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.

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?

Walking through the Exhibit Hall the other day we met these two teachers from Chicago. They were really excited because the girl on the right had just won a Promethean Classroom.

She was over the moon! She was so enthusiastic about winning Promethean because she was aware of the company’s all encompassing philosophy of sharing knowledge and creating rather than controlling knowledge and shutting the world out.

What an amazing site.

500 exhibitors with 50 new ones this year. It takes a day to walk and talk with even just a fraction of the exhibitors whose product is of interest.

The Conference Centre is vast here are some stats for NECC 2009 (courtesy ISTE Daily Leader).

• 10 000 particpants from 60 countries across the world.
• 62 New Zealanders are here and they have the largest contingent of International visitors.
• 6 000 danishes were served in one hour at the continental breakfast.
• 5 300 unique users are on the wireless network at any one time.
• 90 mb of bandwith is being used consistently.
• 102 wireless internet access points.
• 31 buses are running every hour between 6.30 am and 7.45 pm.
• 1 cat inhabits the exhibit hall.