keynotes

Using cooliris as a presentation tool, Derek stood on the edge today to present what he called his ‘most risky’ presentation to date to model what he believes in.

richardmillwood #ulearn09 CoolIris shows the edges of adjacent slides – helps us see overview and reflect on what just went past

Derek has the ability to gaze into the future and weave a story of the past and the present and lead us into a wondering about the possibilities of the future.

“100 years ago in the life of my grandmother, she had no anticipation of the impact of the sea, the air and road travel and of the impact of electricity in our lives. We have an enormous potential ahead of us now with things such as NEN and the advanced network for example. We are going to see changes ahead…”

Derek discussed his involvement in the Horizon report and looking to the future of what is ahead of us.

gmacmanus #ulearn09 the horizon report is interesting reading, www.nmc.org/news/nmc/7292

Augmented reality, cloud computing, open content, smart objects and devices (location aware but connected with a physical environment)

sirchriss #ulearn09  watching a demo of what will be web 3.0 – augmented reality. contextual info

Open content: As teachers we grab bits from all over the place to make the resources we need to help our students learn. More and more people are thinking about who owns content and creative commons licencing is moving this forward allowing us to share and mix content.

Example of smart objects is siftables

juscruzin Siftables – check them out here too: http://siftables.com/ #ulearn09

rachelboyd Siftables as shown by @dwenmoth http://bit.ly/gveEf #ulearn09 I WANT SOME!!!

Derek brought people in to talk to us demonstrating the power of audio conferencing for education. Russell Burt and two of his students at Point England School told us the story of how they connected with Will Smith to contribute to a song/poem he was writing about tolerance. You can read all about this on their blogs:

http://pesleodenp.blogspot.com/2009/04/getting-jiggy-with-will-smith.html

http://manaiakalani.blogspot.com/2009/05/kiwi-kids-meet-will-smith.html

They also told us about another of their connections, “It was on the morning of the 5th of August that we had another one of those special video conferences.  This time our special video conference was with a famous paleontologist and Geologist who’s name was Hamish Campbell.” You can read more on their blog

http://pesselap.blogspot.com/2009/08/hamish-campbell-very-clever-person.html

We also heard about other ground breaking technologies such as wikieducator and KAREN. It was interesting learning about these ground breaking technologies via video conferencing after such a powerful example of how video conferencing can be used for learning.

You can read more about Derek’s presentation on his blog >>

Digital handout available at : www.stager.org/ulearn

This blog post has been written with help from the twitter network. These ‘tweets’ are included as indents. Take part in this back channel by adding #ulearn09 to your tweets. You can view the stream at http://twitter.com/#search?q=ulearn09

This session was entitled Ten things to do with a laptop and was inspired by Seymour papert’s presentation 20 things to do with a computer. You can read the Papert’s paper on the link above and see how your school measures up now 40 years on.

1:1 computing is not about hardware, it’s all about software. Software determines what you do and what you do determines what you want.

What do kids do with computers in your school? Are we helping children use computers in ways that help extend their capacity? Gary is arguing for children to use computers in real ways for real reasons.

richardmillwood #ulearn09 We humans ‘notice’ things, computers help us to manage things, but we manage things.

10 things to do with a laptop:

Write a novel

gibbisons #ulearn09 – @garystager’s 10 things to do with a laptop No1. Write a Novel (write better, more, differently, podcasting, research)

Share your knowledge

Keamac “You can lead kids to the internet but you can’t make them think”  Gary Stager  #ulearn09 – so true.

Tougher questions

eFacilitator Access to primary sources is possible via internet instead of just talking about things #ulearn09

Make sense of data (use primary sources)

Westleyf #ulearn09 Kids will have access but will yearn for structure – that is the place of educators.

gmacmanus #ulearn09 hearing stager speak, reminds me of a history teacher who would start his lessons with national radio speeches from WWII

sirchriss nice ideas of putting “stuff” in context. Don’t make a work sheet – go get primary sources. #ulearn09

Westleyf #ulearn09 Testing content is dead as it is freely available to all -  what can we test that you can’t be written on the back of a bottle

Design a video game (not just consume them)

debh2u RT @jnxyz: #ulearn09 Gary Stager keynote- luv ths ‘kids cn do real work’ ie. Do we expect enuf from R students? (No – we help too much)

Build a killer robot (even in kindergarten)

sirchriss Like the vision – but how to balance it against the  dreadful demand of state based assessment? #ulearn09

richardmillwood #ulearn09 the human species is symbiotic with technology

davein2it kids Learn time tables but never get to multiply.  #ulearn09 priceless

Think outside the square with this. Robotics can be used to bring a ballerina or dancing teddy bear to life, this is not just the traditional realm of boys.

The conversation on Twitter was lively and thought provoking during this keynote. The back channel provided ways for ideas to be explored, extended, recorded and remembered. For me the take away message of this keynote was that ICT is not window dressing, we need to go deeper with our students and we need to expect more, both of them and of ourselves.

What was your take home message?

The keynote videos are now all available on the ULearn08 site. You can watch Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach discussing the ways in which we need to equip our students for working in a networked age. Karen Sewell, John Hattie and Rod Oram examine the needs of 21st century learners and what more schools could be doing to move our students forward. Steven Carden talks about possibilities for business and education partnerships for the 21st century. This includes details of a project he founded, First Foundation, where a number of New Zealand businesses provide scholarships to support students with academic potential who are financially disadvantaged. Derek Wenmoth (chair), Tania Coutts, Beverly Kaye, Carolyn Stuart, and Linda Tame look at the integration of ICT from a variety of perspectives including a powerful message from the early childhood sector that children there are already being equipped with skills at that level so we need to be building on this in other education sectors.

There are also a range of wikis that were developed as part of ULearn08 that you might want to check out. Lenva Shearing put together a Getting tricky with wikis wiki set up in Wikispaces that gives you many tricks to move beyond the basics of wiki design. You can learn how to do things like making a table of contents on wiki pages or finding out how to easily add your students as members of the wikispaces. Make sure you also look at the links on the home page to Lenva’s other resource wikis.

Suzie Vesper from CORE Education ran a pre-conference workshop on Blogs, wikis and the online tools that make them pop. You can find the basics of what web 2.0 means and the differences between blogs and wikis and comparisons of some of the major online providers. You can find many examples of how these are being used in education and a table of 44 tools that can be used in conjunction with blogs and wikis.

Want to see some reflections from teachers of their experiences at ULearn? Have a look at the Nga-Taonga cluster wiki page where attendees have put together their thoughts around the presentations and sessions that they attended.

Get to know ULearn08’s keynotes and spotlight presenters before the conference by reading and subscribing to their blogs. They are listed in the ULearn08 blogroll (to the left of this post).