Advanced Teacher Institute Conference 2016

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 13.59.42Great EdTech CPD opportunity coming up in April – the Advanced Teacher Institute (ATI) Conference 2016 is about pushing the boundaries of technology in education. Taking place over the 14th and 15th of April, it will deliver some of the best CPD available. Check it all on on the conference website here.

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 14.01.35ATI2016 takes place over 2 days at Malvern College in Worcestershire, England. One-day tickets are also available. There are discounts available for groups and great options for those travelling from further afield, like free accommodation on the 13th… If one day is all you can make then there is a one day ticket available too.

I’ll be leading workshops on Designing and Delivering Creative Learning Experiences, Apps for Animation, and Creating Engaging Learning Environments – all with iPad. There are lots of other workshops led by amazing educators on Learning through Game Design, Lego Digital Storytelling, Showbie (not just for assessment), iOS Film Techniques and Augmented Reality – to name a few!

Book directly on the website hereRead more...

Mindshift – Great Professional Learning

Mindshift LogoI love the website MindShift. “MindShift explores the future of learning in all its dimensions. We examine how learning is being impacted by technology, discoveries about how the brain works, poverty and inequities, social and emotional practices, assessments, digital games, design thinking and music, among many other topics.”

MindShift is a wonderful resource for professional learning. If you’ve not found MineShift yet make it one of your goals to visit and explore in 2016! Follow MindShift on Twitter (@MindShiftKQED) or subscribe via email and you will find new articles and resources from their wealth of brilliant writers and commentators. By reading an article or two each week and taking time to think about and explore the topic in more detail you will expand your knowledge of contemporary educational issues and grow as an educator, no matter if you’ve been doing it for 3 weeks or 30 years!

Sometimes it’s an article that articulates just what you’ve been thinking, or something that provokes you to think deeper about an issue. They are easy to share with colleagues and will ensure that you keep learning about learning!

Bay CuriousInteresting Find! – MindShift works in collaboration with KQED, Public Media for … Read more...

On play, learning and technology

Last night I read a wonderful article. I found the article because Cris Guenter shared it on Twitter via Roxana Marachi and I’d searched on Twitter for ‘curiosity + pedagogy’. Just that search alone popped up a bunch of educators I wanted to follow. Twitter is just amazing for professional development. Anyway, the article was called “The Pedagogy of Play and the Role of Technology in Learning” by Aran Levasseur and you can read it here.

I’ve been thinking about the article all day and feel compelled to share it’s findings and add a few thoughts of my own.

1) “One doesn’t read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to develop strategy before playing the game [Civilisation]. One starts by playing. This is true for all videogames.” Agree.

2) “You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you’re supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory.” Agree. These two sentences, for me, encompass the development of a child. Technology-wise, as part of the generation brought up on the Atari (hardly any buttons, wood effect, joysticks, that’s all I remember), Sinclair ZX … Read more...

The most important thing is a person

Steve Jobs once said: 

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.

I woke up this morning, checked Twitter and found an article posted today in the Guardian by Dylan William (@dylanwilliam) called ‘Love the one you’re with: improving professional development in schools.’ Passionate about professional development, my curiosity was piqued and I read on. The third paragraph hit the mark on something we as teachers know to be true…

Although the differences between schools are small, the differences in teachers are not. Teachers vary greatly in their ability to teach students what they need to learn. If you are taught by the best teacher in a group of 50, you will learn in six months what students taught by the average teacher will take a year to learn. If you are taught be the least effective teacher in that group, that same learning will take you two years.

In high school I was taught by an amazing, inspiring music teacher whose classroom, concert hall, theatre, wherever we were, was a fun place to be. I learned a lot … Read more...