I have just returned from the ELH11 conference in Lorne where I learnt so much it will take quite some time to process. The conference was excellent with some brilliant Keynote speakers and great discussions and show and tell sessions as well as a few hands on learning activities. The theme was Revolution and discussions were around whether or not there was one and if so, now what?
The standout for me was Jason Ohler who talked about revolutionising the teaching of writing by teaching students media and using Art as the fourth R. His students ended up writing more than they would in a normal English classroom and obviously learnt more about their subject. They produced well-planned and thoughtful responses to their own questions and then learnt about how to use music and image to tell their stories. This is really learning for now and the future, not learning for what has already been. Students are definitely high level consumers of media and the shift to making them high level (and critical) producers of media is a natural one, but one that most of us have not done. I know that I will be looking more closely at this as an English teacher as the value of it is that students create multimodal texts and learn about all of the stages of narrative along the way. Obviously this does help them learn the skills that schools value.
The twitter feed for this was going crazy on Tuesday morning and I know several of us want to order his books for our school libraries. Jason presented a Keynote and then a smaller group discussion at which it was standing room only.
More on this to come….
#elh11 on twitter.
Tag Archives: conference
ELH11 day 3
Jason Ohler was the absolute standout from this conference. He is teaching kids to write media narratives and his work is inspiring. More on this to come….
ELH11
The conference is about revolutions and attempts to deal with the idea od the many ‘revolutions’ around using technology for learning. These ideas include classroom practice, pedagogy, teacher professional learning, coaching and administration. The keynotes have been excellent, standouts for me have been Diana Laufenberg and Bruce Dixon talking about innovative classroom practice which puts the learner at the centre of everything. A memorable quote is that teachers should just ‘shutup’ and let the learning go on.
Hi to everyone at VATE and HTAV
howtoblogThis is a post from the conference.
VATE and HTAV Co-ordinator's Conference
I
am very much looking forward to this conference. I am presenting on using wikis and blogs for classes and hopefully we get more bloggers, wiki-ites and tweeters out there. If you haven’t yet booked the link is here.
I look forward to seeing everyone and to going to some inspiring presentations.
Future didnt happen
Shame that Futurelab cancelled their presentation at BETT. They are an amazing example of what us possible in education and I really wanted to see them. Disappointed.
Digital Literacy at BETT
@Libwithattitude (Bev Humphrey) talked at BETT about getting students writing using a variety of online tools. She used twitter hashtags to create online stories that were collaborative, even between schools across the world. Bev described the high level of engagement students elicited when writing without realizing it. She also talked about blogging, using voicethreads and getting authors such as Tommy Donvaband, author of the Scream Street books, to skype into her classes after contacting them on twitter. She was incredibly passionate.
Digital Competencies at BETT
Drew Buddie, Head of ICT Royal Masonic School – and VI Form students @digitalmaverick defines five key eCompetencies, or digital competencies that students need when they leave school. He surveyed university lecturers and found that they wanted advanced skills from students in using online tools that schools were not yet teaching.
Students surveyed believed that they only needed ‘Office’ competencies, such as the use if Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This leaves a shortfall of skills which may affect students’ first year of university.
The competencies are as follows:
Managing- personal space- understanding how to maintain a safe and visible online presence and controlling who sees their data.
Collaborating – sharing and collaborating- working with others online, both known and unknown using tools such as twitter and google docs for example.
Presence- digital footprint- maintaining a digital footprint that presents an image of themselves and understanding how others will interpret their digital presence. The skills to clean this up if necessary and the understanding of the ways that employers and universities may research them online.
Consuming and finding out- this is he one that student feel most familiar with. It is the use of online tools to research. They do, however, need to be taught to use more than Google!
Judgement- alternative ways of doing things- the knowledge of he wealth of resources ( changing daily!) and the ability to use their own judgement to decide what would be the best tool for the job.
Sent from Louise’s iPhone
QR codes
I’ve been playing around with QR codes to see how schools could use them. At the conference using my iPhone I can scan people’s contact details using the code created by them just by pointing my phone at them. I’m using a QR code reader and creator on my phone which could be a great way of getting info to students. Good for short task descriptions, treasure hunts etc.
BETT
Going to see Futurelab, professor Heppel and NATE.
