Ok, India… here I come

Wow, what a month. I am sitting rather comfortably in the lounge at Auckland Airport waiting for the first leg of my flight to Mumbai, India.
The last two weeks have been filled with preparing the 12 x 1.5 hour sessions for the workshop I am running. I had thought that my knowledge of the IB [...]

Learning styles and learning tools

Today was the first day of the 4 day process that we are working on with this school district.
The Morning saw Lee present a pair of stunning presentations on Understanding Digital Kids and Living on the Future Edge. Both of these were brilliant. The content was exciting and dynamic. The afternoon was mine.
My focus was [...]

Ready, Steady, Go!

Well I have made it to the airport and I am enjoying the hospitality of the Air NZ Lounge. I have to say the best advertisement for becoming a Koru Club member is being let into the lounge.
I am sitting here prep’ing for what promises to be a busy and very interesting week. Other than [...]

ISNZ – Keynote and Video conference

This week has been exciting and fun. ISNZ – independent schools of New Zealand held the annual conference for Heads, Bursars and boards in Wellington. This year had a different twist to the opening and closing keynote addresses.
The opening keynote was Martin Westwell of Flinders University. He was presenting to the conference on Nueroscience, education [...]

MYSA – summary

Well I am back from the MYSA conference. The conference as an excellent Middle years conference and a good ICT conference. I am very pleased that the 10 year drought that has afflicted Brisbane has broken, but if I am honest I wish it could have broken after my visit.

For me the Keypoints were:
1. Visit [...]

MYSA – connecting learning communities

This was a presentation from Scotch College In Perth by their IT and MYP coordinator, Ben Beaton. Unfortunately the session was a tad slow or perhaps the presentation to full so only 2/3 rd of the presentation was completed. The interesting stuff – Scotch’s use of mobile tools was the part left out. The presentation [...]

MYSA – Marco Torres

I enjoyed this Keynote. Marco is a American educator, producer (Film), parent, politician etc. He started on a great high point by showing his Livescribe Pen (I have one they are sooooooo cool) and then in a rambling presentation discusses his view on education. A view I would like to say I mostly agree with.
Here [...]

MYSA 1 – Urban Outdoor Education

The pre confernce workshop I booked into was Urban Outdoor education. The two presnters were a principal instructor/teacher from a state funded outdoor education facility and the DP at a local state school.
The session started by mirroring an activity they do with students. It involved:

briefing the students (us)
journeying to the location
doing the task
reviewing/debriefing

To start they [...]

The week that was

Wow, what a week. 4 days of presentations, 5 flights and 7 sessions. I have to say it was fun but I was pretty jaded by the end of the experience.
The robotics sessions in Rotorua, were great fun, hands on experiences. As tools for learning and constructing knowledge and understanding they are superb.
In Wellington, I [...]

Last week…

… was a little quiet on the blogging front as I prepared for 2 fairly significant events.
The first event was the opening of the new block at school by John Key. My part in this was running a video conference with my Year 13 class. We were lucky enough to have a colleague to conference [...]