After following last year's 2015 South Africa Summit on Twitter, I was thrilled that this year St Peter's gave me the opportunity to attend the 4th Annual EdTechTeam South Africa Summit featuring Google for Education in partnership with Dainfern College and Cloud Ed. The summit was a two-day high-intensity event focused on deploying, integrating and using Google Apps for Education (and other Google tools) to promote student learning.
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| Let the fun begin... with my colleague and good friend Monique Egbers. |
All the presenters were Google for Education Certified Innovators, Google for Education Certified Trainers, Google Employees or teachers with local successful stories. The keynote speakers were:
I was in awe of the wealth of knowledge and experience of these three speakers. By the end of the summit I felt a little like a groupie hanging on to their every word.
Holly Clark (@HollyClarkEdu) was the opening keynote speaker. Her keynote on "Disrupt Education" was inspirational. She spoke about how various successful companies had disrupted the norm such as Uber disrupting the taxi industry. She challenged us to be the "Uber" in our classrooms. Just as children binge watch television series, we need to get them to binge learn. Unfortunately education values answers not questions - which is absurd... but true. The average four year old asks around 300 questions a day - at five this drops to 50. What happens at five years of age? They start formal education. We need to foster a culture of questioning in our schools. We have to stop being "the comfortable experts and become restless learners". We need to stretch our students "to think, question, pursue and create to take agency and ownership of their learning". I loved her use of the term "combinatorial" - "what you need to teach combined with what kids want to do".
The Breakout EDU (@breakoutEDU) session was facilitated by Ben Friesen (@benjaminfriesen). What an experience! Breakout EDU games teach critical thinking, teamwork, complex problem solving, and can be used in all content areas.
We began the game as a group of strangers who all had with something to do with education and ended as a team excited by the possibilities Breakout EDU provides. I am just a tad competitive so I loved the fact that I opened the first lock but the best part of the experience was that the unlocking of each lock was a combined effort.
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| First lock opened! |
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| One more lock to go. |
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| Success! |
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| We broke out! |
Not only were the sessions that Ken Shelton (@k_shelton) presented brilliant, I also thoroughly enjoyed his keynote on "Transformational Teaching and Learning With Technology". He spoke about companies that had transformed their industries. MTV transformed music (the first song and video ever on MTV was "Video killed the Radio Star"). YouTube revolutionised entertainment. Uber is in the process of launching their first "self-driving" cars. The next step is "Skyuber". iPhone and iPad transformed communication because they were more than just a phone. Nokia missed out on learning- it didn't change! We need to be transformational in our teaching - "don't be a first year veteran 30 times... be a 30 year veteran once".
Ben Friesen (@benjaminfriesen) ended the summit with his keynote, "The Journey". I found my new favourite quote during his keynote that epitomises my life.
I would like to thank everyone involved in the 4th Annual EdTechTeam South Africa Summit. Congratulations to Anthony Egbers and his team for organising a phenominal summit. Hopefully I will be able to attend next year's summit to be held in the Cape.
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| My groupie photo with Ken Shelton and Holly Clark. |
