I’ve just arrived home from a couple of days in Albany on the North Shore. Today I presented a keynote to the 120 teachers who were gathered at the North Shore Stadium for a two day conference to share their achievements in their journey as an ICT cluster over the past two years. My topic was ICT and the future of education, in which I endeavoured to provoke some thinking about education in the future, and education for the future, with an emphasis on how ICT might shape and enable what we do in each scenario. My slideshow is available below.
Something that impressed me at the conference was the level of participation on the part of the teachers present. During the two days there were a number of workshops run by teachers for teachers, covering a range of topics from podcasting to robotics. The teachers taking these workshops were sharing from the perspective of what they themselves had learned over the past two years. Their workshops were well prepared, engaging and very participatory. It demonstrated to me yet again the very positive impact of these ICT clusters on the development of professional learning communities among these groups of schools, growing within a climate of ‘high trust’ and with permission to ‘make mistakes’.
Keamac (Kirsten) was buzzing after the conference. It must have been great. It is a pity you can’t be at L@S but I am sure you will be there in spirit- I am trying to set up a live blogging thing with http://www.coveritlive.com/ but it isn’t embedding in Edublogs just at the moment. Will try again! Tenacity sometimes overcomes these things!
Sounds like it was a powerful, provocative presentation.
Wish I could have been there.
Hi Derek,
it was great to meet you f2f at the conference. Your presentation was engaging and also thought provoking. I would like to take the time to explore some of your questions further through my blog – I just need to get over the next couple of days as we head back to school. I shall definitely let you know when I do. I loved the quiz session you held in the afternoon – it was very affirming for me to see just how “connected” I am. I just have to say, I’d never heard of Twitter before you mentioned it at ULearn last year. I went home that night, found out what it was, signed up and now I’m hooked. Thanks to Twitter I am expanding my PLN and I have learnt about so many new and fantastic things. I have also had the opportunity to establish connections with some truly amazing educators. I just thought you’d like to know how much just one little thing you said to that room full of people has impacted on my life and taken me on such an rich and challenging learning journey.