Learning 2.013

Last week our library teaching team and several other teachers from our school  attended Learning 2.013 at UWCSEA, Singapore. An impressive feature was the student-led sessions. The mornings started with spotlight presentations of the longer sessions, another great idea.
The conference was sub-titled "Making change" and it was a rich opportunity to be stimulated and provoked into reflection of our own practice and contemplation of new ways of doing. There were some immediate takeaways - Haiku Deck, Weavly, some new books to buy. There were also big picture ideas to bring back to our library teams and schools for consideration - attribution and intellectual property; how to ensure our use of technology in our classrooms is transformational; the idea of providing an ebook store for our school communities and their ebook creations; publishing student presentations to TEDxYouth. I have created a Blendspace page of the tools that were used or mentioned in the sessions I attended.
Go to my Learning 2.013 Blendspace here.

So what next?

• Share some ideas at Humanities Department meeting from the session on "Bringing History alive." 
• Discussion with our Director of ICT about an ebook store as a place for publishing the creations of members of our school community. I see this as a growing area as we move to IOS and Apple devices next year, with the brilliant iBooks Author program at hand.
• More conversations with our DP Academic Standards about how we ramp up our approach to Academic honesty and intellectual property - for staff and students. Plans are already in hand but space needs to be found (in year 9 and 10 PGD?) for sessions on intellectual property and Creative Commons. That's a conversation for Heads of Year.
• Sharing amongst our library team of what inspired them, plans for action. Discussion of ideas for Library Action Plan 2014:  investigation of the maker movement -Makerspaces in libraries. professional learning in the library team for teaching and non-teaching staff.