You’re reading this, so you know that the internet is changing how we learn. In the past five years, my connected learning experiences have empowered me to level up every aspect of my life, particularly in the classroom.
Although I’d always been skeptical, more and more I came to appreciate the positive opportunities and outcomes that were possible with instructional technology. This led to increased engagement and I eventually organized Edcamp Tokyo and presented at a Google EdTech Summit.
What are the next steps? How can the best qualities of online professional development for educators be combined to create the next breakthrough connected learning experience?
Connected Learning Festival
I am delighted to announce that this summer, Learninate will host our first Connected Learning Festival during the week of July 20-28, 2019. The format couldn’t be simpler:
- Free online courses designed by educators for other educators
On top of that, each content creator is encouraged to express their creativity, introduce and integrate their favorite tools (digital and analog, virtual and physical), host a live Twitter chat, share on social media using the #clfest hashtag, and many more of your brilliant ideas to celebrate connected learning.
Innovative summer PD for teachers
The aim of the event is to engage in participant-driven professional development for teachers. Have a strategy that gets your students excited about content? Teach us how to do it with an online course. Mastered a technique to leverage technology to make the job easier or more efficient? Maybe you’ve uncovered secrets of stress management and teacher wellness?
Share your wisdom this summer!
More than tech
One limitation of a lot of online PD is that it’s often about educational technology. Sometimes, this is simply a reflection of the meme that ‘the medium is the message’, but I want to see that change. It makes sense to use Twitter to show what you can do with Twitter, or countless other tech tools. Learninate lets you show how to do anything, and it’s time for technology to facilitate more learning beyond itself.
Deeper than blog posts
I like blogging. I do it a lot and wish I could do even more. You should definitely blog, too. But a blog post is not the best medium for designing learning. Neither is a video by itself. Learninate provides a platform to integrate text, images, and video, as well as assignments and quizzes that help learners to interact and apply what they are learning.
They can share what they have learned with a picture, a social media post, or in a form unique to a particular course. There’s flexibility to get literally creative with how we assess learning on Learninate.
Badges galore
Every course registered for the learning festival will have a unique badge for completion, as well as special badges for additional achievements. You will be able to design a badge for your own course, another way to express your creativity!
You are invited.
Learninate is an experiment, and the Learning Festival is a chance for anyone to get involved as a course creator, learner, and promoter. Here’s what to do:
- Register for Learninate and subscribe to our email newsletter to receive Connected Learning Festival news.
- Invite friends and colleagues by forwarding newsletter emails and sharing on social media.
- Become a Learninate course creator by completing the simple and easy course, How to Create a Learninate Course.
- Accept a friend request on Learninate from me, @bart, and I will help you connect with other teachers, assist you however needed in building your course, and coordinate the schedule for the week.
We need smart, creative, passionate, connected educators like you to make this a success, so please sign up and join the team.