U Learn 2010 Reflection

I'm back from U Learn. I enjoyed the conference and it was great to see how far along Ashhurst School is compared with many other schools. Here are a few summary notes from keynotes & breakouts I went to:

Lee Crocket- Understanding the digital generation

• Knowledge changes and facts become obsolete
• Children's brains are changing- they see & interact differenctly
• Education needs to be about the "head ware" not the "hardware"- focus on critical & creative thinking
• Which type of learning are we providing for? "Just in time" -the learning of the future? or the "just in case" learning of the past?
• He show this clip: Daniel J Simons 2010 Invisible gorilla - perceptual blindness
  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY

• This relates to how busy our lives are and show how easy it is to miss things that are going around us. You can't assume anything.

David Kaine- Building a 5th wall in your classroom

• Make the children work harder- train children up to be the experts. They become the port of call. I need to do this with keynote, podcasts & imovie etc. I want to get lanyards for my IT students and the children will have a list of the programmes that they are experts at listed with their photo ID on their lanyard.
  
• David thinks that most schools don’t integrate e-learning and ICT isn’t valued, as it often is dropped off the programme. I feel that this is not the case at Ashhurst School. ICT is very much an integrated part to learning in my classroom.
• Think about where you put your computers- do you encourage collaboration by allowing groups of children to work around the one screen?
• Other teachers have had parent work shops- where parents learn about posting comments, taking photos & movies and have a go at uploading to the wiki/blog. This allows parents to have a better understanding of what the children are doing and encourages the wider community to be a more active audience. -Could be run by the student. Shows the children that everyone is a learner. (We could definitely do this at Ashhurst School)
• A new website that I learnt about: Glogster (edu.glogster.com) multimedia synthesis of knowledge e.g. it gets children to copy & paste “stuff” from the internet AND then you synthesis all of this knowledge into own words- I think this would be very relevant for my children to encourage them to not copy but still acknowledge the sources of the information.

Fiona & Rochelle- Digi Store learning paths

• I got a lot out of this Breakout & I AM SOOOO MOTIVATED AND EXCITED ABOUT SETTING THIS UP! To start with I will do this for each of my maths groups. My long term goal is my students will create their own instructional movie to relate to the follow up activities.
• http://digistore.wikispaces.com/NavigatingLearningPaths (Their notes)
  
  
• http://digistore.tki.org.nz/ec/pin/MHWUUP?userid=4408 (My digi path)

They read an entertaining book called “it’s a book” Lane Smith -book on how books are forgotten

I will post my notes on the others tomorrow. I have to get up early for school tomorrow.

Thanks Ashhurst School BOT for sending us to Christchurch for U Learn.