Ideas+Brainstorm

= = =When is the conference? I went to the blog page, but couldn't find any mention of dates?= BRIAN: October 15-19 and October 22 -26 //Should we continue to offer CPE and graduate credit after these dates??//

= = =Ideas= Please jot down anything for now, even if it seems like pie in the sky. Let's get those creative juices flowing! > Before I would make contact with these folks, it would be nice to share what our expectations for them are, and how we could publicize their institution's involvement...maybe a logo and a link?
 * Accreditation for prior learning -- APL (Terry)
 * 1) Miguel: I'd like to invite some local Texas universities, school districts to participate in offering credit. Wouldn't it be neat if the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Education Service Center,Region 20, a few local school districts agreed to grant Continuing Education Units (CEUs required for K-12 educators in Texas)?
 * 1) Miguel: How are we going to certify completion/review of staff development?One of the tough things is that an institution might not want to grant a certificate for particular hours unless there is some deliverable.That deliverable could be managed via Moodle, a blog, or something,but whatever it happens to be, we need to outline the components.
 * 2) Miguel: How will we manage certificate creation and track progress? Should there be one central database to collect participants who take advantage of professional learning opportunities offered? Or, do we leave it up to the institution? My recommendation is we handle that work to ease the load on the institutions.
 * Terry: I think you have some great ideas here, Miguel. I've started a discussion on the "Accreditaion" page here. I think the k12online conference organisers need to maintain the database
 * I think it would also be good if we can agree on what we hope to achieve in the relatively short time available to us.

4. Brian: In the spirit of brainstorming, one way we could possibly collect and track participation in the conference is to use an application like UCCASS to set up a questionaire/survey/database that participants can contribute to once they have completed a session. I have set up, very quickly, a sample of something we could do at [|http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net/survey/survey.php?sid=39] The information can be exported in CSV format if needed.


 * looks like a great idea to me. What do others think? Thanks for setting that up, Brian** (Terry)

//This IS a good idea, and the need to keep track of participants enrolled for credit is an important one. I'm wondering if perhaps before we select the tool to perform this function if it might not be a good idea to reach consensus on what functions we want performed. Then it could be easier to select the tool. (Jim Lerman)//

BRIAN: You bring up a good point Jim. My thinking so far is that we could use the UCCASS tool to serve three, simultaneous, purposes: 1) If we directed participants to the tool after they took part in a session, the tool could be used as a way to **EVALUATE** the session and then pass that information on to the presenter, along with the K12 conveners. We could then also generate an overall evaluation of the entire K12 experience. 2) Jim makes the point below, and I agree, that typically the granting of Continuing Education Credit is a local decision/process. Using UCCASS, we could **COLLECT NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION** for participants and use this information to award (email?) **CERTIFICATES OF COMPLETION** of individual sessions. Participants could then provide these certificates to their local school district for consideration. I think we'd need to come to some consesus on how many hours of credit we would recommend for each session, as well as whether or not attending in itself is sufficient, or if we should require some sort of reflection piece (I think we should). Further, I would think that we would expect more from participants who were seeking graduate credit from a university and would then need to consider something along the lines of what Jeff proposed on the Accreditation page. 3) Although Moodle is a viable solution, in my experience I have found a tool such as UCCASS to be much more user-friendly and welcoming. Many of our participants may be at the very early stages of technology adoption and having to navigate a Moodle environment may "turn them off". With that said, the information we could collect in UCCASS, or a similar tool, could also be used as a database of contacts that we could turn around and use for future K12 conferences as a way to **PROMOTE FUTURE CONFERENCES**.

//**One thing we need to consider, if we go with this, is who has server space we can use to load the UCCASS software and database. Right now I run UCCASS, my blog and website on a eight year old Gateway computer that I loaded Apache and MySQL on, and that sits under the desk in my front bedroom. I'd be more than happy to volunteer that space, but it may be better to have server space that is larger, newer, and more accessible.**//

//I'll work on drafting a certificate of completion for your consideration. And will soon add a new page to this wiki that we can use to develop and tweek questions for a possible survey/evaluation/contact tool.//

5. I have some experience in this area having done a lot of work in administering teacher prof. devt. programs for all kinds of credit. - Jim Lerman

__Graduate Credit__ Seems to me that if we have a relationship with a university from last year for graduate credit, we ought to stick with it...at least for the US. These kinds of arrangements can be very time consuming to set up, depending on the institution. A key determinant might be what the particular univ. charges per credit. There is tremendous variability, ranging from a low of about $150 per semester hour to almost $1000 per semester hour. Once we can tell a univ. that we have a track record of a somewhat sizable number of people taking the program for credit, we are in a better negotiating position. Perhaps we can start to do some work soon for next year's arrangements, at the same time we are working on this year''s.

As long as the US university is regionally accredited, we do not really need more than one. The credits will be accepted all across the US and Canada. I do not know about outside North America.

One thing to make sure about is whether the credit is truly graduate credit. Some univs. grant what the call "post graduate" credit, which is really undergraduate credit.

__Continuing Education Credit__ I think there are at least 3 things to consider here: inservice credit, recertification credit, and CEU's.

A. __Inservice Credit__ In the US, this is usually granted by an individual school district to educators in that district for advancement along the salary guide. Each district has its own procedures and guidelines. Usually once a few large districts approve a program for inservice credit, others will follow suit without too much difficulty, but it's always a local decision. The documentation we prepare for the univ. for graduate credit should be pretty useful as boilerplate for the districts, but we'll probably have to prepare an application for each district to award inservice credit. The upside to this is that the required documentation is usually not very taxing to prepare. Teachers usually pay very little or nothing for inservice credit. We may want to establish a deadline for folks by which they need to contact us if they are interested in arranging for inservice credit - something like a month before the event.

B. __Recertification Credit__ Many states in the US require teachers to present a certain number of hours or credits of continuing education in order to maintain their teaching license. The requirements and procedures in each state are different. Many states require providers of recertification credit to register with the state and provide documentation of their programs. Graduate credit is nearly always acceptable for recert. purposes. For this reason, I suggest we consider not addressing this issue directly and simply indicate to folks who might be interested in this type of credit that they take the graduate credit option.

C. __Continuing Education Units__ Although somewhat present in education, CEUs are found most frequently in other fields (health care, business,etc.). In my experience, this has not been an important issue for teachers. If we have graduate credit, this will address nearly all CEU issues.

__Documentation of participation and instructors of record__ Was anyone on our committee involved in this process last year? If so, their experience will be very helpful.

It appears that there were 2 people involved as the instructors of record for a school in Shanghai(?), is that correct? It would be very useful to have someone with a Ph.D. or Ed.D serve as the instructor of record. This will make the univ. people very happy. The actual grunt work of reviewing people's work can be farmed out to others, or shared, but it's very good to have a Dr. of something or other be the name on the top of the page.

In terms of managing the record-keeping, it's not a big deal as long as the numbers of people are small (5 is easy, 50 can take a lot of time). However, if they start to grow, this can become quite a burden. As the numbers grow, so do the complications of individual situations.

I've seen online course enrollment management systems, but don't know much about them. Does anyone have experience with this? Obviously Moodle is a very likely option, but I don't know about its enrollment management functions...only about its instructional ones.

I think 2 rules of thumb might be advisable here...and they are somewhat mutually contradictory: -Have the participants do as much of the detail work as possible. The less we have to do the better, not because we are bad people, but because our time is not infinitely expandable. -The need to maintain some kind of quality control requires an aspect of supervision/monitoring/review/evaluation. This requires the time and effort of qualified people. We need to designed some of these qualified people and provide operating guidelines for them.

That's it for now. My fingers are tired.

6. (CINDY LANE) In terms of marketing here: Now only should the dates and times be visible everywhere, but a countdown should be posted ANYWHERE!

How about a tease video on Teachertube?

Let's get some participants from last year give short/sweet tutorials?

How about getting some schools to arrange their PD time around a session? How about contacting (I can do this, just want your input) Discovery?

Emints?

FETC? (Brian Curry V.P. ...perhaps I can contact him to see if he would send out an email?

SITE? ....and for the record I agree with everything posted above.... could we run the sessions through webex, and those that want credit have to view the conference through webex? or ellumiate? as I said...RANDOM THOUGHT....but you would have a "history" if they were actually on....
 * This is a very RANDOM thought...those who want credit...

7. (Jim Lerman) //I like these ideas Cindy. There are lots of ways, I think for the Conference to receive widespread (and free) publlicity. I'm wondering if we have a PR committee to handle this work? Other sources for publicity: press release to major newspapers and news services (AP, Reuters) Education Week ASCD has a daily news service for its members Education Trust (has a daily news service) Bonnie Bracey (sends to about a half dozen listervs) Listservs that we're all members of Blogs with big subscription lists (Wesley? Miguel? Sheryl) I think this is where I heard about last year's conf. ISTE - I know Don Knezek, Exec. Dir CoSN// //Yahoo! Teachers Network (Derek?)// //Google Certified Teachers (I'm a member of this network) Apple Distinguished Educators network(Lucy Gray is one, I know others) Technology & Learning Edutopia National Education Assn. American Fed. of Tchrs. Subject matter associations State ed tech associations State ed tech directors assn US Dept. of Ed. tech director (don't know the name off the top of my head) Educ. Commission of the States Natl Bd. for Prof. Teaching Standards National Commission on Teaching and America's Future// //TeachersFirst http://www.teachersfirst.com//// PBS Teacher page Scholastic teacher page CyberBee teacher page WNET teacher page (they have a huge email list from their Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conf. Maybe we could share lists?)//
 * Terry here: My understanding is that Sheryl is doing the PR, so I would suggest passing these ideas on to her. Wes, is that correct?**

What are the dates of the conference?
Terry: pre-conf: w/b 8th Oct; strands 1 & 2: w/b 15th Oct; strands 3 & 4: w/b 22nd Oct