GEG NZ Student Summit

Our Amazing GEG Student Summit Team

Kudos has to go to our amazing learners for their ability to face their fears of presenting in front of a crowd of students during this event and doing an awesome job!

We had a blast and learnt a lot!

One of the things I wanted to do as part of my Moonshot from Sydney was to get our learners out of the classroom and striving for dreams, big dreams!   This was one way I thought we could get them to realise their potential and show others how truly fantastic they are.

Myself and two other teachers - a year 6 and a year 2 teacher have been working together this year and decided that this was a great opportunity for our learners.  ... We'd been playing around with a few things over the term and decided to take them a little further and get our students to present on them... they were

- Animation using Google Slides
- Google Cardboard - Photospheres

Our Google Cardboard / Photospheres Presentation

The only problem we had - narrowing down the students we could take, we would loved to have taken both classes but needed to be realistic about who was able to present and what we could manage during the day.  So we took 10 students each - three presenting teams and a few parent helpers.

The teachers and students worked tirelessly preparing, practicing, reviewing, editing and practicing their presentations again.  The best practice came when they presented their work to small groups of their peers - they taught them how to animate and/or create photospheres.  It was a really great way to cement their learning and for the students to realise what the needed to slow down, tweak, speed up and take out of their presentations.

The day came for us to go to the summit and we loaded 30 very nervous learners onto the bus very early in the morning to make our way to Hobsinville.  We arrived and were greeted with conference packs - a real conference experience for the students.  They sat glued to the keynote and were keen to experience their first workshop.  Throughout the day they learnt about creating movies, websites, games, music and news broadcasts.  They loved it!

Two of our presenting groups had to be moved because they're sessions were overflowing, what a great boost for our students.  They did so well, were calm, caring, explained everything and allowed the students that they were teaching to be the hands on learners.  They shared their experiences and learnt a lot about what they were capable of and what other students could teach them.

If you ever get a chance to be part of a student event like this do it, it was magical watching our learners have this experience and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

What a great day!  Our Team at the end of the day.

Techno Titans blog posts about the summit
Marvellous Meerkats blog post about the summit