EducampNZ

Speed Geeking, Unconference, EducampNZ

Well worth getting up for, on a spectacular Saturday morning in Auckland!  I had a great time along with Wendy one of the DP’s at Rowandale.  I was a bit concerned before attending as I’ve never experienced a day of professional learning where there isn’t a planned agenda and set times for things.  I was surprised to find the day zoomed past and it was great to get input from everyone there as to what we wanted to discuss or find out about. 

The smackdown at the start of the day gave me plenty of new and exciting ideas to develop both in my classroom and hopefully across our school.  I thought Barb D’s idea of surveying the staff for what they want for morning tea would be great fun. I’ve just starting using Google Docs with a form to get staff to record ICT issues/concerns/queries.  It had taken a bit of training but we’re starting to make better progress especially when it comes to scheduling technician assistance and repairs.  There were plenty of other ideas shared during this spot, including answer garden and history pin two tools well worth having a look at.  I can see how answer garden would make it really easy to gather feelings after a learning session with children and adults.

I relished the opportunity to get together with other junior school teachers and hopefully the wiki Rachel Boyd created will be a place where we can share even more ideas.  We talked quite a bit about the importance of children being able to move their digital work including blog spaces, wikis and the items they’ve posted on them.  I can’t remember which teacher suggested it but tagging posts with the child’s name throughout their school life and linking back to those posts on new blogs as they move to the next year is a good place to start with portability.  I think this is something I’ll be reflecting on with my ICT team in the next few weeks.

I’ve been lurking around Twitter for just over a year now and it was nice to match up a few faces with twitter names.  I think anyone considering taking part in a day with this format should definitely go for it!

Big thanks have to go to Summerland Primary for hosting the event at their place and to ACES for their organisation.