While at ISTE, Robert from Mind Share Learning organized a wonderful Social event to celebrate the great continued work they do and the partnerships they have formed. Part of that celebration was the formal presentation of my certificate as one of the winners of the 5th annual Mindshare Learning 21st Century Learning Video Contest.

Such an honour and privilege to be in that group.

I’m using my only 2 days of vacation from Shad Valley UNB to attend the Learn2Learn conference a Rothesay Netherwood School sponsored by UNB Education faculty. The Shad Valley kids just finished a trip to the Huntsman Marine Center and so I was late coming into the conference hall. The closest table had Anglophone East people like John Tingley, Liz Nowland, Chris Ryan, and Bruce Ryan there. It turns out that there are two presenters from RHS, Chris and I. That is a significant percentage of the total presenters. I think that says something.

Mark Kelly from the CBC is the keynote. He is talking about giving students a voice around the issue of bullying. His Documentary is on CBC.http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/More+Shows/ID/2242004426/

Day 1 & 2

There are lots of great conversations happening. The vast majority of them claim to talk about collaboration, but they fall into a couple of categories “Divide and Conquer, or the Funnel”. The way that they are using things like Google Apps revisions still focus on the final product as the important thing rather than the process.Good students know they are good, but perhaps not why, and the struggling students do not get a chance to watch editing in progress. The SMARTBoard model of peer editing during class time is NOT about helping the author of the work, but rather about helping the EDITORS. This is where the higher order thinking and critical thinking is taking place.

Hello San Antonio, home of the Alamo, and ISTE 2013. What a cool place. So nice to meet Charity again. I met her on Twitter and as a SEE, then F2F at the SES in Colorado a couple weeks prior to ISTE. She introduced my to google glasses.

I wonder what our exams will mean when everyone has these glasses! what kind of freedom will we have to innovate when the tests are minimized?

I got to meet David Warlick in person again after 7 years. We originally met in Fredericton and I told him about the Shark project. He has been using that example in his talks ever since. I have so many new things for him now.

Microsoft gave away 10000 Microsoft Surfaces. I got mine. Microsoft could have a real’ chance to infiltrate the Education realm with this one. If they can win in schools, they can win everywhere.

The coolest part of ISTE for me was spending time in the SCC, the SMART Collaborative Classroom and the Spotlight Talk. I was preaching about how SMART Boards are to be student centered tools. we should not be asking questions about how to get 1-1 technology into the hands of students. That will happen despite us shortly. The much more pressing issue is going to be, what will school look like when it happens? Will collaboration and communication increase! well in some ways, but not in others. in the business world, collaboration looks like a divide and conquer where experts get to apply their power for the good of a final product. But in school, the product is much less important than the process. if that is so, individual technology does not afford the same kind of group think. Smartboard do…

I also had a Spotlight talk when I gave examples of 21C Projects. the VP’s of major companies were only able to attract 50 in a venue ready for thousands. I had 140 people attended my talk. Not bad.