Last week I was fortunate to have been invited to speak at the Future Schools Expo + Conference in Sydney. It is an annual 2 day event and is the sister event of EduTECH which is the largest Australia and Asia Pacific’s education event. The event had one central exhibition with five parallel conferences designed to tackle five specific areas of the future school: Future Leadership, Young Learning, Special Needs, Teaching about and using emerging technologies, STEM, coding, robotics and the new digital technology curriculum.
I spoke about resourcing the teaching of code in a junior school. Below is my Power Point. I finished by providing activities which the delegates could experience.
It did mean taking many resources with me to Sydney, leaving poor Megan without some of the items we were using at school……for example BB8…..I think she quietly enjoyed having a purely literature week!!!
As a speaker I was able to move around between the conferences and thoroughly enjoyed listening to many engaging presentations. Always a favourite of mine is to listen to the great things Meridith Ebbs @iMerinet Meridith’s Blog is doing at her school in Port Macquarie.
Many of the presenters for coding spoke about resources available to schools to support teachers in delivering computational thinking and coding to their students. Most of the resources I make reference to in my power point where you will find links, for example Code Club Australia, CAS, CS Unplugged
After my session Marita Cheng told her story as founder of Robogals and as CEO of 2Mar Robotics doing mechanical engineering. Marita was the 2012 Young Australian of the Year and is so inspirational!
Listening to Michael Ha talk about using ‘Drones in Education’ was exciting. He explained how drones could be used, mostly from the sporting aspect but his ideas could be used across many areas of the curriculum.
Another great session was listening to Dr Tim Bell who is the founder of http://csunplugged.org (NZ), which I use constantly to access ideas and activities which address so much of the digital technologies curriculum.
Here is a link to the many speakers who attended…. including ‘moi’…. http://www.futureschools.com.au/speakers_bios.html#MaritaCheng
A few images from my session…
On the first day of the conference Brian Host @HostBrian Brian’s Blog invited me to speak at the TeacherMeet sessions which were running and being hosted by Brett Salakas @MRsalakas http://aussieed.com. I took the opportunity to talk about how Megan and I use literature to inspire our girls into making, building and creating in our Makerspace. We do this in our library program and also in subject areas.
Here is the power point I used……it was only a 5 minute talk!