Plan your time well with this year’s Buzzword Bingo!

It’s March, and that means time for the fastest growing (and arguably hippest) education conference in the United States – SxSWedu in Austin. More people, more presentations, more great  opportunities for learning.

If you are just jumping into the world of edtech, use this BINGO card to ensure an introduction to the latest trends.

If you are well-versed on the intersection of education and technology, keep an eye out for these buzzwords and challenge startups and presenters to go deeper than a marketing pitch.

For the ultimate win, try and find a vendor with a tagline that scores a BINGO! There will be at least one on the floor:

I cleaned up all my curriculum maps. I documented my daily routines. I re-organized all of my server files. I shared permissions for all of my Google Apps for Edu data. I made screencasts of all iPad management processes. I worked with administrators to hire and train a middle school technology integration coordinator and a lower school technology specialist. I practiced my conversations with students prior to the announcement.

I thought I was in good shape until my last day of school. My final sessions with kids were tinged with sadness. Students asked all sorts of thoughtful questions about my future plans – ranging from when I would visit to my dog’s ability to accompany me to work at Google.

What I was completely unprepared for was students, faculty and administration leveraging the tools & skills we’d been exploring to give me a send off. I received a heart-warming and beautifully composed email from a student who had a history of mis-using the communication medium to make others feel bad. I received digital cards, digital collages, video goodbyes, HTML formatted farewell cards, and even a digitally sketched portrait. Students used a variety of digital media to capture the last day, including a high-5 tunnelled super send off!

Finally, as the recent collaboration (below) with a class in Los Angeles reminded me: just because I’ve left teaching full-time doesn’t mean I can’t continue to participate in education. I’m looking forward to working with students in the future and using technology as a form of self-expression and communication to enhance those experiences.

We are in a constant cycle of evaluation as we seek to understand the impacts of mobile learning, standards-based assessment, and mixed-age groupings on student academic achievement and character development.

Below are some edtech-focused numbers based on the first 3 months of this school year:

To learn more, take a few minutes to read and watch this previous post, “Got Verbs?“.

A few years ago most of us had never heard of social media managers, market research data miners or app developers. What will be the employment opportunities for recent grads in 2025? One new career for recent economics grads might be a virtual world economist.

Gaming and social networks are a global industry. Many systems allow participants to buy, sell, and trade in native currency that can be purchased with real-world money (Habbo Hotel credits, Facebook credits, Wii points, etc). How will real-world currency fluctuations affect virtual-world currencies?

Seattle-based game-maker Valve recently hired an in-house economist to manage the interaction of their virtual markets (source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18456171).

The event was Storified using social media and the results are below (here’s a link for feed readers):

I’ve been stealing inspired teaching ideas from these two since the summer of 2008 – I guarantee you’ll walk away from the discussion with new ideas that can be implemented immediately!