Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was awarded the Hart Vision Elected Official of the Year Award. Mayor Villaraigosa has been a passionate advocate of the charter school movement. He oversees the Partnership for LA Schools, which runs ten of the lowest-performing schools in the district and is seeing improvement in test scores. Mayor Villaraigosa challenged charter schools to not only build new schools, but to take on the lowest performing schools and turn them around. In addition, he urged the charter school movement to hold itself to a higher standard of performance and shut failing charter schools down. By taking on the lowest performing schools, turning them around, and holding charter schools to the highest standards, Mayor Villaraigosa insisted that charter schools can destroy the myth that they are cherry-picking the best students.

Sal Khan of the Kahn Academy delivered a powerful keynote address that showcased the power of disruptive technology. His Kahn Academy is very reminiscent of what Clayton Christensen speaks of in his book Disrupting Class. From humble beginnings tutoring his niece, Sal has been noticed by Microsoft, Google, and Bill Gates as an educational innovator. In highlighting the future of his non-profit Kahn Academy, Sal pulled back the curtain on what has become an increasingly hot topic, inverting or flipping the traditional teaching model. By making the lecture content available for the student to access outside of class, the teacher is allowed to focus on the critical learning moments in class and once again truly teach.

Much attention has been focused on tracking student learning and providing meaningful data for both teachers and students. Despite the detractors that feel it discourages innovative learning, it is a vital step in truly personalizing a students learning. Several vendors provided a look at how schools can improve this process. Both Illuminate and Scantron show-cased platforms to help this task become easier and more efficient.

The march for schools to more fully integrate cloud resources was readily apparent. CloudConnect, sponsored by the San Diego County Office of Education, is a browser-based platform that incorporates virtual learning environments, single-log-ins, data storage, and curriculum offerings for both schools and individual teachers. It leverages the mobility of cloud resources to provide a dynamic and 24-7 learning option. EduTone is another vendor that provides software-as-a-service and bills itself as connecting all the dots. They provide a single-sign-on gateway for their customers and have leveraged the power of the Google App Marketplace. In addition, they have a marketplace of services that can be added to their customers menu of options. This provides a slick and cost-effective environment for schools looking to save on their IT budgets.

Finally, it was great to meet so many of you that are engaged in making education better. The conversations and ideas that were shared will fuel my own work for quite a while. As always, feel free to share your comments and I look forward to hearing about your experiences.

According to Hack College, which broke the story, the 7cubed team skipped class and challenged themselves to create seven apps in seven days. Quick Cite took about eight hours to write and is the first app to be released. More are expected to be released in the future.

The 7cubed team acknowledges that the app isn’t perfect and would like to find time to schedule future revisions. It seems the catch is that it is apparently difficult to schedule the time for them to all skip class. The ability to effectively transfer citations between styles was mentioned as one area to improve. Another challenge may be the issue of bar codes only coming into use in the 1970′s. This may hamper the app’s effectiveness with older books.

As a real-life exercise, the 7cubed team has come up with a remarkably effective app in a short amount of time. Hopefully this will encourage other students and faculty members to develop more useful apps in the near future.

The goal of this category is to provide school administrator’s with easier access to school-focused applications. This new offering is aimed at helping solve some of the unique issues faced by education institutions. These include lack of financial resources, security for a customer-base that is under 18, and the ability to access current technology. Google’s new education category is designed to offer cutting edge collaboration tools.

Here’s a quick video explaining the category:

With the creation of the Education category, Google has highlighted two significant benefits for schools.

1. Access to cutting-edge tools
2. Easy Integration

With more schools embracing Google-driven, cloud-based platforms, integration becomes a breeze. GrockIT, Aviary, LearnBoost, BrainPop, and others have lined up to provide innovative tools for teachers and students. For schools usng Gmail for student and faculty accounts, adding these applications makes real sense.

Shawn and I have been working with our IT department to provide a more robust Google apps implementation for our school. We will share more of our experiences along the way, please share yours.

Napa New Tech: School of the Future is Here, Tina Barseghian

Pay Attention, T4 – Jordan School District

Math Class Doesn’t Have to Suck, The Innovative Educator

Wikipedia Turns 10: Are we Banning or Boosting?, Doug Johnson

This is the perfect time to look back at 2010. Several events stand-out in 2010. Here’s a quick walk down memory lane.

Shawn’s post Using Facebook to Improve School Communication continued to be of great interest. The great reception of this article led to several opportunities. One of the more interesting of these being chosen as guest contributors to Clara Shih’s revision of The Facebook Era (2nd Edition). Our collaborative rewrite of this article provides a streamlined guide to leveraging the communication power of Facebook for schools. The Facebook Era (2nd Edition) continues elaborating on the phenomenon of Facebook and its implication in all areas of life (business, education, and leisure) and is a great read that we recommend (Note: We have no financial interest in your purchase, we just like it!).

In March EDBuzz.org delivered a very well received conference session at the 17th annual California Charter Schools Conference Web 2.0 for Teachers. In this session we highlighted several current Web 2.0 tools and illustrated their benefits for both teachers and schools. In addition, teacher’s and administrator’s were excited by our examples of their successful implementations.

In June, teachers were urged to look at the 2009-2010 school year and reflect on their craft. The popular article End of School Reflections provided a process for teachers to assess their performance. Identify opportunities for change, and create a growth plan.

2010 has truly been a great year here at EDBuzz and we look forward to the next year. The shear amount of  innovations and entrepreneurial spirit directed at education is incredible. Implementing this knowledge and the opportunities provided will continue to be a great challenge for education as a whole.

At EDBuzz.org, we realize that our current projects have a great impact on our future direction. We would like to share the areas that have attracted our attention and energy. Both currently and moving into 2011, we are focused on a variety of projects, the largest of which include creating a new hybrid school (online and traditional classroom learning) and creating a open high school Economics course that demonstrates Layered Instruction (personalized learning path).

The hybrid school project is a joint-venture between a San Diego based education foundation and the Pollinate group. Its focus has been to deliver twice the education at half the current average price. Our focus of this project has been to identify key areas that can be transformed to achieve these goals. Among these are the teacher’s role, the way students spend their time on a topic, and Web 2.0 tools, as well as other technology tools, to better accomplish these goals. This project will provide numerous posts and opportunities for community discussion.

The Economics project focuses on three key concepts. The first is the implementation of differentiated learning and options for students. The second is to incorporate current Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration. The third is to provide an example of how an Open Course (available for all to be used) can be constructed and implemented. This project is ongoing and should be available to all in the second quarter of 2011.

Now it’s your turn. Where have you been? What are your reflections of 2010? In what project are you engaged? What trends do you see? Are there any goals that you would like to share? Where do you want to go in 2011? Take a minute today to join our community and share where you’ve been and where you’re  going. You can post here or reach out to us on Twitter at @darylljohnson or @sroner. We look forward to hearing from you…

Here is a Sports Illustrated mock-up on a tablet by Time, inc. that really demonstrates the potential power. Imagine the opportunities that this device could provide for learning. What are your thoughts?

One more note, it appears Verizon has briefed its managers to expect a busy day tomorrow. Hmmm…

Things are getting tough for educators in CA. This year’s budget isn’t looking so good. I guess teachers can expect a “negative cost of living adjustment (COLA)”? Good grief!

Take a look at this excerpt of his 2006 talk. If you want the full version, you will find it here.

How does technology impact our students creativity? In what ways might it be holding them back? We look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments…

• Take time to fill out your profile and add a picture. People like to see who they are communicating with and knowing some information about you will help them identify with you.
• Share the items that are capturing your attention. Be sure to add links (use URL shorteners) so that people can learn more.
• Don’t be shy about sharing information about your institution and your student’s successes. Be sensitive to privacy and how your post will reflect upon you and your school.
• Use hashtags to keep up with what other’s are doing. Twitter can provide a virtual classroom for your professional development, as well as identifying tools and techniques other teachers are using.
• Remember that like email, not every tweet needs to be read. There are just too many.

If you implement even two or three of these ideas, you will be ahead in the game. Most people don’t realize that twitter is much more than a Facebook status update. The ability to scan trends and search for hashtags is very powerful. Additionally, people get stuck tweeting in either work mode or personal mode, but don’t really balance the two. Strive for a strategy of balance.

In my next Twitter article, I will look at ways to connect via Twitter. Feel free to share your comments and ideas.