EduTech is the biggest education technology conference in the southern hemisphere with over 8000 people gathered in Sydney for the 2017 edition. So what is on offer? Inspiration, ideas and a massive expo with just about every angle of tech covered.
Here is a summary of Day 1:
Here is a summary of Day 1:
Carol Dweck - Opening Keynote - Growth mindset culture and strategy
- There is a decline in growth mindset as students get older Prof Dweck asked "how do we help people to remain learners".
- Not only individuals but groups or organisations can have a fixed or growth mindset.
- Notice your fixed mindset, acknowledge it and coach it. We all like to think we have a growth mindset but we all have some fixed mindset lurking around!
- How do we deal with failure? One group had a "failure of the year award" for a team who learned the most from an unsuccessful project
- Mindsets are dynamic - not all or nothing
Brad Loiselle - BetterU
- Brad was inspired by poverty in India he saw and set up a company that delivers learning opportunities to anyone http://www.betteru.ca/
- He described it as the Uber + Amazon of education
- Technology can be a great equaliser in education
- Ghandi - "My life is my message". Powerful!
Mark Scott - A vision for K-12 Education
- A well-reasoned and articulate message on the future we need to move towards in education
- A great summary here from Chelsea Attard
- Scott spoke of the future our students today will inherit and the need to educate them for this future with future-focused skills
- He spoke of the glacial change in curriculum development (the next speaker said he would settle for glacial change as we have had none since 1957)
- NSW is ripe for experimenting on what works and being able to scale innovative ideas that work
- AI is the new electricity and its advances will produce spin-off effects the magnitude of what we saw with the invention of electricity
- The greatest thing a child could leave school with is a growth mindset
- Our students need more than "transient enthusiasms" - tech tools that burn bright and fade away with time
- He spoke of an initiative school called Aurora College that is totally online and delivers courses to students across the state of NSW
- In STEM subjects more girls have a fixed mindset than boys
- We need to do some proper research on the effects of technology, not just rely on ad-hoc methods
- "The future of Australia is not what we dig up out of the ground, it is the people that walk the land"
Prof. Louise Stoll - Leading professional learning communities
A great talk with very cleverly weaver Beatles song lyrics that tied the whole theme together "I get by with a little help from my friends"
- Need to work together and de-privatise practice
- Not evidence-based practice but more like evidence-informed
- Schools have a lot of policies and documents, but what about a policy or common understanding about learning? This is what students at one school came up with when challenged to define learning:
- We need to get OUT of the comfort zone - what is one thing you have done this term to push yourself out of your comfort zone? Without going into the panic zone!
Kim Maksiminovic - "But I'm no good at IT"
- Students today may be savvy with social media but this does not equate to savvy use for enhancing their learning. Frequency of access does not equate to responsible, informed use of technology for learning.
- She spoke of the purposeful use of technology, aligned to school vision and mission statements
- We need to model learning to our students
- Her ICT technology integration model rightly involves students and support staff. I am working on adding parents to the mix also!
Greg Whitby - schooling in a 1 to 1 world
A passionate and informative talk on the need for change in education - now!
- Soft skills (collaboration, communication, creativity etc) are NOT soft, they are hard!
- We watched a video of a teacher at High Tech High - he has a completely different idea than most of us - each day he doesn't know what he is going to do because it is the students that set the agenda for their learning, he is there to facilitate and guide and help
- Although we have many buzz words (PBL, STEM, CBL) they are based on experential learning driven by an enquiry cycle
- We don't need improvement in schools, we need transformation
- How can we adapt our schools to cater for the world students will inhabit?
- Greg spoke about a new school in planning - experiential learning, driven by enquiry, connected to the working community
- The radical urgency of the now - kids deserve change now
Angela Maiers - liberating genius
I must admit I had a big problem with this talk. We were told we absolutely MUST tell every student they are a genius and get them to believe it. Without defining what genius was, the content had no basis. Some definitions include:
a person endowed with extraordinary mental superiority
A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge
Any definition I saw does not imply that EVERY person is a genius which was the core argument of the talk. I can understand the need to instil and develop confidence and self-esteem, but I have a problem with characterising every person as a genius.
I am not a genius and I still have self-worth and believe I can do good things in the world.
Einstein, Gauss, Newton, Bach, Mozart, Picasso - they are geniuses.
Microsoft session - disruptive technologies
I must admit I love these "over the horizon" type sessions that blow you mind with what is coming in a few years..
- Hololens - 3D virtual worlds for medical, forensics
- Holoportation… literally a hologram you can see with a VR set... who could you bring in?
- Chat bot - built by Year 8 students
- Real time language translation … huge implications for international students
- PowerPoint add-in translator - as you speak the text appears in whatever language you decide. A viewer of the presentation can choose the language they want to read the text in
- Blind man with glasses developed a translator visualiser that would speak what it saw to him
Clickview - Flipped learning
As this is my passion, I loved seeing how Clickview is embracing this paradigm and supporting embedded questions in videos and hosting flipped videos.
Brendan spoke about a number of different ways teachers could record a video:
- Screencast from your device
- Video of you at a whiteboard
- Using a Lightboard (HUGE wish list item!)
- Using a document camera
Microsoft - Travis Smith
- A focus on Teams and a new EDU version coming soon that will replace Microsoft Classroom. This version will include Class Notebook, plus the new Whiteboard app and integration with Kahoot.
- We saw a demo of a new add-in for OneNote that enabled searching for and embedding of learning resources through an integrated search in OneNote (not out yet!)
- aka.ms/meetteamsedu
Abdul Chohan - Belief Leads Change
- The most expensive words in education: "We have always done it that way"
- Learn form the past to prepare students for the future
- We used to collect books and mark them and give them back a few days later. Technology can enhance feedback and make it more immediate and personal eg audio feedback
- Need some consistency and some non-negotiables, if not then staff will just use anything and this can cause confusion
There was so much more! Some great conversations with vendors and possible solutions to issues. Overall - I feel connected to so many of the core ideas shared.