June+2011

June 24, 2011
Off to ISTE in Philadelphia tomorrow morning! Like so many of us involved professionally in Education, June is a month of deadlines, due dates, reports and reveries. ISTE 2011 will be a fantastic way to cap off a monumental year for Dakota Collegiate, and for me as a teacher as well. All year I had the opportunity to teach in a 1 to 1 environment, figuring out how to actually be the "guide on the side" instead of my former role. I have seen first hand the transformative impact that ubiquitous information technology has in a high school classroom. What I thought was a good idea a few months ago I can see now as the way forward for Canadian education.

Having an opportunity to help lead a significant push forward with a student owned device pilot project is an exciting and daunting challenge as I look forward to 2011-12. I hope to meet a few people at ISTE that will help me see the way past my report cards and forward to the near future at our school.

June 28
ISTE is everything that people say it is- big, fast, and a celebration. After a few days of a conference like this is starts to get hard to remember what day of the week it is. However, it is Tuday, and although the conference closes tomorrow, tonight is my last night here, with tomorrow being my travel day home. The line-up of speakers I've seen includes John Medina, Steven Covey, Will Richardson, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Scott McLeod, and a variety of other familiar names from the Twitterverse. Overall though, my favourite session was by Gary Stager. I follow Gary on Twitter, but I had never heard hm speak before today. In my own research on 21st Century skills and the significance of computers in education I learned about Seymour Papert, and Gary is a scholar cut from the same MIT cloth as Papert. I found that I resonated with many of his ideas, and I look forward to reading the book he is putting out soon.

Tomorrow is a travel day. So long, Philly, and thanks for the memories!