Sydney Edtech Summit Day One

So much to think about!

First time in Sydney for me.  I'm feeling very grateful for the opportunities the Maniakalani Innovative Teachers programme has given me.  The last time I was at a similar conference (GAFE, early 2015), I was at the beginning of my learn-create-share journey.  That 2015 conference was really inspiring and I took back some tools to my classroom and carried on learning.

This time round, I am presenting, and I'm part of a fabulous team of ten Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers and two Manaiakalani facilitators.  We have had a lot of fun together and lots of thoughtful conversations about our classroom practice and what we value about our developing learn-create-share pedagogies.

On the first day, I've learned to create a pivot table with Santi Vega.   My next google sheets project is going to be how to make a box and whiskers graph. 

I've had a play with squibler, particularly the dangerous writing prompts.  Fiona Thomas had an inspirational suite of tools on offer for us to play with.  I'm already a fan of one her key tools - ReadWrite, but I hadn't known about the dangerous writing prompts before.

If you stop writing, you fail. It helps you keep on writing, no matter how challenging.  No space for anguishing over an empty page/screen.  It's possible but not simple to save and share what you have made.  Fiona was clear that this doesn't always matter, given that I was thinking (obsessed with?!) about formative assessment and feedback.  I am going to have a play with my students next term, and get them to decide what it will be most useful for.  It definitely has good potential for starters at the beginning of a lesson.

In the afternoon I supported Amber Wing, who shared a range of digital creativity tools, and gave us all lots of space to create something for our own classrooms.  I learned to make sure I have a bit.ly link for my presentation for Tuesday, so that participants can access my resource on laptops as well as via the phone app.  I got to spend some time with the participants in Amber's session, and loved seeing people learning how to put a sequence of tools together to make an effective sequence of learning in their classrooms.