Last Saturday I attended, and presented at, the ICT in Education conference which was attended by, I believe, over 160 people (mainly teachers) who have a real passion about using ICT as part of their teaching.
A link to my presentation, “Facebook for Teachers”, is available at the end of this post.
The conference was kicked off by Christian Payne (aka Documentally) who spoke about “Mobile Story Making”. Christian is a great story teller, has a great presentation style and is interesting, funny and informative. If you don’t believe me, watch for yourself.
Next up was Ciaran McCormack whose presentation was entitled “Preparing our teachers for the Storytellers of tomorrow”. I wasn’t really surprise, but it’s still a bit of a shock to see it in writing, that a large proportion of our secondary school students think school is boring. What is interesting is that this boredom, for many, is due in no small part to how “exciting” life and learning is outside of the classroom environment due to kids being exposed to various forms of technology (games, phones, the internet). This certainly poses a real challenge for our schools and teachers. Another thing that caught my attention during Ciaran’s talk was how very simple use of technology can make for a very exciting and motivating learning environment, the FIS Bookclub being a great example. You can watch Ciaran’s presentation here (the audio improves a lot after about 8 minutes when someone hands Ciaran a microphone).
After this we all broke out into various workshops/talks, one of which was presented by my good self entitled “Facebook for Teachers” and, as promised, here it is for download.
Those who are interested in exploring the use of Facebook in the classroom might be interested in Facebook for Educators and Coolcat Teachers Blog Post Facebook Friending 101 for Schools.
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