CHANGE BECOMES PEACE: International Education Week, Nov 12-16

Today, November 12^th, marks the start of International Education Week 2012 (12^th to 16^th November). Launched over a decade ago, this annual initiative is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the role of education in furthering peace and intercultural cooperation. I would like to encourage you to join Peace One Day in marking this week. Check out Peace One Day’s Education Resources for ideas and a great lesson plan on inter-cultural cooperation.

I will be marking the week by Skyping with a classroom in Spain and speaking at the opening event of the student-centred Global Issues Network Summit in Switzerland. I will also be keynoting the 2012 Global Education Conference at 16:00 GMT on Wednesday 14 November. This is a free, five day, online conference involving students, educators, and organisations at all levels. From wherever you are in the world, you can choose your time zone and watch any part of the conference here.

I would also like to remind you about Skype for Peace, an innovative crowd-funding platform that supports Peace One Day’s aim to make the Global Education Resource freely available to every classroom worldwide; individuals’ contributions will go directly towards realising this goal.

The final day for donations is November 27^th – Giving Tuesday. Any donation is greatly appreciated and for more information please check out this short film. Visit www.skypeforpeace.org to donate.

Many thanks for all your wonderful support.

Warm regards,

In peace,
Jeremy Gilley

Remember that every session was recorded, and is archived on our web site along with sessions from our 2010 and 2011 conferences. Please make sure to re-visit this treasure trove of material. Below are direct links to our keynotes and to innovation strand presentations. We would love to read some reflections on the event and encourage you to respond to this thread in our discussion forum. You can also leave feedback for conference presenters by leaving comments on their original proposals.

We are deeply indebted to the many keynotes, presenters, and volunteers who took time to bring the 2012 Global Education Conference to life. We appreciate the time, expertise and incredible enthusiasm for all things global that you exhibited during International Education Week.

Steve and I also want to send a shoutout to our partners and sponsors. Without their support, our work would not be possible. We hope that GEC members will reciprocate by learning more about work conducted by iEARN, GETIdeas.org, BrainPOP, the American Federation of Teachers, Hewlett-Packard, Intel Education, and the International Baccalaureate. We are also grateful to EdSurge for organizing and publicizing our new Innovation Perspectives sponsored by Cisco.

For those who will be attending the 2013 International Society for Technology in Education Conference in June, we will be holding another face-to-face summit on Sunday, June 23rd in San Antonio, Texas, USA. . Stay tuned for further announcements on this. If you’d like to participate in the planning process for this event, please visit our community and join this group.

Additionally, if you want to get involved with next year’s conference, please join any of our 2013 community groups: 2013 Partners, 2013 Presenters, and 2013 International Advisory Board. Don’t forget that we also have continuing conversations, including requests for project partners, in our community discussion forum on our main web site. We also are experimenting with a new Google+ commmunity and we’d love to see you in that space as well.

Again, many thanks to you all. See you online soon!

Lucy Gray, Conference Co-Chair
Steve Hargadon, Conference Co-Chair