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February 3, 2010

Further Reflections on EduCon 2.2

Filed under: education
Tags: , , , , , , , — David Warlick @ 11:15 am with (5) Comments

The conversation never stopped — even over Philly Cheese Steak

For fear of appearing to be a kool-aid drinking, rose tinted glasses wearing, disciple of the Order of EduCon, I do have a complaint about the event.  They really need a better way of storing our coats.  I had to remember that mine was just to the left of the Case 6 amplifier in the music room, just behind that Yamaha piano looking thing.  Ok, that’s out!

Traveling to the Ohio eTech conference in Columbus, directly from EduCon, I will confess to having thoughts of, “How can you go to a conference and sit still and get taught at, after the brilliant conversations of Educon?”  I had those thoughts.  They were unfair, but I had them.  Truth is that sitting and listening to Adora Svitak, the child-prodigy writer (first book at 7), was a joy, and it was useful listening for new insights from here talk.  For instance, she made a big deal of her parents giving her a laptop at six and that having the computer, and a word processor, freed her from the limitations of her six-year-old’s hand writing.  “Imagine if my parents had been afraid of the technology,” she said.

Much of what she shared, we’ve been talking about for years.  But there are many who haven’t heard it, and it is, indeed, unfair of us to believe that every educator is ready for unconferenced learning.  It is also a reality that some of the attendees of eTech were ready for unconference sessions, as with most ed tech conferences, and some people have stopped attending these conferences, because there simply isn’t enough there that’s new to them.  Incorporating conversations into the conference schedule is something that we need to be seeing a LOT more of.

Back to EduCon, I’ve done lots of school walk-throughs, but this is the only place where students are the tour guides.  I’m afraid that I do not remember their names, but our small group was led by two seniors, having attended Science Leadership Academy (SLA) for all of it’s four years.  We were able to walk into classrooms, but also ask them, from a student’s point of view, what their experience has been and how it has affected them and their view of their own futures.  They are worried a bit about their transition from a more open, student-centered learning experience to most university’s “one-size fits all” methodologies.  I believe that they’ll do fine and that perhaps this is exactly the kind of learner we need to be springing on universities to shake things up a bit.

I have to confess here that it is one of the challenges of my particular hearing problem that I often misunderstand things.  What I hear is garbled.  So I have to collect a lot of contextual information — facial and body gestures, clues from other viewers, and a lot of subconscious things — to understand what is being said.  Bonnie Mark’s husband once told me that my hardware was faulty and that the software was compensating.  Very cleaver and accurate way of putting it, but my software often gets it wrong. 

But what I saw and heard in that Literature class blew me away.  Four students were sitting behind a table and the rest of the class was sitting in chairs, haphazardly arranged around them.  The four appeared to be performing a scene from the book that the class had just read, a scene that they had added to the book, having scripted and rehearsed the scene to express some aspect of their interpretation of the book.  The class then discussed the inserted scene and students added their own insights.  This is all over Bloom’s Taxonomy — and now that I think about it, I do not recall ever laying my eyes on the teacher.

I’ve got to learn more about “Mouse.”  From what our guides said, it appears to be an elective that has some aspects of tech support for the school, but also some “tinkering” qualities.  The students spend time taking stuff apart and hacking it in some way.  I tried to get a few minutes with Chris Lehmann, Founding Principal of SLA, to explain it to me, but, as you can imagine…  Anyway, this concept is exactly the conversation that

Links on Tinkering

Brown refers to “Architectural Studio”

  • All project is made public (sharing)
  • Completed products are critiqued by master & peers
  • Distributed community of practice

Sylvia Martinez, of Generation YES, lead on Saturday, “Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency.”  It was about the benefits of giving students, and teachers, the opportunity to hack stuff.  She mentioned a culture of Bricolage in schools in Italy, where there is a room that people simply drop off their junk.  Students can spend time there taking stuff apart and remixing it with other stuff to make something that is useful — or just interesting.

Perhaps one of the most powerful exerperiences, for me, was being clued by one of the students, that Chris Lehmann’s class on modern education theory, for SLA seniors and juniors, was about to start.  For a time, I was the only adult in the room, except possibly for Chris himself ;-)  But as other EduCon attendees wandered in, an amazing conversation errupted between the students and their perspectives on learning and what they were learning about education theory, and our own perspectives as experienced educators, and, perhaps even more importantly, as people who where 10 to 40 years more experienced than the students.

One of the most interesting statements from one of the students, and one that speaks well of the school, was, “I’m studying themes (here), not subjects.  I am always looking for the connections between what I’m learning here and what I’ve learned there.”

Shortly there after, Dean Shareski asked something to the effect of, “At what age have we reached the base knowledge needed?”  Some of the comments I jotted down (thumbed into my iPhone) were:

  • “It depends!”
  • “There is no test for maturity.”
  • “When a person can think for himself.”
  • One students commented on how she was able to think about her capstone project more fully now than she was last year.
  • “Maturity is about being future oriented.”

Then I suggested, as (probably) the oldest person in the room, that one thing you learn, as you get older, is how to appreciate what you do not know.  Perhaps, the sign of maturity or of the “base knowledge needed” is starting to realize what you do not know, that it has less to do with what you know, and more to do with the questions you are asking.

Certainly one of the high points was the conversations we had with each other, outside of the scheduled “conversations,” just here and there.  So many people say that the best learning at conferences happens in the halls.  One such was with Lisa Parisi and Brian Cosby.  They are working on a book about blogging in the classroom, and I grilled them a bit about their experiences.  Three ideas really jumped out at me:

  1. Students pay a lot of attention to their older blogs, what they wrote at the beginning of the year (or years ago), and they are amazed at their own progress as writers and thinkers.
  2. They (Lisa & Brian) usually do not draw attention to the students problems with grammar in their blogs, until the student comes up and asks, “Why didn’t they understand what I was trying to write here?”
  3. When I asked if their students understood the learning that they were doing, the method, Lisa said that they didn’t, until she asked them to produce a video at the end of the year that would be used as an introduction to next year’s students.  She said that when they started planning that video, they started to think about and talk about learning collaboratively through conversation.

That’s enough about EduCon.  According to Google’s blog search, 179 other blog posts that mention EduCon, have been posted in the last week.

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Upcoming International Conference

Filed under: conferences, education, technology, warlick
Tags: , , , — David Warlick @ 8:23 am with (2) Comments

The web page of one of the schools I’ll be visiting while in Singapore…

International conferences are interesting places.  You discover how education in these various countries is in such different places, and how we all have such similar goals, we’re trying to converge to a point that is more relevant to today’s children, the future we are preparing them for, an increasingly global awareness, and within a dramatically new information environment.

I will have the honor of working with educators from throughout Asia, at the International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology (iCTLT) in Singapore in a couple of months.  It will be a boiling cauldron of ideas and perspectives, probably coming from opposite ends of a spectrum of education philosophies, where our goal is somewhere in the middle.  I hope that this sharing of ideas will result, for me, in a better handle on what that goal is, what it looks like, what its outcomes look like, and how to talk about it.

If you’re in the area, then you probably know about the conference.  But here’s a brochure if interested.  Really looking forward to seeing and chatting with Terry Freedman again.

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February 1, 2010

We’re Not Merely Wasting Talent. We’re Poisoning It!

Filed under: education
David Warlick @ 8:16 am with (6) Comments

Gerald Aungst wrote a comment on yesterday’s ..Reflections from Educon.. blog post, which was mostly a reflection of a podcast interview I listened to yesterday with Richard Branson.  It started with…

I’ve read the biographies (in various forms) of several currently-successful, mostly famous people who the world would consider highly talented, perhaps genius. The common theme in all these stories? School didn’t work for them. They floundered, or even failed, marking time until they could get out and follow their passions.

I started a reply, but I feel so deeply about this issue that I wanted to elevate my reply to full article status.  There is a Chinese idiom that I have become aware of on my trips to China and Hong Kong, Losing Face — although the later, converse of the saying, saving face, seems to be more frequently used today.  I was especially aware of the concept when working with ministry officials, who seemed especially careful not to do anything that might cause embarrassment or cause them to not want to show their face — to lose face. 

I remember once, when I was to speak to a group of elite teachers, no one, among the ministry members on hand, had ever heard me speak.  To introduce me, and then watch me fall on my face, would have hurt the reputation of the person making the introductions.  So they had the youngest and most recently hired member do the introductions.  I do not know if he is not the minister of education or sweeping a factory floor.

What deeply concerns me about this issue of “failing” in school, in spite of (or perhaps because of) valued talents, is that not succeeding in the regimented environments that tend to result from high-stakes testing is far more face-losing today than it was when Richard Branson was in school — and therefore, far more likely to poison the person’s future.  This is tragic, but even more so, because some of these talents that are are practically ignored by high stakes tests are exactly the talents that are so important today — essential to adapting industries and societies.

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January 31, 2010

Some Reflections from Educon — and it isn’t over yet!

Filed under: education
Tags: , , , , — David Warlick @ 2:27 am with (7) Comments

Virgin Galactica – http://www.virgingalactic.com/

On my way down Arch Street this morning, walking to SLA for the last day of Educon, I listened to a TED audio podcast, an interview with Richard Branson, of Virgin-Atlantic Airlines, conducted by TED curator, Chris Anderson. I didn’t know anything about Branson, except for Virgin… and his interest in space travel. So it surprised me when Anderson mentioned that he (Richard) did not have a very successful education experience. Branson admitted to being dyslexic, and that he never really understood school work. He left school at 15.

Now there are two messages that we might take from this. One, a really smart person can overcome learning difficulties and be successful. The other one, the disturbing one, “How many truly talented people has ’schooling’ failed, individuals who haven’t found the way or the environment to success?” “How many opportunities to enable talented people as valuable contributors souls we have squandered for the sake of ‘business as usual?’”

During one of the Educon conversations I participated in yesterday, a young teacher lamented over older high school students, who should have graduated a couple of years ago. They need to graduate and get out and start living. They do not have time to do interesting learning activities, because they already have a job? What can we do for them, before it is too late.”

Here’s what I wanted to say, but didn’t, for fear that it would come across as callus. I wanted to say — should have said — “It’s already too late!” “It is too late to enable that student, who is ready to become an adult. It is too late for your high school to capture the potentials of that student and benefit from the contributions she might have made, if her personal talents had been recognized, encouraged, and harnessed.” I applaud this young teacher for here position, and for what she may be doing for older high school students, and, “Keep doing it.” We need to do all that we can. I’m not suggesting that we give up.

But I think that we need to acknowledge the tragic waste that is resulting from today’s system. We need to stop believing that we can bandaid the system into relevance. I think that we need to be willing to say, “It’s too late for her. Now, what can we do to make sure that we never have to say that again.”

January 28, 2010

My Educon Conversation

Filed under: education
Tags: , , , — David Warlick @ 5:47 pm with (7) Comments

One of the best things about Educon is the nature of the sessions, called “Conversations.” It is unconference in practice, meaning that the session leader does not teach for learning, but, instead, his job is to generate conversations among the attendees from which everyone learns. It is not a hive mind at work, but a sharing and mixing of many ideas and perspectives, from which group and individual meaning can be found. It is beautiful!

Participant Grid

Group Grid

I have led numerous such unconference sessions, mostly to the delight of participants, who often write in their evaluations that these sessions were among the most rich in learning. I continue, though, to walk away feeling that I didn’t do my job, because I didn’t teach anything. It’s the school romantic in me. I’ll get over it.

I have felt, for some time, that the conversations I facilitate lack anchor points or magnetic positions around which to latch ideas. They are typically rich in backchanneling, which will certainly be the case at Educon, and there is great value in using each other for gaining traction. But I’ve felt for a while that something more firm was needed.

So, in addition to channeling ideas through Twitter, during my conversation, I will be asking participants to map their ideas along a bi-directional rubric (see “Participant Grid” on right), giving us all a ladder, on which to climb as we suggest ways of ramping up traditional classroom practices (all recently witnessed in existing classrooms) into learning experiences that take thinking to a higher level and make learning a more relevantly active engagement.

It will work like this:

  1. Participants will load a rubric onto their computers, with two scales, Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy going vertical, and Daggett’s Application Model along the horizontal.
  2. I will suggest a classroom learning experience that was recently witnessed in a classroom, asking participants to click the point on the grid at the point of intersection along each scale.
  3. A grid will be displayed (see “Group Grid” on right) that shows all of the participant’s clicks, indicating where individuals and the group think we are with the activity.
  4. Here, I will ask questions like, “Somebody thinks that this activity involves analysis. What is it about the activity that achieves this?” And, “How might we enrich this activity to include a measure of analysis and make it relevant in other subject areas?”

My goal is to use the tool to steer conversations about specific learning practices, drilling through the theory to describe exactly what teachers and learners are doing, and perhaps even suggest learning experience that no one in the group has yet imagined.

..Or it may not work at all. That’s the thing about conversations. They wouldn’t be interesting if they didn’t go in unpredictable directions.

January 27, 2010

On iPad, Education, & Technology

Filed under: warlick
Tags: , , , , — David Warlick @ 11:12 am with (3) Comments

engaget photo of Steve Jobs & his iPad1

I was riding back from Salisbury, yesterday, while Steve Jobs was announcing Apple’s new iPad. The best I could do was read a live blog, updating with the features and peppered with the writers skepticism and acknowledgement of the Jobs mystique. I left it a bit underwhelmed, hoping for something a little more earthshaking.

However, upon getting home and doing a Google search for iPad and video, I found a link to this Mashable blog post (Official Apple iPad Demo [VIDEO]) with an embedded Apple promotional video about the device — and “I’m sold,” as I announced on Twitter just after viewing piece.

I’ve been thinking about the device since — and why I am so sold on it now, despite my admitted disappointment over not being rocked by something really “Amazing.” A core question I’ll be asking myself as time goes on is the iPad’s suitability as an institutional learning tool. But, quite frankly, we have bigger problems than that.

Today, I am writing about a viewpoint article published in The Daily Gamecock, University of South Carolina’s student newspaper. Written by freshman literature student, Michael Lambert, the article (Education, Technology Share Weak Connection), at first, affirms what we already know, that technology is changing and it is changing us. Lambert writes,

Life before text messaging feels harder to imagine than life before the wheel.

Then he writes something striking to me, especially as I am reading Jaon Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget (see Another Great Tilting). He says,

I neither glorify nor decry the digital age. Technology does change us and how we act, but so does every minute of the day: every handshake, every look skyward, every farewell.

Continuing on to answer the question that haunts us all, new technology impacting teaching and learning?

I have never understood how technology enhances learning. The only digital age staple I see nowadays is PowerPoint, a tool that has become more of a crutch for teachers than a study guide for students. And we all have our experiences with Blackboard (and its pandemic lack of use by professors). From what I see, little has changed in education, given all the technology that has been imposed on it.

Although there are many valid reasons why formal education has resisted the transformations indicated by technology, and more importantly, by a new information landscape. There’s no excuse. But we all know about the barriers.

What truly disturbs me about Michael’s piece is that he seems so indoctrinated to a teacher-, textbook-, standards-directed education experience that information and communication technologies seem to have little impact on his vision of himself as a learner.

To illustrate his dismissal of digital technology as a learning tool, he shares an anecdote.

A film historian once asked my high school media class what we thought films were stored on. He answered: old 35mm. DVDs, Blu-rays, even VHS — he wouldn’t touch the stuff, he said. It takes advanced technology to play those. But 35mm takes light, a wheel and something with which to turn it — nothing else.

It is an interesting observation, and one I might use some time. But it makes sense only within the narrow context of one who studies film. Michael believes that

We aren’t quick to embrace technology in our learning because the old lecture-and-notebook way of doing things works (and has always worked). Most of the time this technology requires experts to work it correctly and the right generation to receive it. We aren’t that generation.

It’s a perspective that is narrow, institutional, and wholly out of date — and it percists.

Perhaps Michael will become an academic; reading, write, and submitting for publication — and teaching college students comparative literature. If so, I sincerely hope that he discovers, somehow, that finding ways to help students learn, by making them knowledge workers, will better prepare his students for a lifestyle of learning better than helping them learn to “Be taught.”

  1. Attias, Cyril. “Apple iPad Keynote.” Flickr. 27 Jan 2010. Engaget, Web. 28 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/newyork/4309048745/>.
    [↩]

January 22, 2010

Do Grown-Ups Learn?

Filed under: education
David Warlick @ 12:33 pm with (18) Comments

!afterclass! Emotion
Janss Mall, Interactive Fountain
Thousand Oaks, CA1

Unable to find a table at Starbucks Thursday morning, I took a chair offered by a woman who looked like she was finishing up her pastry and would soon be leaving her table — to me. She was a regular and knew why I was there.

We started talking and she told me about the numerous and wildly varied jobs she had held since graduating from UNC with a degree in “Peace, War, & Defense.” I finally asked her, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” I hope I asked it in the playful way that I’d intended — because she seemed a bit taken-aback by the question.

The thing is, it seems that when posing that mostly fun-poking question to adults, what you are really asking is, “What is the last thing you want to learn to do?”

Thinking about it this morning and visualizing my archetypal learning-resistant educator, what I see is a grown-up, someone who is doing the last thing they want to learn to do. Of course we’re all always learning and we all plan to develop new interests, skills, hobbies, etc, as we go along. No one ever intends to stop learning, and being “grown-up” is certainly not an exception.

I just wonder, though, if resisting change and the learning required to adapt to change is a characteristic of feeling “Grown-Up?”

We don’t stop playing games because we’re getting older – We get old because we stop playing games. (author unknown)

I saw that quote on a slide at a conference I attended last year, and it rings true to me. But it doesn’t say to me that we should resist growing up.  It’s says that we should never stop playing and being playful.

I wonder, if I should add an “eleven” to my 10 Ways to Promote Learning Lifestyle in Your School, “Find ways to be playful at your school — and perhaps feel less grown-up.”

  1. Lehrer, Nancy. “Children at Play.” Flickr. 11 May 2008. Web. 23 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/rovernl/2483220921/in/photostream>. [↩]

January 20, 2010

Another Great Tilting…

Filed under: education
David Warlick @ 6:34 am with (6) Comments

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307269647
Average Customer Reveiw: 5 of 5 stars

Gary Stager pointed this one out, via Twitter, @’ing it to Will Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and myself — including me in very fine company, I might add.

It’s about a new book by Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget.  Perhaps most known for popularizing the term, Virtual Reality our paths intersected several years ago through Advanced Network and Services, where he was exploring potential VR applications of Interent 2 and I was working with ThinkQuest, which was created by Advanced Network.  He’s a fellow that some readers of my blog might find a bit odd, but mostly he is oddly talented, described as a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.

Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author

I’ve not read the book, though it’s on order and should be in by Educon.  But it appears, from it’s Amazon page, that Jaron is rejecting Web 2.0. “(the) emerging Golden Age of information sharing and collaborative achievement, the strength of democratized wisdom.”  His position, according to the Amazon.com review, is that,

(the) unfettered–and anonymous–ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, the shouting-down of reasoned argument, and the devaluation of individual accomplishment.1

Not having read the book, I can’t comment on its content.  But the Amazon page includes an interview with Lanier, which reveals many of his objections, carrying on themes that seem to be pretty consistent with his ongoing philosophies of technology and humanity.  Acknowledging that the Internet and Web have enabled individual expression and empowered “vast classes of people” in the developing world, he claims that,

The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web. Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0″ designs. These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals. It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307269647?ie=UTF8&tag=resourcesforprog&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307269647

Lanier readily asserts that a group, collaborative, and frictionless (my words) exchange of information are useful in solving some problems, such as setting a price in the marketplace and elections.  But, he continues…

The phrase “Design by Committee” is treated as derogatory for good reason. That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent the iPhone.

There is nothing in the interview that I disagree with, and some things, about which I have expressed deep concern in 2¢ Worth.  He rightly claims that, “..if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced.”  “Partisan Mobs,” he calls them.

But all in all, I think that Jaron is attacking, what is attackable about Web 2.0, specifically questioning the arguments of its champions, and not so much the evolving applications that regular people are using in the participatory Web.  I look forward to reading this book on the train, on my way to Philadelphia.

Added 10 Hours Later:
I just watched an interesting video archive of a Q2Cfestival session (October 2009, @ Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario).  The panelists were Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT; Raymond Laflamme, Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the Perimeter Institute; Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist, author, composer, musician, & artists; Neal Stephenson, Author; and Tara Hunt, Author and Marketing Consultant.  The title was Wired 24/7?

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  1. ”You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.” Amazon.com. Jan 2010. Amazon.com, Web. 21 Jan 2010. . [↩]

January 19, 2010

10 Ways to Promote Learning Lifestyle in Your School

Filed under: education, pln, social networks, warlick
Tags: , , , — David Warlick @ 11:06 am with (19) Comments

A Learning Commons1

On the 14th, I wrote a blog post (Applying PLN — a Continuing Question for Me), questioning some of my own assumptions about expecting educators to embrace learning practices — cultivating personal learning networks.  I wrote about my feeling stumped by administrators in Colorado last week, wishing that I had the answers to their questions about promoting more relevant learning in their classrooms. In truth, like most of the rest of the session, some excellent ideas came out of the conversation that erupted, after it was revealed that I had no easy answer.  The thrust of the discussion was the culture of the school, and the expectations that the culture places on its members.

So, what does that culture look like?  What do we see in the school and classroom where learning lifestyle pops to mind?  I think that we see is conversation — and not just conversations between teachers and students.  There is a much broader conversation that permiates the entire building and beyond, about new learning and about learning new things.  It is a school that says, out loud,

“We go beyond the basics.”

“Standards are the starting place for what’s exciting here, not the end goal.”

“This is where learners of all ages are not just memeorizing facts and mastering skills — but working with new knowledge, constructing new knowledge, and impacting others through their work.

Here are just a few suggestions for administrators for promoting these conversations:

  1. Hire learners. Ask prospective employees, “Tell me about something that you have learned lately.” “How did you learn it?” “What are you seeking to learn more about right now?”
  2. Open your faculty meetings with something that you’ve just learned – and how you learned it.  It does not have to be about school, instruction, education managements, or the latest theories of learning.
  3. Make frequent mention of your Twitter stream, RSS reader, specific bloggers you read.  Again, this should not be limited to job specific topics.
  4. Share links to specific TED talks or other mini-lectures by interesting and smart people, then share and ask for reactions during faculty meetings, in the halls, or during casual conversations with employees and parents just before the PTO meeting.
  5. Include in the daily announcements, something new and interesting (Did you know that a California power utility has just gotten permission to start buying electricity from outer space?).
  6. Ask students in the halls what they’ve just learned. Ask them what their teachers have just learned.
  7. Ask teachers and other staff to write reports on their latest vacation, sharing what they learned – and publish them for public consumption.
  8. Ask teachers to devote one of their classroom bulletin boards to what they are learning, related or unrelated to the classroom.
  9. Include short articles in the schools newsletter and/or web site about research being conducted by the teachers – again, related or unrelated to the classroom.
  10. Learn what the parents of your students are passionately learning about, and ask them to report (text, video, Skype conversation, or in person to be recorded).
    —————————————- added later ————————————–
  11. Find ways to be playful at your school — and perhaps feel less grown-up. (see Do Grown-ups Learning?)
  1. Lower Columbia College. “Learning Commons.” Flickr. 19 Feb 2009. Web. 19 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/lowercolumbiacollege/3293381635/>. [↩]

January 18, 2010

After the Conference

Filed under: education
David Warlick @ 8:31 am with (2) Comments

BETT Show, photo by Danny Nicholson1

Last week was BETT 2010, the British Education and Training Technology conference, in London — arguably the largest education and technology conference in the world.  I have not attended one, but it is one of my goals to do just that.  Although we are all facing similar problems and challenges in education, Great Britain is in a different place from us, in the U.S.

Terry Freedman, with whom I will be working in Singapore at the iCTLT conference in March, wrote a very useful list of 7 Things to Do After the BETT Show — or any ed tech conference.  Here is an shamefully abbreviated version, so please go to Terry’s ICT in Education blog to read it in full.

  1. Meet with your team members
  2. Draw up an action plan
  3. Meet with your Headteacher or Principal — and be prepared
  4. Share with school staff
  5. Listen out for suppliers, with whom you shared your business card
  6. Find out what others thought (read blogs and Twitter bytes), and
  7. Well, read Terry’s blog.

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  1. Nicholson, Danny. “BETT2010.” Flickr. 14 Jan 2010. Web. 18 Jan 2010. . [↩]
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