SXSWedu14: who to see Tuesday

3/3/2014

This afternoon's speech was bananas.

Earlier today, Mike Kleba gave his talk "Teachers: Undiscovered Entrepreneurial Rockstars" at SXSWedu. We met a ton of great people and felt the energy of the nation's hottest Educon focused on innovation. Check out @ryanwohara or @mikekleba twitter feeds to see and feel the excitement generating around the idea of #teachernomics here in Austin. T

Our take: just about everyone here in Austin seems to agree that teachers are the past, present, and future hubs of innovation in education. If the private industry has been the source of reform and innovation in education, teachers have been the developers, implementors, and champions of everything that has worked.

So, where do we go from here? More sessions, of course.

Here's our list of who we plan to see (or hope to see) while in Austin. Join us as we chase down the EdTech companies, the startups, and the Ed leaders who seem to be working from our Teachernomics premise. If you want change in Education, work with and for teachers. It's not a political or moral argument. It's a logical one.

TUESDAY 03/04 SXSWedu
9:00am Win-Win! Strategies for EdTech/Educator Engagement
9:00am How Do We Get More 'Ed' in EdTech' Development?
3:00pm The Textbook Is Dead- Long Live the Teachers!
3:00pm LAUNCHedu: Educator Insights
4:30pm Tuesday Keynote: Vivienne & Norma Ming

If you think we should be endorsing other sessions, let us know! In the meantime, get out an enjoy Austin. Or whatever place you are in. Chances are, you'll be around some teachers doing great things.

1 Comment

Greg S

3/3/2014 11:10:00 am

Hey, sounds like a lot of fun. One of the ed reporters for Huffington Post, Alan Singer (prof at Hofstra and liberal activist type) came and gave a Common Core talk to the staff at my school. He was a real wild-eyed visionary ("The system is rigged!") But he also had a great deal to say about the Common Core, etc. "The Common Core is a license to let kids explore, not a program for indoctrination" and suchlike. Anyway he went on an hourlong rant on how teachers can empower students to take action, can make a difference in their communities, can be a force for change. And then he described a hypothetical project about community activism that kids could do, that happened to exactly mirror a project I've been working on, based on the NY Times investigative series on Dasani, the homeless child in the NYC shelter system.
I happened to sit next to Ray Suarez from NPR/Public TV/al Jazeera on a flight to Puerto Rico, and he's been a real advocate for education in his way, especially in the Latino community. He took a nice hour and did some research to critique the unit and the texts of study, etc.
I was pondering what to do with this unit, since it represented such a significant piece of my mental exercise these past few weeks, and I'd also be interested in your vision of teachernomics and how much impact the teacher's input or opinion should impact such a scheme.
One of my colleagues pointed out that the only time he got a kid to advocate for a social issue, the kid went out to collect signatures to reinstate the death penalty in New York. So it doesn't always come out how you plan.

NOBODY influences
LIKE A TEACHER