Wow! #Digicon15! My head exploded.

What a brilliant event with SO much going on in so many areas!

I need to reflect but my head is a jungle so I’m just going to get down anything and everything I am thinking here and see where it takes me.

These are my main takeaways and the things taking up space in my head!

My own presentation: Student Centred Learning in a Tech Rich Environment (with @ErinMacNamara)

• I am super proud of myself for diving in headfirst to a terrifying experience that turned out okay and was actually kind of fun. Thanks for the push @BecSpink.
• I have something valuable to contribute in my own tiny area of expertise. I presented on something I know about and felt comfortable to teach others about it. At first their blank stares were off-putting but after a while people started taking notes and even asked questions that I could answer with ease and eventually I felt like… “Oh… I DO know what I’m talking about”.
• Here are the slides if you want to peruse.
• I liked presenting and want to start having a go at doing it more often. Maybe some more Teachmeets. Heck, maybe I’ll run for president.

Keynote – Hamish Curry

• “Curriculum is a guidebook, not a rulebook”. It’s so easy to get caught up in what the curriculum says that the meaningful learning can get lost. For me, I think this hinges on more of an inquiry approach across all areas of teaching which makes it student driven and most likely will tick off a lot of boxes along the way. This sounds very nice but it’s hard work and something I really want to improve on.
• “Real things, real places, real people. If you can’t get those things in, you probably shouldn’t be teaching it.” Wow. This is such a great way of explaining that it’s important to make things come alive for students and to make it relevant. Should be second nature for teachers but I find once you’ve done something a few times it’s easy for it to get dry if you’re not careful (speaking from my 4th year of grade 2s in a row… sigh).

Keynote – Celia Coffa 

• Get into Quadblogging! Get the kids connected!

Explore the World with Google – Sam Vardanega

Awesome resources and ideas of what to do with them! There is so much potential in these few tools.

• Tour Builder – Storytelling moving around the world, attach a picture and story/description for each location and build a journey by moving between each place https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/

• My Maps  – Pinning notes and pics on certain places, make a shared map. I will be using this for narrative setting descriptions this week! https://www.google.com/maps/d/

• Google Treks – Street view but for not streets e.g. Ocean, mountains, canyons https://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetview/treks/

Don’t be a Textbook & Keynote – Corrie Barclay

• Lots of reading into frameworks and models for learning to do!  Just some of them… new pedagogies for deep learning, 6C’s, The Solo Taxonomy, TPACK, ACOT2 Framework, ATC21S Framework, CCR, Competencies for 21st Century Learning.
  I always feel a bit behind when people talk about frameworks and models for learning. I am so busy at work all the time that I don’t feel like I have time to look into the ‘big picture stuff’ like this. This means I often feel like I am just ‘doing’ rather than ‘doing with intention’. I want to better understand some of the frameworks behind educational design new thinking to allow me to think more broadly and make some impacting changes to my teaching, and I think some of these that Corrie suggested are a good start. He was really interesting to listen to and challenged me to think bigger.
• “What would irresistible learning look like?” Corrie said this was cliche but I’ve never heard it before and I like it!

Disruptive Thinking in Education – Anthony Speranza

Well this one still has me floored. It was simultaneously the most interesting and frustrating session I went to. There was so much to get out of it, but it all felt too big to properly process. Anthony himself said that he was still getting his head around the concept of Disruptive Thinking and what it means… glad it wasn’t just me!

• Changing trends in what is needed in education… from content to dispositions. Teaching and modelling skills and thinking habits rather than content and knowledge is something I think I am getting much better at with experience. It is something I am working to get across in my team and sometimes this is difficult. This session reinforced that I am on the right track with encouraging this with my colleagues.
• “Looking at the rate of change in the world and the rate of change in schools, they’re not even close to correlating.” Most classrooms I see/have seen look exactly the same as they would have 200 years ago, except that now we arrange our tables in groups, not lines (sometimes not even this). The teacher is the dispenser of information, the students are the receivers. We have the knowledge to correct this, but not the… what? What are we missing that is stopping this from changing? Time… motivation… disinterest… fear… pressure… close-mindedness… set-in-our-ways-ness??
• Time as currency. Could I do this maths in 20 minutes instead of one hour? Is this writing going to need more time allocated to allow it to develop? Should we work on this over a week or a month instead of moving on to the next topic?
• What does disruption look like in my teaching? Bearing in mind that I’m still not totally sure about this concept, I think I’m doing just a little bit of disruption:
  • 1:1 iPads as a necessary and well-leveraged tool for learning
  • Blogs as a way to connect students with the world, still a long way to go here! (I’m thinking Twitter, Skype, Quadblogging)
  • “Do sharks have saliva?” “I don’t know, guys. Let’s Google it.” Teaching students how to access information that is at their fingertips, teaching them to evaluate its validity, teaching them the skills needed to decode and comprehend and assess what they find out.
  • Starting to trickle some coding into my teaching
  • Learning as the journey, not the destination… problem solving, valuing mistakes as a learning opportunity, developing resilience and nurturing curiosity.

Permission to Innovate (Spark Talk) – Adrian Camm

• “The value of a curriculum is as a framework used to design meaningful learning experiences for students”. Time to get your heads out of the box, teachers. We’ve been told from day one that the AusVELS is designed as a guideline, so we need to stop treating it as a textbook. This might be scary for some, but we need to design learning experiences that reach students on a level that makes them suddenly take the wheel and take control and direction over their own learning. I’m pretty sure that’s where the valuable learning is at.
• “This card entitles me to try something new. If it doesn’t work as well I as I wanted I will be free on criticism for my efforts. I’ll continue to pursue new ways to help my students be successful.” I would love to see my school be transformed by something as trusting, challenging and terrifying as this! In a school ripe with freshie teachers, we soak up a lot of learning sponge-style, and we’re provided with some great PD and introduced to some excellent methods as we need it, but sometimes I feel as though because we are somewhat fed what we need to know, we lose the onus to push ourselves and take control of our own learning, and begin to see improvement as something that is expected of us, that just takes up extra time at staff meetings or causes jelly legs before P&D time. I would love to see teachers with a passion, who discover something new that captures their imagination and try it out off their own bat, with time allocated to doing it throughly and in a considered way. And WITHOUT a bunch of grumpy faces in the staff room being judgemental about someone who just wants to improve their craft and transform learning for their students.

First up on my to do list:

• Get blogging more with my grade! Make it valuable! Begin with Quadblogging.
• Start a Twitter account with this year’s class, to connect with experts and other grades, to share and look outside our four walls.
• Think of time as currency – be more flexible and smart with my planning, according to need.
• Read about ‘student choice about how to learn’ (any article suggestions for me?)
• Look more closely at the digital technologies curriculum and map it against the curriculum with my team. Implement lessons and blog about them as a reflection.
• Get reading! Models, frameworks, inquiry, disruptive thinking… anything! Just take some initiative and learn something new and try it out!
• Do my own blogging… to reflect and to share. My own workshop taught me that I have something to offer to the teaching community which made me feel all warm and fuzzy.