The final day of ISTE

By the Wednesday, I was feeling really comfortable with the conference. Here is what I did:-

Educational Blogging: Flattening Classroom Walls with Kathleen Morris, from Australia and Linda Yollis, from USA. If anyone doubts the power that blogging has, I hope they came to this session. It was full of tips, advice and projects that resulted from this great partnership, which started as a comment on the other’s class blog.  See their presentation and resources.

Here are their top tips for success:

• Start small – publish once a week, work with one other person
• Prioritise – crowded curriculums
• Integrate – look for ways to map to work in the curriculum as time is a premium
• Network – find a friend as it can be overwhelming.
• Have fun – so many unexpected outcomes along the way.

At the end of this session, a group of edubloggers remained for the photo shoot. Can you identify them all?

- Returning to the bloggers lounge for a break and to catch up with similar minded souls, I was able to say goodbye to Suzie Nestico, one of my Flat Classroom Project friends from the USA.

Kinderchat with Heidi I then wandered across to my next chosen session, when I noticed Steve Hargadon and Peggy George, two of my most special online colleagues.

Steve Hargadon and Peggy George

Steve was recording a young teacher, Heidi Echternacht,  presenting The Tale of Two Kindergarten Teachers and the Power of a PLN in the early years, including  skypeplay and #kinderchat. Love the learning moments that are available at ISTE. Listen to the recording. See the other great unplugged presentations. 

Gail Lovely‘s session on Are Tablets a Prescription for Learning? Evaluating Apps for Early Apps for Early Learning. This was a great session, full of practical ways to evaluate the apps to be used and showing how the apps are used. I will dedicate a post to this session and share some of Gail’s wonderful resources and sharing.

Windows 8:- as I still like my PC, I was interested in the look of the new look Windows 8 and was suitably impressed.

Pirates Play and Videoconferencing Between sessions, I was roped in by a pirate in the Play lounge to try out videoconferencing and was so glad that I did as I was able to have several people both f2f and virtual helping me with the use of polycom equipment. We have it in our school but it is not fully used yet.. However that made me almost late for the next session with Steve Hargadon.

I had noticed a tweet by Steve, requesting people for his panel on “Learning 2.0: How social media is changing learning”. Being a topic of high personal interest, I volunteered should there still be a need to fill the gaps. And I was in!

The panel consisted of innovative leaders including David Walick, Brian Crosby and three others. This was very exciting for me to be on and I was proud to represent the female perspective of social learning.

Closing keynote – was a fascinating session  Dr. WillieSmits fromDeforestACTION together with Liza Heavener and  Chris Gauthier showing the true power that technology can bring to learning and ways in which it can make a difference to our environment. Great way to close ISTE 2012.

Closing Keynote

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