Sharing the Addiction

I am here on Day Two of the Ulearn conference. Day one started off with an introduction by Steve Mahary. While he may have arrived a little late and gone overtime but I still found it really heartening to have the Minister of Education for this country ‘talking the talk’ and obviously very well informed on the place of ICT in education.

Following that, Ewan McIntosh came to the stage. I knew that Ewan was a bit of a Web 2.0 guru but he was also very watchable with a well developed sense of humour and very useful content. I am often trying to ’sell’ the message of Web 2.0 to the teachers in my cluster and I find it can be quite difficult to pass on the passion. I could see that the audience at Ewan’s presentation were quite inspired and ‘got it’ a little more by the end. I am looking forward to working more with Ewan during a full day workshop on Tuesday next week.

After a very nice lunch, it was time for my workshop on demystifying blogs and wikis and online publishing. My introductory presentation seemed to go well (you can view a summarised version of this presentation on my wiki) but we had all kinds of problems with the internet connection which does cause issues when your entire workshop is based on a wiki. People were able to add photos and embed media on the workshop wiki pages but it took ten times longer than it really should have and meant that we didn’t get to complete the workshop as planned. Luckily, people were very sympathetic and many said that they would finish the workshop using my notes at a later time. I think that people will hopefully have a go with blogs and wikis as a result of the workshop.

I headed to Tony Ryan workshop on engaging learners after that. What I found heartening about this session was that many of the techniques he mentioned are happening in many New Zealand schools. I really liked his idea of having children in teams deciding on whether they are arguing the yes or no for a topic BEFORE you give them the title of the topic. The example given was Golilocks is a delinquent. They then have to research their side of the argument (and go around room to other teams to shop for great ideas from other teams). After this, each side of the argument has time to present their ideas without interruption from their partners. After this, you get them to switch viewpoints and they are able to recycle arguments from their partners ideas. Finally, they have to talk as a complete team about where they sit against a continuum in relation to the topic. I think this would be a great way to encourage higher level thinking about topics!

The day ended with drinks and a very social night out! More about day two at a later time.

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