Conferences | Betchablog

19Mar/100

Big Twitter, Little Twitter

This video just went live today from New Zealand's wonderful EdTalks collection. I'd forgotten all about it, but it was recorded back in October at the ULearn conference in New Zealand. It's kind of weird looking back at things you said many months ago and had forgotten you'd even said.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's a few thoughts about the use of Twitter for ongoing professional development, and some musings about how kids might use it (or something like it) to develop good digital citizenship skills.

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Tagged as: edtalks, Twitter, ulearn No Comments

5Mar/1011

ITSC 2010. It all begins.

So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast.

I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I'm rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What's more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I'd do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I'll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well. It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I'm really thrilled to be able to be a part of them.

Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It's all very unconferencey. Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that's great, and it's certainly the best part of most conferences I've been to, so it's cool that we are seeing more conferences these days that try to focus on the conversations and encouraging the serendipitous aspects of this kind of learning. I like it. There is also going to be a focus at ITSC on actually making something, creating something to take away back to our schools that will help drive the shift. It sounds pretty cool.

Anyway I better get back to putting the finishing touches on this preso. It's an honour to have been asked to present, and I'd like to do a good job of it, although I'm always concerned about what I can actually add to the conversation. It's a bit daunting, but I'm looking forward to it.

If you happen to be going to any of the ITSC events over the next month or so, please come and say hi!

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Tagged as: Apple, itsc, keynote goldcoast 11 Comments

18Dec/092

Ways of Working

I hope you've all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year's event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com

I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task.

As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you see above. It's not exactly what I'd planned, but I'm still pretty happy with it... it still looks at most of the things I wanted to include, but just not in the way I'd originally envisioned.

It was an interested experience to hang all this stuff off a single focus point, in this case, the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition that takes place in Sydney each October/November. I particularly liked the idea of using SxS as the core for the presentation because I know of quite a few schools that do actually use it as the basis for a thematic unit of work for their students so I know that it really does have a "real world" use in education. I was also quite fascinated with the way that social media and web technologies have infiltrated and expanded the event over the last few years, and I think it offers a great example of how the web and the real world can collide in a good way. I also liked the notion that the use of technology in schools can (and should!) be used to support real live physical events, and that technology really can be used to enrich a real world experience. And finally, because K12 Online is such an international event, I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase a little bit of Sydney, this beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live.

Hope you enjoy the presentation, and that you take the time to check out the other 79 or so presentations that have been part of the conference this year.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: k12online, k12online09, sydney, waysofworking 2 Comments

1Dec/092

K12 Online Conference starts today

Of all the conferences and professional development events I've taken part in over the last few years, the K12 Online Conference is the one that I think has had the most impact. Not surprisingly, because unlike many "one-hit" conferences that are over at the end of the weekend, K12 Online rolls out over an extended two week period, releasing several presentations each day on a wide range of topics. These presentations are all in some multimedia format, usually a video, but they could be in whatever format the presenter chooses, and they live on permanently beyond the actual conference itself. It really is, as they say, the conference that never ends.

The K12 Online Conference started in 2006 as the brainchild of a couple of North American teachers. If you want the full story of the conference and how it started, you might like to listen to episode 16 of the Virtual Staffroom podcast where I got to interview those who started it. Ever since that first year, I've looked forward to K12 Online each year. There's an incredible effort behind it... I can vouch for that, as I volunteered to be on one of the organising subcommittees in 2007 and 2008, and I've also contributed presentations in 2008 and 2009. So I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a huge amount of work that takes place behind the scenes, from many passionate and committed educators, to make this all happen.

Anyway, the 2009 conference, with the theme "Bridging the Divide" was officially opened today with a pre conference keynote from the fabulous Kim Cofino. Like everything Kim does, it's full of passion and insight into what it means to be an effective teacher in the 21st century. I'll embed it here, but you should probably head over to the K12 Online site and check out all the other stuff going on there.

Once you've watched it, go check out the schedule of stuff that will be released over the next few weeks. There's something for everyone.

Then once you have seen the schedule, make sure you grab some of the presentations for this year's conference. Heck, why not subscribe to one of the RSS feeds and get them as they are released. You won't regret it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: k12online, k12online09, keynote, mscofino 2 Comments

9Oct/094

Dinner for 1600

Those Kiwis know how to throw a dinner party! As part of the wrapup of ULearn09, the organisers held a huge party with a terrific band, amazing special effects and atmosphere, plenty of dancing, and of course catering dinner for 1600+ people! The amount of organising that goes into something like this is mind boggling!

Photos are from the public Flickrstream using the tags ulearn09 + dinner. If you have photos you'd like to add, just tag them with these words and they'll appear in the feed.

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Tagged as: core-ed, dinner, newzealand, party, ulearn09 4 Comments

6Oct/091

ULearn 09, Day 1

Photo by @allanahk

So here I am in Christchurch, New Zealand for Ulearn 09, certainly one of the biggest Ed Tech conferences in NZ, and probably one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere I would think. It's a education conference that I've wanted to attend for the last few years, having only ever heard good things about it, but for whatever reason I just haven't been able to get here for it. This year was different, and after hearing how good it was from my work colleague, @sirchriss, I was very keen to get here. Fortunately, a number of Australian educators were sponsored to attend the event this year and I was lucky enough to have my presentation submissions accepted, so here I am.

It really is a beautiful part of the world, and Christchurch is a very attractive city. The conference itself is quite large, with close to 2000 delegates, 400+ workshops and presentations, 150 support staff and over 60 vendors. The logistical effort to plan and host a conference of this scale is significant and the organisers do an amazing job.

I got up early enough this morning to attend the Powhiri, a kind of Maori welcoming ceremony. I'm constantly struck by the energy and pride of the Maori people, and think it's wonderful that the two cultures of New Zealand, the traditional and the contemporary, exist together in such harmony and respect for each other. This is a country that really values their indigenous people.

But mainly, today has been full of meeting people. Many of them for the first time (although I felt like I've known many of them for a long time.) I bumped into @janenicholls at the Powhiri, and then during the day I kept meeting more and more people who looked just like their Twitter avatars. "Hey, you're @moodlegirl!" or "Hey, you're @keamac!", "Hey you're @dwenmoth!", etc, etc. Then of course there was the reconnecting with people I have met before, people like @rachelboyd, @allanahk and @dragon09. I also attended the unconference session in the afternoon at Boaters, where I got to meet many others and to take part in some powerful conversations. I really enjoyed the unconference - really just a very informal gathering to chat about whatever topics came up - and I got a lot out of it.

After the unconference, I met up with Matt from Core-Ed to record a short video interview as part of the Edtalks series. This is another terrific NZ initiative, and involves recording short video interviews with leading teachers about some of the things they are doing with technology to make learning more engaging for the kids they teach. Over time the Edtalks video library has grown to become a valuable collection of good ideas and best practice for other teachers, and it was a bit of an honour to be asked to make a contribution to it.

Tonight, I went to the dinner with about 40 other conference folk, where I met still more people that looked a lot like their avatars. More conversations, more great ideas exchanged, more opportunities to hear about how other people approach this incredible job called teaching. Likewise, I had a few people say to me today, "Hey, you're @betchaboy!" as though there was almost a sense of celebrity to it for them. It's really, really weird. After having a day full of these "Hey, you're @that_person" moments, it made me think about how funny it is that we have these little "celebrity" moments when we meet someone that we've only ever know from the online world, especially if it's just from reading their blogs, following them on Twitter or hearing their podcasts. I mean, we are all "just" teachers, and yet there is that glimmer of excitement when meeting each other for the first time.

It reminded me of an Intel ad currently screening on TV back in Australia, where Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB, walks into a room full of "fans". The ad concludes with a great one liner that kind of sums up the experience I had in meeting people today... I won't ruin the line by telling you what it is, you can watch it for yourself...

Andy Warhol once said that everyone will get their 15 minutes of fame. Maybe with the rise of global social networks, extensive personal learning networks and the notion of "celebrity" now existing way out on the edge of the long tail, we'll all just want to get our 15 minutes of obscurity instead?

Looking forward to Day 2 tomorrow...

Technorati Tags: ulearn, ulearn09

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Filed under: Blogging, conferences, Ed Tech, Friends, Humour, Teacher PD, Twitter 1 Comment

29Jul/091

The Adobe Summer Institute Wrapup

I'm finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute. The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe's Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program. I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I'm really glad I went.

When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have. Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I've always been quite immersed in Adobe's Creative Suite, but the nature of these tools always seems to be such that the more you know about them, the more you realise you don't know.

The other AELs came mainly from all over the US, with quite a few from the UK and a handful from other places like New Zealand, Hong Kong and Belgium. I was the only Aussie. We started the week on Monday evening with a Welcome Party at our hotel where we got to meet the other AELS and some of the folk from Adobe. It was good to meet new people and make new connections.

Tuesday started early for me with a Photoshop exam. This was taken as part of the Adobe Certified Associate, a recognised certification for Photoshop users. Happily, I passed the exam without too much trouble. The rest of Tuesday was filled with meeting with the Adobe product teams, where we got to hear about future product roadmaps, learn about upcoming features and directions for the Creative Suite, and to offer suggestions for how we thought the products could be improved. Parts of the day were done under NDA so I can't really go into details, but suffice to say there will be plenty of exciting new stuff coming from Adobe in the next year or two. Dinner that night was held at Saratoga Springs, a lovely camping ground in the hills surrounding Silicon Valley, and we had fun and games with some hilarious variations on team volleyball played with water-filled balloons.

Wednesday was filled with AEL to AEL sessions - workshops where we presented to each other many of the things we were doing in our own schools and districts. Watching these sessions, it really struck me what an intensely creative and passionate group of educators this was. Although not everything was directly relevant to my own teaching situation, I still got tons of great ideas from the sharing that took place. Collaborative projects, experimental ideas based on art, design and creativity, ideas for streamlining school administration, examples of how teachers do things in other parts of the world... we got all sorts of cool ideas from these AEL sessions. After a full day of learning from each other, we regrouped in the Adobe Cafeteria for a delicious dinner and drinks, where more sharing and conversation took place in a relaxed casual atmosphere. I was quite amazed as we watched the planes fly over the Adobe building, which was directly in the landing path of San Jose airport, seeming to clear the top of the building with only a few hundred feet to spare. A few of us kicked on to a bar in downtown San Jose where the conversations continued into the night, only louder.

Thursday was another full day of learning, with a intense session run by Adobe's John Schuman. We learned many of the very cool features in the software tools, and in particular how to make them work together smoothly. Our project required us to integrate our work across Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, InDesign and Bridge as we roundtripped files between the various tools. In each of the applications we discovered lots of useful workflows and there were quite a few new concepts that I hadn't come across before. The last part of the day took us into a project using Flash Catalyst, a relatively new product still in beta, that makes it much easier for designers to create interactive content. I'm still getting my head around Catalyst, but it looks like a great tool for rapidly designing interactive media without the need to know heavy-duty coding stuff.

Thursday night was good fun, with a night out to a local San Jose pool hall. By this stage we had gotten to know each other a little better, so it was cool to hang out, shoot some pool and have still more conversations about learning and life. The night finished while it was still young, as the pool tables were reclaimed at the stroke of 9:00pm. A few of us wandered across the road to another party that looked like it would be fun. I turned out to be an Open Source party, sponsored by Source Forge. With free drinks (free as in "beer" - I thought that was hilarious at an Open Source event), tatoos getting done in the basement (no, I didn't get one), as well as Twitter stations, free T-shirt giveaways from the good folk at ThinkGeek, guys playing with Star Wars light sabres, people wearing infra-red night vision goggles, etc, it was a truly geeky event... I loved it!

Friday morning was the last day of the conference and I'd arranged to do another certification exam, this time in Dreamweaver. Although I've used Dreamweaver a lot in the past, I hadn't used it much lately so wasn't feeling too confident in my ability to pass this exam. However, I did pass, and since I had a bit of time to spare at the end I decided to have a crack at the remaining exam for Flash. This one I really wasn't too confident about, since I haven't used Flash much in the last 12 months and there are some big changes to the CS4 version. Even so, I surprised myself by passing the Flash exam too, so I was feeling pretty pleased that I managed to get my certification in Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash all in the same week.

The rest of Friday morning was a general wrap up of the event, with feedback and a debriefing session between the AELs and the Adobe folk. It was kind of sad to have it all come to an end, but we eventually said our goodbyes and all went our separate ways. The sessions were all recorded with Adobe Connect, as well as a ton of Twitter, Flickr and Delicious resources all tagged with ael09, so at least there is a decent electronic record of the sessions.

I didn't have to be at the airport until quite late so myself and Saiqa, another AEL from London, decided to rent a car and do some Silicon Valley sightseeing. We dropped in on the headquarters of Apple and Google, then headed in to San Francisco for some last minute sightseeing around Fisherman's Wharf before getting back to SFO airport for our late flights.

Overall, a great week and one I'd be keen to do again. Thanks Adobe for running and hosting the event, especially to Megan Stewart and her team who did a great job of making sure the program went off perfectly. Great conference, can't wait to get back next year!

Technorati Tags: ael09, adobe, sanjose

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged as: adobe, ael, ael09, cs4, sanjose 1 Comment

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