innovatEd Event

innovatEd is a professional development opportunity for educators being held on Thursday, April 7 from 4:30-8:00pm. It's being held at Presbyterian Day School in Memphis, so we are hoping for a great turnout from Memphis area educators, but all sessions will be streamed live, so no matter where you live, you can benefit from this event!

There are already 50 people registered to attend, so we have just added a third presentation room. You can check out the presentations here. (Room 3 info will be filled in soon.)

This is a combined effort of Philip Cummings, Akevy Greenblatt, Melissa Smith, and myself. We wanted to provide a professional development opportunity for teachers in Memphis and around the world. The focus is innovation in education....what can we do in our classrooms to keep the students engaged and interested while covering our curriculum.

Presentations will be 20 minutes long. There will be people skyped in to present as well as live presenters. We still have room if you are interested in presenting.  Click here to fill out the presenting proposal form.

We hope you will tune in online or join us if you live in the Memphis area. If you live in Memphis, a pizza dinner will be provided by Presbyterian Day School from 4:30-4:55 during registration.

Free Online Conference-Jan. 8th

		Just wanted to let everyone know of an online conference  on January 8th that you may be interested in checking out. It's the Reform Symposium.  http://reformsymposium.com/ Here is a description: This year the conference will focus on interactive presentations that help teachers with creating engaging classrooms and lessons, building relationships with students, improving literacy, working with interactive whiteboards, and much more!  We look forward to 2 keynote speakers, 18 presentations, an open discussion on classroom management, a panel discussion on parental engagement, a mentor program, and an open lab for hands-on support in helping you continue your professional development in online educator communities. Here is the schedule (choose your time zone): http://reformsymposium.com/january-8th-schedule-of-presenters/ Lots of the sessions look great! If you have some time Saturday, check it out! Have a great weekend!

Martin Institute Conference Thoughts

The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence, housed in Presbyterian Day School (where I work), held it's first conference last week.  The theme of the conference was Teaching for Tomorrow. There was a lot of preparation to make this first conference outstanding and I think the goal was met! I wanted to share the wiki for the Martin Institute with you because most of the presenters shared their presentation materials on the site. I was privileged enough to get to present 3 different sessions at this conference and I felt that they were successful. Most of the sessions were Ustreamed. If you have time to watch, I highly recommend checking some of them out!
Wes Fryer was the keynote speaker on Thursday night and Tom Barrett was the speaker (skyped in) during lunch on Friday. The conference had some awesome door prizes (including 5 iPads and 3 Flip cameras) that made several people very happy when they won! There will be a spring conference and a summer conference at the Martin Institute. More info will be posted on their website for more info about the upcoming conferences.

The Reform Symposium

If you have time this weekend (July 30-Aug. 1), I recommend checking out The Reform Symposium.  This online conference will showcase innovation in education.  From their site: The Reform Symposium is a free online conference for educators, administrators, parents and students. This year the conference is focused on innovative practices in education and what role these practices can play in educational reform.
Check it out! If you miss something, recordings of the presentations will be archived at the presenter's pages.
The twitter hashtag for this conference is #rscon10 if you want to follow it on twitter.