Day 3 of ISTE 2014

I think Im still processing Kevin Carroll's keynotes address from this morning. He spoke http://blog.iste.org/kevin-carroll-ceo/o fast, for the first two minutes I thought he was speaking in tongues! From a desperately poor upbringing, the middle child of three boys who were first abandoned by their father and by his mother when Kevin was 6. His older brother took on the role of adult at the age of eight.  This is 1964, in the deep south in the midst of the civil rights movement these 3 kids got on a bus to travel alone to Philadelphia where they could reconnect with their grandparents, in reality their saviours.

The key message that reasonated with me is a familiar one at Melbourne Girls Grammar where we continually raise the bar and our expectations of our girls,  and that was that children are far tougher and more resilient than we give them credit for. From this background, where social workers had written him, he dropped Spanish at school but bounced back proving them all wrong, as he entered what would be a ten year long career in the military where he ended up mastering 5, completing a health sciences degree and a Masters.

He worked with Nike for many years and worked with the Gates Foundation to ensure every public library in the U.S.had a computer.His passion now is is to ensure both adults and children have time to play.he has written books about it and advocates that play is as  important as eating drinking and sleeping but then asks, "why do we eliminate it?"

To read more visit: http://www.kevincarrollkatalyst.com or to see video of the event www.blog.ISTE.org/kevin-carroll-CEO/     Or  watch his Ted talk:
tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Play-is-Kevin-Carroll-at-TEDxRV

                 "If your dream doesn't scare you, its not big enough" Albert Einstein

My next session was, "Creating Innovators: Educating The Students Who Will Change The World" with Howie Diblasi. 

Whilst we all recognise that creativity is the foundation of innovation and vital for working in a global economy the question was how do we engage students in creativity, creative problem solving? All the information from the session can be found on Howie's website www.drhowie.com so I won't go into it here.

After a short break for lunch I headed to "Digital learning environments for personalization" with Cheryl Lemke where we discussed what she meant by the term personalised learning and talked about how technology adds value. 

We also discussed some of the implications: self-directed learning, authentic learning, learning communities and new approaches to assessment. We quickly moved onto a discussion on designs for learning environments and pedagogies that together build the capacity of students to succeed on such environments. Cheryl suggested that in such environments we should have, at the ready, curated digital content aligned to standards, intelligent adaptive learning systems, adaptive testing, learning opportunities, unit designs tools for student production, communication and thinking, and more.

Essential Elements of Personalized Learning
To build COMPETENCE (Cognitive Engagement)

1. Tap into student interests and passions to ensure relevance/motivation
2. Address individual needs, strengths, and preferences (data/feedback)
3. To build AUTONOMY (Behavioral Engagement)
4. Engage students as decision makers in their learning (data/feedback)
5. Build resilience and self-direction in students  (growth model of intelligence)
6. To build BELONGING (Social-Emotional Engagement.Support full participation in a democratic community of learners

The resources for this session can all be found on: http://learning.metiri.com

Finally for today my last session was "Exploring the future of learning with MindShift" with Tina Barseghian and Robin Mencher.

MindShift is a curator and translator of the best educational research on the future of learning in all its dimensions, covering cultural and technology trends, innovations in education, education policy, and more. In this session we explored how to get the best use out of MindShift for making change in classrooms and schools. I decided to give it a workout and chose the topic, Design Thinking e.g. http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?s=design+thinking

There were some great articles on mindshift but the most valuable thing was meeting the young educator next to me who is part of a new school launching in San Diego this August totally based on the Design Thinking guiding-principles:
                         https://sites.google.com/site/design39campus/guiding-principles 

So much learning and networking going on, and still one day to go!