ULearn14

So ULearn14 is over.  It was an amazing four days of learning and it's great to be challenged to the point that you feel you have changed as a person from the experience.

A lot of the breakouts I chose had a leadership and big picture thinking slant to them.  It made me realise the importance of having a vision for what you do as a school.  Dr Julia Atkin's work came up a lot and the ideas make sense.  What does your school believe is important in education and then work out your school's principles and practice from there.

The changing face of education became apparent too.  After spending a year working towards having a more digital classroom it is easy to feel like you are working towards the sharp point of 21st century practice but after listening to Professor Yoram Harpaz, Mark Osborne (Core Education) and Luke Sumich, Blair Giles and Barb Dysart (Summerland School) I realised I have a lot more work to put in to be the best I can be and more importantly knowing that I can't do it alone!

A lot of my focus over the past year has been developing resources and tasks that make the most of the digital technology.  But reflecting back on this now I realise that a lot of my time and energy has been put into what I am going to do TO students to improve learning rather than what I am going to do FOR students.  The difference here is subtle and it is easy to get your back up over the idea that you are just doing stuff TO students even though you are grouping for learning and/or making resources for them to use.  But the idea of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) takes this a step further.  It focuses on what we are doing FOR students.  Mark Osborne from Core Education backed this up in his BYOD breakout when he said:   Design for the edges - don’t assume that everybody is average and ‘normal’.  Give kids a wide range of tools to access to do what they need to do to be powerful. In class this is so much more than just developing tasks that are engaging. It means providing your teaching in a way that is available to students when they are ready to learn. It means giving your students real and diverse choices in how the present their learning and understanding. It means gathering feedback from your students about YOUR teaching, providing yourself with real feedback and data to REALLY base the changes of your practice on.

There is just so much that I learnt over the last four days and far too much to bore people with a single blog post about it all.  So the next few weeks will be about taking the time to go over notes, understand and synthesis the information and decide on the direction I should take.   I don't want to rush out and make knee jerk reaction based change without thinking though how and why I will be making the changes.

So thank you to all the people involved with ULearn14, you all did a fantastic job making it all run smoothly.

My ULearn14 Digital Badges