16. The Wednesday Keynotes

[laurakgibbs]

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You can see the embedded video here: Jared Stein (Adora Svitak's keynote is not available, unfortunately).

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After reporting on the five sessions I went to on Wednesday, I wanted to also say something about the Wednesday keynotes. I missed the morning one by Adora Svitak (because of the evil wifi gremlins! argh!), but  @karen_bowden ‌ did a beautiful Wakelet of the tweets from that session based on all the good tweeting: Educators as Nation-Builders. 

I'm sorry that I missed the talk because I've been a fan of Adora Svitak for a long time, and you can learn lots at her website: AdoraSvitak.com. The inspiring words from her keynote provided a welcome counterpoint to the more corporate keynote from Tuesday night.

Here's a tweet from Daphnee St. Val; click that link for the video in the tweet:

And here's  @heather_hurley ‌'s screenshot of a link of young people to follow for more inspiration; this is a post at Adora's blog:

Young people doing cool things who you should follow 

The themes from Adora's talk resonated with many of the things that  @jared ‌ talked about in his keynote; what was the most powerful to me was the video about Canvas and the Larch Corrections Center:

If you have a few minutes, WATCH THIS VIDEO. It was even more powerful knowing that there were graduates (I think two?) from the program right there in the audience with us. I also found this article about the educational program from Clark College at Larch; this is from back in 2016. I am so impressed by all of this: 

Inmates at Larch Corrections better themselves through educational programs | News | thereflector.co... 

And... 

 @mjennings ‌ did a sketchnote of Jared's keynote: so cool!

InstCarn Recap: Day 2 - PM Keynote 

And these two keynotes both resonated with more to come from Michael Bonner. I'll write about that in a future post, but for now, let me spread the word about  @KristinL ‌'s great work organizing a book club so that we can read Michael Bonner's book together this fall:

M. Bonner - Book Study/PD 

Yay!

[Bobby2]

Those pesky gremlins laurakgibbshat a shame you missed Adora Svitak. She was certainly worth staying awake until 1am for. I loved the way us remote attendees could participate, and our chat was valuable (and fun!) also. 

I particularly loved how she stressed the importance of Community. YES!

[laurakgibbs]

I was SO GLAD that all the keynotes were streaming! That way I didn't feel like I had to cover them at all (so I focused on not missing any of the breakout sessions)... and it was so cool to see remote people tweeting during the keynotes along with everybody else who was there in the big tent. I saw a tweet from  @G_Petruzella ‌ for example and I thought that meant he was at InstCon (which would mean I would have to track him down for sure!), but he tweeted me back that he was just participating remotely this year, which is what I did last year. This year was better because all the keynotes were streaming! 🙂

[karen_bowden]

Here's an interesting bit of recent news about the role of accreditors in our colleges and universities: How to Make College Better & More Affordable | EdSurge News. Maybe we need to start asking what *can* education do and still be accredited by an organization that has been around since 1895.

[laurakgibbs]

Oh, thanks for that,  @karen_bowden ‌: I haven't read that article, and we don't see very much written about accreditors. I would definitely like to learn more about that!