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“Educating Leonardos” - multidisciplinary education

Helen speaks of the need for more creative thinkers, more innovators, and the need for schools/teachers to impart and encourage the joy of learning. She emphasises the new roles for teachers as facilitators, and the need to be inventive with the curriculum.

As far as attitudes are concerned, Helen speaks of the “open source attitude” - a positive attitude towards learning, developing, inventing, creating, sharing, hacking and innovating. A way to do this she asserts is cross-discipline or multi-disciplinary connections - for example bio-computing, and the development of organic machines. Helen advocates a managed approach to this, and spent some time talking about the future of education and the campus of the future.

Ewan McIntosh, talking about the need to explore emerging practice that matches the potential of emerging technologies - leading edge thinking, teaching and learning.

The 5 points he covered were

1. Audience - from classroom audience, or teacher as audience, to hundreds of thousands
2. Creativity - new publishing tools and options, animations, students sharing products online and for ipods and cell phones,
3. Differentiate - raising the bar; moving from page-based to digital media.
4. Authentic goals - authentic purpose and audience, leading to strong ownership and motivation.
5. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the teaching - an emphasis on old tools can be a barrier to innovative practice; computer games can make a difference.

Quote - “mobile phones need to come out of pockets and be on all day”

The conference is underway and I’m listening to Ewan, the first keynote speaker. Ewan is talking about digital holidaymakers. Audience members applauded when he gave his view on accuracy of digital immigrants/natives metaphor, no doubt due to the huge numbers of “older” teachers who are at the forefront of the digital innovations in their schools, and see the “digital natives” yet to catch up. Ewan ranges over flickr, youtube, blogging and more, posing questions about the time teenagers spend on creating online video to the time they spend on school activity.

Ulearn has started with a bang. Many teachers attended Pre-Conference workshops prior to the conference starting. Workshops were run on topics such as Inquiry learning, curriculum, Kidpix, Podcasting and Web 2 tools. I had a wonderful day with 20 switched on teachers ranging from Early Childhood, primary, secondary to tertiary. We spent the day looking at the importance of giving student voice in the classroom and the many ways you can help that happen. In the afternoon participants were given the chance to script and create their own podcasts and I thought I would share one with you.

Simon from Educating the Dragon created this vidcast inspired by the Show With Zefrank. Take a look for a bit of fun. This link will take you to podcast entitled “Can I go to Uloin?”.

A key component of ULearn07 will be the contribution by participants to the understanding and knowledge being created throughout the conference through the use of Web2.0 applications such as blogging, wikis and social bookmarking.

Delicious is a bookmarking service that is shared on the internet, where links to websites are sorted by tags. To see a full list of all the bookmarked websites related to Ulearn07, visit
http://del.icio.us/ulearn07 or http://del.icio.us/tag/ulearn07

You can add to these lists if you have a delicious account. First create an account, and if you come across a related website or blog entry, add it to your account using the ulearn07 tag. Include a description for others who may know nothing about the site. For those presenting workshop sessions at ULearn it will be helpful to delegates if the resources, links or blogs referred to in your presentation are bookmarked in delicious with the ulearn07, or ulearn tags.

For presenters who do not have their own Del.icio.us account please feel free to use the Conference account to bookmark sites relevant to the conference. To log in - User ulearn07 and Pwd skycity07. Information about how to do this and how to use other Web2.0 applications is outlined in the conference handbook.

Colin Gover and Maurice Young of Marina View School plan to provide participants with experience in how to make an MVTV show. The MVTV crew will take you through the process of making the show. Become a learner and join a group of children to help put the show together and learn lots of new skills to take back to your school so you can make your own TV show.

You will have the chance to be a producer, a scriptwriter, a camera person, a video editor, make the weather, this week in history, a presenter, sound technician or lighting crew and many more roles. Maurice and Colin, along with the MVTV crew, will show you how MVTV grew from small beginnings into what it is today. It is a show of the children, by the children, for the children. It is recorded live three days a week, shown to the entire school and uploaded to our school website to be viewed in NZ and the world.

Colin has been the Marina View School’s ICT Director for the last 7 years. He was co facilitator as Marina View School was an ICT Lead School and has presented workshops at conferences for many years and recently presented at the ACEC Conference in Australia. Maurice has been principal of Marina View School since 2004. From trusting that exciting things would develop, and supporting the ideas and the people, Maurice has seen how technology can truly make an impact on the Marina View School community.

The photographic record has always been an important element of the conference experience. We have set up a ULearn flickr site that will store photos of the conference. We will be uploading photos here regularly during the conference, and there is a link on the Ulearn07 conference website so you can check them at any time.

If you are uploading photos to your own flickr account, make sure they are tagged ulearn or ulearn07, so they will turn up in any search on Flickr that includes ulearn or ulearn07 as a search term. For example here is the flickr record of ulearn tagged photos at the moment, sorted with the most recent at the top.

Helen Baxter, keynote speaker for Thursday, is the Managing Directrix of Radio/NetTV production house Mohawk Media, and co-founder of digital label TMet Recordings. A Strategist for Creative Kiwi Community The Big Idea, she also shares a fortnightly ‘Virtual World’ slot with Chelfyn and Jim Mora for National Radio, New Zealand.

Kiwi born and British bred, Helen is also a Mentor on the ART Venture Programme. She writes a fortnightly column ‘The MsBehaviour Files’ for the Big Idea, with a slot on Kiwi FM and Creative Bizi NZ blog. Helen is a regular speaker with a focus on Collaboration, Education and Knowledge Management.

Helen has been involved in e-learning and Knowledge Management for over ten years. She was founding Editor of Knowledgeboard.com, a global community for Knowledge & Innovation, developed under the European Commission’s IST Programme. Voted ‘Best of the Web’ by the Harvard Business School in 2002, the KnowledgeBoard community went on to win ‘Best User Experience’ from the International Information Industry Awards in 2003.

To see some of Helen’s recent work, there are podcasts and mindmaps from recent keynotes at mohawk media, including the recent conference for media studies teachers.

There are numerous examples of blogs being used in our schools by teachers and students, and anyone new to blogging is likely to be keen to see what is already happening.

So 12 months ago we established a wiki, nzedublogs, where NZ bloggers can publish links to the blogs, podcasts, and video blogs that they are publishing.

There are now links to more than 30 teacher blogs and podcasts, and more than 30 student or classroom blogs (5 more were added today from Bucklands Beach Intermediate, including a blog used as parent newsletter), so there are many examples to browse. If you or your class are not there yet, it’s a wiki - so go ahead and publish the details yourself. And if you know of other blogs that could be included please encourage the bloggers to add their link to the list.

Kids Using Technology in Education (KUTE) is an annual event organised by The Auckland Computers in Education Society (ACES). On a Saturday morning every October, students congregate in a central Auckland school hall to share their learning through ICT with their school community. This year KUTE will be held onsite at Sky City during uLearn07. This is a highly interactive breakout where conference attendees will have the opportunity to talk directly with students from a number of Auckland schools who will be demonstrating, sharing and answering questions about their learning through a variety of ICT supported experiences. These include Game Making, Animation, Photo Editing, Blogs, ComicLife, Podcasting, TV Broadcasting, Inquiry Learning and also how students are effectively utilising an LMS to support their learning. Participating schools include Summerland Primary, Marina View Primary, Kristin School, Pt England School, Cornwall Park Primary and Baverstock Oaks School.

Read more about KUTE and other ACES events on their website at www.aces.org.nz