I’m currently on the Gold Coast at the 4th Interactive Whiteboard Conference. It’s a big event with around 450 delegates, and about 120 different presentation sessions! I had the pleasure this morning of presenting two of those sessions, and have spent most of the rest of the day flitting around, checking out what else is on offer, looking at new products and generally enjoying the beautiful weather here on the Gold Coast. Right now, I’m sitting here in a Web 2.0 workshop run by John Pearce. John is teaching teachers how to set up their own blogs and wikis, so I figured this would be a good moment to add a quick blog entry myself. There are a few photos in the Flickr sidebar, and I’ll add more over the weekend.
G'day from sunny Queensland by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Thanks for another thought provoker, I was sitting in on your talk about multiple intelligences yesterday. It is SO good to be mixing with a large group of people who engage in conversations about IT without pulling faces or looking at you in that ‘I don’t understand geek speak’ kind of a way!
Its been great to meet you and read about what interests you. Obviously if I’m going to be leaving comments on other people’s blogs Mrs Jacobs won’t cut it for a nickname. I’ll get onto that immediately. I can see a big learning curve ahead.
I went to the IWB conference at Castle Hill last year (much closer to where I work in Blacktown as you could well imagine), and now I’m starting to wish I’d jumped on the plane to the Gold Coast!
I also went to John Pearce’s workshop last year on Web 2.0 tools; it’s what got me into the whole thing in the first place. Hopefully he had the benefit of a cabled network this year. The wireless in our schools (Diocese of Parramatta) is good, but it struggles when 30+ people click that “OK” button all at once! Once we pulled ourselves through the first grinding halt or two, we were away.
Some people question whether IWBs really are an effective tool and whether they support a contemporary understanding of how teaching and learning takes place (it was even a topic on “The Virtual Staffroom” if I remember correctly). I think the large workshop agenda for the conference shows that the board, just like the computer itself, opens up a whole world of opportunity to our students that they wouldn’t have otherwise to the same degree.
Let’s hope I can get a small group of colleagues to Melbourne next year.
Thanks Fiona, yes we got to be geeks together! Nice writeup on your wiki too. 😉
Hi Christen, enjoyed meeting you too, and thanks for the great chat at the cocktail party.
G’day Robert, yes John was on a wired connection, but still plagued by bandwidth issues alas! Still, he got through it.