Think of learning. Think of what happens to help learning. Now think about a day filled with teachers learning how to help the children in their classes learn, how to help their colleagues learn. You might then come somewhere near to what has been happening here today. Today has been a day of keynote speakers and seminars. A day of brain stretching, thought-challenging, ideas-sharing. It is impossible to share more than a snapshot of what has been going on here – just like yesterday, there is a buzz and a pace to everything that is going on. It’s also hard to capture the essence of the excitement in a blog post – but that is here!
One of this morning’s keynotes was from the inspirational John Davitt, who speaks slowly – not out of consideration for those who don’t have English as a first language, but because he thinks slowly (his words, not mine – and definitely not in evidence as he spoke to us)! He used humour to keep us all engaged as he shared his ideas about the journey of learning not needing to be the same for everyone. “If you get bored, use the back of the bingo card to draw around your phone – and if your phone is too big to fit on the piece of paper, you’re at the wrong conference!” The messages shared resonated with those who were listening, as he suggested we’re learning in a world full of differences and there can be many different ways to reach the destination/learning goal. Learning should be active and involve good formative feedback – but we often get more useful feedback when using online shopping such as ebay than we receive in a learning situation (just checking out his ebay feedback cheers him up). It’s important to “define technology by how it helps learning, not by its chip speed or its brand name.”
The workshops and seminars throughout the rest of the day were challenging, informative, interactive – and in the case of Stuart Ball’s workshop there were even sweets to be eaten once they’d been used for the serious learning stuff. Mandeep Atwal from TakingITGlobal moved people, some even to tears, as she presented about the issues we are challenged to address within the next few years. This year’s focus for the SHOUT project is land, with schools being encouraged to develop projects to in the Deforestaction theme, as well as taking the opportunities to talk to REAL scientists from the . The work will be showcased at the Partners in Learning Global forum in November, which will be an exciting opportunity for those students invited to the event. Why not check out how to get involved in the project and give your students an opportunity to be invited to the forum? Shout was introduced in this blog here and their website is here.
Highlights for the day included Microsoft tagging, uses of Microsoft OneNote and …..Welshmen singing rugby songs! And through the whole experience we can see more connections and links being made between the teachers who are here. As Kirsten Panton showed in her workshop, the more teachers collaborate, the more innovation happens. And there are a lot of collaborating teachers here so we can expect much more exciting innovation throughout Europe.