knowledge that site represents for us educators even today.

My face to face and online learning continues each day as I participate in what our profession and the Web has to offer those who are willing to join in the conversation about how to improve K12 learning for all of our children.

The bottom line for me is that this conversation is not about technology tools; it is about student learning. I subscribe to the definition of Professional Learning Communities that Rick and Becky DuFour and many other leaders of education have espoused. In simple terms,
 * student learning is our focus,
 * we can improve student learning if we work together collaboratively, and
 * monitoring student learning is the only way to know
 * what students are learning and
 * how we can get better at helping them to learn.

Claiming What We Imagine Wiki Unfortunately we had some difficulty with the audio in this session...you can catch the last hour of the video here ...some audio missing at the beginning media type="custom" key="449549" Chat Log of Session Below:

01:23 lizbdavis : hello? 01:30 njtechteacher : Hi LizBDavis I'm fixing computers and listening in the background 01:42 jeanberg : Sorry if I'm intrupting anything here (don't really know what you guys are up to here :): is there a slurs to Second Life EduCon somewhere? 01:44 njtechteacher : jeanberg - Try looking at the wiki http://educon20.wikispaces.com/Agenda 01:45 jeanberg : Thanks :) 01:45 njtechteacher : You're welcome! 01:46 njtechteacher : This is Dennis Richards talking about Claiming What We Imagine 02:04 jeanberg : ups: sorry for leaving like this - I had to blog this, this is so cool 02:04 jeanberg : http://ikt-diginalet.blogspot.com 02:04 jeanberg : Norwegian blog :)