We have listed descriptions of the sessions offered at Summit 2010 in the space below. Click the filters to see the presentations geared toward Leadership, Technology, Communication, Advancement, as well as Power User Sessions, or view the full list of sessions all at once.

Presenter: Oliver Davis

In this session we will cover how 3D and Maps create an interactive campus experience using the latest web tools available --- including Google Earth and Google Maps. We will walk through the development of a live campus model in 3D and the steps required to build interactive geoweb-site using map based content and video for students, alumni, parents and staff alike.

Presenter: Mark Sargent

In this session, we will present to the user the secrets to creating an Academic Group Page that works. In addition, we will be looking at some real examples of pages that work as well as hearing from experts from schools that have implemented pages successfully.

Presenter: Elizabeth Allen

Keeping up with social technologies can feel like a full time job - and for community managers, it *is* a full time job. Monitoring your online reputation, communicating with fans, tweeting, blogging and posting are all part of the community manager's job description. This session will give examples of what community managers do and how they fit in with your communications strategy.

Presenter: Brian Solis

"Social media has democratized influence, forever changing the way businesses communicate with customers and the way customers affect the decisions of their peers. With platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, anyone can now find and connect with others who share similar interests, challenges, and beliefs—creating communities that shape and steer the perception of brands. Without engagement in these communities, we miss major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.

However, use of the tools does not guarantee that people will listen. Engagement is shaped by the interpretation of its intentions. In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts.

With Engage! as your guide, you can effectively compete in this new era of digital Darwinism while engendering the support of online champions. Social and participatory media significantly contribute to the success of every modern business, and with this book, you will find out how to:

* Create a space in the online ecosystem that truly represents your business and cultivates your customers' loyalty and trust
* Participate in the unique culture of each available social media platform to engage your customers
* Establish an organizational structure that constantly targets the next new media trend
* Attract online champions and change agents who will uncover the social networks you need to reach and the influencers who will help build your reputation in the networked world
* Consistently adapt your company to market needs and trends based on the invaluable connections you forge and the empathy and insight you garner in the process

There are thousands of customers waiting to hear from you about your business and vision. It's the minimum ante to create a vibrant and loyal online community. When you engage, you will build an authoritative social network that increases your visibility, relevance, influence, and profitability. It's time to Engage!"

-From the book jacket of Engage!

Presenter: Joel Price

You're already using Facebook for your school, and you might also be using some other Web2.0 services to syndicate/display your content. What can you do to make sure people are finding your online presence beyond your school's website, and how can you start assessing where your time and energy should be allocated?

Presenter: Gina Trapani

Google Wave is the most ambitious but least understood products Google has ever launched. In this session, you'll learn how Wave represents a bold step forward in the real-time, online collaboration, why it's so confusing to new users, and how your group can use Wave to get things done faster and more efficiently.

Presenter: Stephen Johnson

Social media is here in education, and it's scaring many Heads of School witless. And who can blame them? The Head has a difficult job of leading the school, increasing its prestige, making sure it's all paid for, and (this is under-appreciated) protecting the school and making sure the whole enterprise doesn't go wrong.

Those of us who have drunk the social media Kool-Aid know that these are amazing tools for sharing our schools’ stories and building community on a huge scale, but it’s not without risk and your senior admins know this. It fact, it might be all they know. They’ve heard the horror stories about students posting things about teachers on Facebook, and they’ve read about people tweeting what they had for breakfast. Their first impulse about chat on a live stream is not "do it," but "Danger!"

As communications professionals, we know that social media works, it’s just a matter of convincing our bosses. So how can you get administrators past the fear to feel the social media love?

In this session, I'll share some strategies that involve selling the benefits, containing the risk, helping admins reach their goals, and building coalitions (yes, you’re going play a little politics) that have worked at Windward School (and some that didn’t) so we can start a lively conversation about how to talk to senior admins about social media.

Presenter: Homa Tavangar

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, how do we prepare our children to succeed and to become happy, informed global citizens? A mother of three, Homa Sabet Tavangar has spent her career helping governments develop globally oriented programs and advising businesses on how to thrive abroad. In her book, Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World (Random House, 2009), Tavangar shares with all of us her “parenting toolbox” to help give our children a vital global perspective. Her message and approach are being successfully applied in schools, non-profit organizations and corporations, as well as at the kitchen table.

In this session, Tavangar will share her unusual personal story, and lead a multi-media, interactive discussion using tools and ideas for raising up smart, confident global citizens – whether they’ve circled the globe or never been on an airplane.

Presenter: Mara Braverman

Do visitors find it easy to navigate and read? Or are you making them work hard to find information? Learn how to improve your website’s usability---and encourage your important audiences to visit more often and stay longer.

Presenter: Jeff McGuinness

Your website and pushpages communicate all the great stories your school has to share. But, if you tell every great story you think you have all at once, your audience will surely turn away. The key to engaging your audience—and keeping them engaged—is in how you present the information you want to share. How you present your content to one constituency, and sometimes even one constituent, is going to differ dramatically from how you present it to another.

In this discussion learn how a bit of online feng shui, a few friends, and a NYC traffic cop can help keep your e-communications effective and engaging.

Presenter: Jill Judd

The calendar is likely one of the most centralized information centers for your school and managing this information can be like trying to hit a moving target. In this session, we’ll go over how to zero in on effective calendar publishing by taking advantage of integration, collaboration, and synchronization. Learn tips and tricks on how to integrate your Podium calendars with products that offer facility booking and conflict resolution. You’ll also find out how you can get synched up with Microsoft Exchange. Then learn how to incorporate useful tools like RSS and iCAL feeds to facilitate better communication. These tips and tricks are sure to help your event management hit the mark every time.

Presenter: Michael Horn

"According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.”

Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.

You'll learn how:

* Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school
* Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology
* Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student
* Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform
* We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market"

- From the book jacket of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

Presenter: Justin Malvin

Learn how live streaming video with chat can bring all of the exciting events on your campus into the homes of your community members, alumni, prospectives, and donors. Perfect for community building and development, this session promises complete mastery in just one hour.

Presenter: Basil Kolani

We had a thriving Moodle installation before our WhippleHill portal arrived and we focused all our energies on Academic Group pages. After our Moodle integration, I'm envisioning a role for Moodle to enhance the content that our teachers are able to publish on their pages.

Presenter: Kim Hurlbutt

Asking for financial support does not distinguish your school; it is the relationship you cultivate with alumni between the moments of asking that sets you apart. Emerging social media have changed all the rules, providing unprecedented opportunities for stewardship that is smart, informed, customized and personal. In this fast evolving environment, effective stewardship calls on a Director of Donor Relations to integrate distinct media to execute stewardship strategies that are unique to the individual. This session reveals real-life examples of one office’s highly effective use of social media for alumni stewardship.

Presenter: Antonio Viva

School leaders at every level are facing challenges that have never been experienced before. Understanding the unique needs of the 21st century student as well as what skills and attributes are in demand should inform school leaders how best to take advantage of technology and implement change school wide.

Presenter: Mark Sargent

This panel discussion will focus on the success that schools have had implementing the Student Information Systems products at their school, specifically focused on how publishing data to the community has helped them create a positive atmosphere at the school and achieving successful implementations. The panel members will be people at different schools who are attending the Summit and each will be able to present upon different aspects of the products…from publishing Grade Book Grades to the Community, to Publishing Report Cards and sending Comments to individuals.

Presenter: Kyle James

Maybe you don’t even know what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is? Search Engines are the first place that nearly everyone goes when looking for something. Having your site displayed at the top of results for relevant searches is a powerful way to get visitors to your website. In a sense it’s a way to provide free traffic to your site. Also because when people search, they are usually looking for a specific thing being and able to provide it to them you are gaining a relevant visitor.

Unfortunately, when people think about SEO immediately those emails of spammers who guarantee #1 results in search engines come to mind. SEO doesn’t have to be black magic, pixie dust, or snake oil. In fact if you think of SEO in terms of the usability and accessibility that the search engines like Google have always intended it to be then it’s a very practical approach to designing your website.

This presentation will cover the bottom line best practices about On-Page & Off-Page optimization for search engines. This will be solid advice that individuals can take home and immediately make changes to their site.

Presenter: Sören Stamer

"There is the idea of the 'different' company. A company that after more than 100 years is now turning its back on production based on the division of work. In his introduction, Götz Hamann, journalist for Die Zeit, describes the authors as engaged in an 'attack on capitalism'. Expert articles by such renowned authors as Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott and David Weinberger are augmented by examples from Nokia, SAP and Vodafone in the quest to discover how Web 2.0 technologies can best be used as business tools, and how companies will need to change in order to survive as Enterprise 2.0 organizations. Not forgetting the question of whether it's worth it for company management. After all, Enterprise 2.0 necessarily implies that decision-makers must also 'let go' and give up their control. Yet are we really ready for this?"

-Product description of Enterprise 2.0 - The Art of Letting Go taken from Amazon.com

Presenters: Michael Wyszomierski and Tony Trumbo

Learn how to take advantage of free tools to monitor and control your school's visibility and reputation in search results and across the web. We'll show how your school can use Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and the Local Business Center to help your audience reach you.

Presenter: Daren Worcester

Is it better to have multiple portals, or just one? What content should display publicly versus private? Are there any channels you should be using that you aren’t? And how does Groups fit into the bigger picture? In this session we’ll discuss the WhippleHill-recommended strategies for portal communication, as well as highlight things you can be doing from a managerial standpoint to be more efficient and better informed.

Presenter: Melissa Lavallee

WhippleHill clients will lead you through their “behind-the-password” communities for parents, students and teachers. Each school came to us with a common problem: They wanted to communicate effectively to their constituents without overwhelming them with too much information. These schools will share how they made decisions regarding the layout of their Portals and how they determined who would have access to their Assignments, Athletics, Media Gallery, Calendars and Portals. Although they all use Podium to solve their communication challenges, you will get an insider’s look at how they customized our solutions to best meet the specific needs of their constituents.

Presenter: Sir Ken Robinson

"The Element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the Element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. With a wry sense of humor, Ken Robinson looks at the conditions that enable us to find ourselves in the Element and those that stifle that possibility. Drawing on the stories of a wide range of people, including Paul McCartney, Matt Groening, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and Bart Conner, he shows that age and occupation are no barrier and that this is the essential strategy for transform­ing education, business, and communities in the twenty-first century."

-Product description of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything taken from Amazon.com

Presenter: Chuck Will

Like brochures and magazines, school websites tend to claim near perfection. Self-managed sites offer opportunities to break free from static messaging, by providing visitors what they crave: voices of authenticity and conversation. Use your camera and your words to communicate the simple, fascinating reality of now: classrooms, dorms, sports huddles and relationships. Every school prizes honesty as a core value; now, bring your web presence alive by practicing it. We will study ten (out of thousands) of Chuck’s blogs, tracing the evolution of strategy, voice and style.

Presenter: Daren Worcester

The way users seek and retain information online is constantly evolving. As page managers, we need to adapt to these changes to ensure the school’s core messaging is still getting across. In this session we’ll analyze the most important pages of your site—admissions, giving, programs and more—and discuss various communication strategies for making the greatest impact.

Presenters: Molly Compton Rumsey and Heather Manella

Learn about the first girls-only online school from the school's creators, members of the National Coalition of Girls Schools. It's also among the first coordinated efforts by independent schools to offer comprehensive e-learning.

Presenters: Matt Clobridge and Jan Devereux

Technology in the classroom is allowing students to easily produce work in multiple media -- from video and audio to traditional written material. It also allows these products to be shared with an audience outside the classroom walls. But how can you collect all this work and display it in a user-friendly way for others to see? Join us as we discuss the BCDS mashUp, Beaver's online showcase for student and faculty work. You'll learn how we got started, how material is chosen for the mashUp, and how it is used in our marketing efforts. We'll also demonstrate how the site integrates all of Beaver's web and social media activities. Since a mashup can be constructed in many ways, this will not be a technical discussion, but rather one where we look at what a mashup is and how you can use it at your school.