Parent-Teacher Conferences

It’s that time of year again … time to meet the parents to discuss their son/daughter’s achievement in your class.  Check out this blog post to read some advice on what works in conferences.  Be sure to also check out the comments to the blog for even more advice.  Then, return here and leave a comment with YOUR tips/tricks/best practices for Parent-Teacher conferences.

What do you do to ensure that your parent-teacher conferences go smoothly?

Global Education Conference

Bienvenue! Welcome! 歡迎! Willkommen! Benvenuto!
반갑습니다! Seja bem-vindo(a)! Bienvenido!

The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held November 14 – 18, online and free. Sessions will take place in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the five days. The 2010 Global Education Conference had 15,028 unique logins and presentations from 62 countries.

To attend and be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, click HERE and join the Ning.

The sessions schedule is now live and available in multiple time zones HERE.

The conference is a collaborative, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity.

The conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to connecting educators and classrooms with a strong emphasis on promoting global awareness, fostering global competency, and inspiring action towards solving real–world problems. Through this event, it is our hope that attendees will challenge themselves and others to become more active citizens of the world. Let us learn, question, create, and engage in meaningful, authentic opportunities within a global context!

Our goal is to help you make connections with other educators and students, and for this reason the conference is very inclusive and also provides broad opportunities for participating and presenting. We have expert presenters and keynote speakers, but we also encourage presenters who either have not presented before or have not presented in Blackboard Collaborate (Elluminate).

The information above was borrowed from:  http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/2011-conference

Searcheeze – Collaborative Research Made Easy!

http://searcheeze.com

Thanks to Christine Rineer who sent me the video below, and Ellen Kosh who sent it to her..  This looks to be an awesome, easy-to-use and effective collaborative research tool.  Not only can you build your collections (of websites, specific text on sites, photos, videos, anything) for your private use, but you can share them as well.  On top of that, you can invite others to work on your collections with you.  And there you have it, collaborative research!

In addition to finding and saving items into collections, there is the ability to add text to each entry, custom text fields in-between and among items, and also each item in the collection can be commented on, shared on social networking sites, etc.

Check out this video to learn more:

 

Check out my first “go” at a collection for Collaboration & Video Conferences: http://www.searcheeze.com/p/diannekrause/collaboration

How do you think this can be used in your classroom?  Leave your comments below!