Four weeks on and thoughts of NECC 2009 keep percolating through my head. What has stayed with me? What will I be acting upon? What will be the next move into the classroom? Who will be enlisted to try new stuff? What characteristics do they need to   . . .  just give it a go in an educationally sound context!

What has stuck?

Think as far ahead as you can. I am limited by what I don’t know. The more I know the more I know I don’t know!

I know we need to be engaging our students and I know technology can support that. Things are moving so fast as soon as I imagine things they are passe.

We have the opportunity to create powerful and meaningful learning environments. Environments where;

• Feedback is timely, targeted and valued;
• Adversity is used to grow learning;
• Exploration and experimentation are the norm; and
• Learning is recognised as being non-linear.

It’s not the where of learning that matters it is the how.

• Every student should have a computing device in their pocket and be taught how to use it effectively and responsibly. (APPs be they for google or ipod/iphone are powerful and a growing number have amazing educational potential.)
• Mobile devices provide opportunities for students to be online and to have access to information and be learning anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
• Are schools and classrooms as we know them appropriate learning spaces for today’s students?

Knowledge needs to be deep rather than broad and once you have explored a concept in depth only then do you realise fully how little you really know.

Being able to do a Boolean Search is an amazing thing and the Google advanced search capability makes it so easy to fine tune the information being gathered.

Digital text is challenging because:

• Potentially overwhelming with amount of content available.
• Where do we start?
• How do we determine what is relevant?
• Forces us to look for significance by using primary sources as much as possible.
• Analyse and hypothesise about  . . . Am I being manipulated?
• What’s worth reading?
• Read deeply and develop the skill of synthesis

Realise and understand that originality is NOT derivative.

Web 2.0 tools are powerful motivators and provide novel opportunities for student learning, constructing and creating knowledge as well as making available effective and exciting self assessment tools.

Teachers need to let go of their need to control students and student learning, they need to use their understanding of pedagogy and knowledge of curriculum outcomes to become co-learners, co-constructors and co-creators of knowledge along with their students. They need to develop with their students a purpose for learning; authentic tasks, problem or project based learning opportunities where they see what they are doing is relevant and worthwhile.

Parents in the digital age should be in their kids’ faces and in their spaces.

On Monday morning we went to the NECC 2009 Exhibitor’s Hall. It was huge, vast, expansive . . . so American.

We were on a mission to get a Promethean and SMART t-shirt.

They made it so hard fill in forms, show a magazine bit of a hassle really!!!! Never did get the SMART shirt probably a Freudian moment.

We were caught in the rush of the crowd, jostled along, not sure where we were going.

Suddenly an arm appeared out of nowhere, a blue t-shirt was thrust into our hands . . . a BIG sloppy PEARSON shirt.

People looked at us as if we weird when we got on the bus this morning. “What’s with the t-shirt?”

Well you know what we’re not so stupid.

Standing in the endless snaking Starbuck’s line this afternoon a hysterical woman ran up to us offering congratulations and these two cute little ipod shuffles . . .

for wearing our PEARSON’s t-shirt.

Cameras flashed, celebrities for a minute, congratulated by our fellow coffee addicts . . . what a buzz!

We were chattering away in the back about the Conference and things we’d been doing.

The Cabbie was a middle aged Afro-American. Part way through the trip he asked “is there a teacher conference or something happening?” We told him of the NECC 2009.

He became really chatty. He believes technology is really powerful and proceeded to tell us that the ipod shuffle had totally changed his life. How so?

He discovered you could listen to books and they were freely available from a variety of resources to be downloaded to an ipod shuffle. He has “read” 200 books in the past year. He had never read anything before then. His spoken language and vocabulary indicated he was a deep thinker. His voice was light and proud when he spoke of his books.

How many more people like him are there out there?

An educated, articulate, intelligent and informed “illiterate”.

When are we going to look beyond testing and statistics as a measure of our students literacy?