After my Edutech presentation in Brisbane in June I was interviewed by Corinne Campbell for the Teachers’ Education Review (TER) Podcast. It was posted on their site last week and I spent some time listening to me sound quite knowledgeable about topics related to digital citizenship, the importance of our students understanding what curation means in today’s world and the approaches we are taking at my school with our LMS (Learning Management System) and Google Apps.
Part of the interview was spent discussing the importance of schools committing funds to infrastructure to support whole school technology initiatives. Corrine remarked in the commentary after my interview that she’d never really heard people discussing this in depth. This is a conversation that needs to be had at every school looking to make large scale change with technology initiatives to support learning. Without a robust network supporting the introduction of web based LMS’ and cloud based technologies like Google Apps you have no hope of seeing adoption become widespread. Teachers need reliable infrastructure to ensure everything ‘just works’, and school administrations need to provide funding and staff to make this happen.
Thanks to Corinne and Cameron for posting the podcast on the TER site. To hear my interview, go to 40min 19sec in when it begins. The entire podcast is worth a listen, with timecodes listed below.
Timecodes:
00:00 – Opening
01:19 – Intro
10:13 – Off Campus with Dan Haesler
19:12 – Education in the News
37:09 – AITSL’s Teacher Feature
40:19 – Main Feature, Interview with Jenny Luca & discussion about technology in education
Well, this was my first visit to sunny (and very warm for this time of year!) Brisbane for the EduTECH National Congress. Who wouldn’t be excited to have been asked to present when you’re sharing the space with the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, Conrad Wolfram and Sugata Mitra?
I was excited, but I have to say nervous too, especially when I discovered after registering on the afternoon before the event that I was presenting in the Great Hall. Honestly, I hadn’t looked at the program all that closely other than to know the time I was presenting, so it was rather daunting to discover that my session was in a venue larger than any stage I’d presented on in the past.
My Keynote was “Digital Literacy: guiding students (and teachers) to develop their 21st century skills.” I tried very hard to take much of my own experience and apply it to this presentation. For years I was focused on my own classroom and as Head of Library, at the knowledge base of the classrooms I was able to influence. In my position now as Director of ICT and eLearning, it’s my job to make possible large scale change across the school campus.
It’s a different proposition, because in a position like this you make decisions about the operation of the school network and the platforms that are used. I do a lot of reading to support my understanding of change and what is needed to make meaningful impact, and Michael Fullan’s Stratopshere had a passage that had staying power for me.
Over the last 18 months, I’ve had this at the forefront of my thinking. It’s relatively easy to get the early adopters accepting new platforms and running with them, but a much harder proposition to get the late majority and laggards coming with you. You need to try to fulfill Michael’s criteria and think hard about what you need to do to make technology available so that it sits in the background making things possible, but not being a learning outcome in itself. As I said in the presentation, technology should not be an event in the classroom, it should act as a facilitator for effective learning outcomes.
*Thanks Bill Ferriter for your wonderful CC slides – used a few in this presentation! Mentioned you too. 🙂
My presentation is available to view in my wiki, you just need to sign in with an email to gain access. I’ll let you take a look and make your own judgement about it’s effectiveness. I was overwhelmed from the response it got on Twitter – I couldn’t keep up with the stream in the 30- 45 minutes after I left the stage. To be honest, it was validating. So much of the time I’ve voluntarily invested in networks was represented in that presentation. It felt like a hell of a lot of thinking and hard work had paid off.
Having the opportunity to see Sir Ken Robinson speak in person was without doubt a highlight for everyone who attended. He presents with such finesse, integrating important messages about the state of education in a world where testing regimes seem to dominate education systems worldwide, with carefully placed humorous interludes that win the audience over with their natural charm. He is the kind of speaker you could listen to all day. Ahh, to perfect that technique… And take a look at this video he showed of the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra as an example of creativity in circumstances where you might think it wouldn’t flourish. I dare you not to tear up…
I attended the conference dinner where we were once again entertained and enlightened by Sir Ken. And yes, I behaved like an edu-groupie and managed to get a photo taken with him. No longer a lame claim to fame!
I was very impressed with Conrad Wolfram speaking about the need to transform Maths education and acknowledge the relevance of Computational Mathematics in schools today. Here are some of my tweets from the session:
If you’ve never visited the Wolfram Alpha site, you must take a visit. Then take a look at Conrad’s site where he makes the case for change to the way we teach Maths today (see video below – appears on this site). I’m not a Maths teacher, but I have a son finding it very difficult to access the Math curriculum as it stands now. Conrad’s ideas sound like Project Based Learning (PBL) for Maths, and it makes sense to me.
I thought Greg Whitby had some practical and important things to say about making change happen as did Matt Richards who didn’t hold back when presenting to IT Managers about moving your school into the cloud computing space. Judy O’Connell has a wealth of knowledge and did a great job informing the audience about what is necessary to prepare for the impact of Web 3.0. Visit Judy’s blog where her presentation is embedded for viewing.
What is always a highlight for a conference of this size is the opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones (who are most often people you’ve met on Twitter but need a conference like this for a face to face meeting.) I loved seeing Sue Waters, Annabel Astbury, Helen Bremer, Joyce Valenza, Judy O’Connell, Judith Way, Graham Wegner, Matt Richards, Meredith Ebbs and Matt Esterman again, and was thrilled to get the opportunity to meet Paul Luke, Leigh Murphy and Corinne Campbell for the first time. Leigh Murphy interviewed me after my session for the Scootle Community and you can see it below. (my interview is towards the end)
Special mention needs to go to Matt Esterman who got the ball rolling for Teachmeet presentations that happened at four different times in the main Trade Hall where an area had been set aside for them. It was wonderful to see classroom practitioners sharing their practice with conference participants and opening their eyes to the vibrant education community being forged in informal networks throughout Australia today.
Thank you to the organisers of the event for bringing together such an interesting array of speakers and for managing to draw such large numbers to an event about educational technology. Thanks also for giving me an opportunity to air my thinking. Like I said, a validating experience.
It’s been a HUGE week for me, but not nearly as huge as the week that John Green has had with the release today of ‘The Fault in our Stars‘ worldwide.
I find John absolutely fascinating. He’s not only fascinating, he’s entirely relevant to the subject I teach, ‘Language of our Times’. This Year 9 elective is designed to help students understand the nature of communication in today’s world. My students are currently completing a task that required them to work collaboratively to research John’s use of social media channels to grow his audience. The second part of the task then required them to individually produce a feature article about John’s methods that could appear in a digital newspaper. They need to think about the headline, lead and the structure of the paragraphs to follow. As they write, they needed to hyperlink to relevant content and find suitable pictures and YouTube videos that would complement the written text.
What I’ve seen them produce so far has been fantastic. I’m pretty blown away by the skills some of them have to write with the kind of conversational tone that works well in a feature article where your subject matter is someone who uses the Internet to good effect like John Green does.
Why was my week huge? Well, I presented at EduTECH in Brisbane. I’ll write a post over the weekend that explores what happened there. I’ll leave you with this though.
Yep, it was huge. Not sure I’ll ever see my name trending ahead of Tony Abbott again. 😉
I listen to a radio program on the drive home from work some days where they have a segment called ‘Lame claim to fame’. I love it. People ring in with their tenuous links to celebrities and the like and claim their five minutes of fame in what is always a humorous, light hearted segment. It makes me laugh. In the car. By myself.
So the other day, when I saw that twelve pages separated me from the great Sir Ken Robinson in the EduTECH Official Showguide, I immediately thought, here’s my lame claim to fame. So I posted this on Twitter.
When I re-read it later, it occurred to me that the EduTECH organisers and Australian Teacher Magazine may be thinking that I’m making light of my inclusion in the guide. It might appear (as can be wont to do when you’re communicating in 140 character bites) that I was being sarcastic when I said this was a career highlight.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me state quite clearly , this IS a career highlight for me.
I feel very honoured to be selected for inclusion in the guide, alongside other local speakers Dan Haesler, Anne Weaver, Peter Evans, Karin Gilbert and yes, the overseas presenter and highly esteemed Sir Ken Robinson, who resides 12 pages in front of my piece. I’m very grateful to the organisers who contacted me and asked if I could share my thinking and allow me the opportunity share my thoughts in a publication that will be seen by many.
Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book in recent times called ‘Lean in‘, where she posits that women need to take their place at the table like men do, and lean in and make their voice heard. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I’m not someone who holds back on their thinking. I think I represent women well by making my voice heard in networks that are often dominated by male voice and by being a Keynote speaker who can hold her own and inspire people to take the leap to make moves to change their thinking and practice.
However, I don’t think I ‘Lean in’ enough. I don’t often retweet kind things people say about my presentations. I thank people, and I sometimes favourite their comments, but I’m loathe to retweet. I think I’ve done it once or twice and I’ve always felt uncomfortable after the fact, like I’m showing off and parading myself around for everyone to see. I don’t have a page in this blog full of testimonials from conference participants. And yet, I see it happening all the time in the networks I inhabit, often by men who are occupying the scene and taking their place at many tables.
Maybe my tweet should have read:
Really pleased to be featured in the EduTECH Official Showguide (and only 12 pages away from the great @SirKenRobinson)
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 