Linda Lehrke - Tinkering with the Possibilities

To be honest, I went into this break out for two reasons:

1.  I met Linda last year at ULearn11 and she was telling me about how excited she was to be starting in a brand new school starting from scratch in in 2012 and because she has been heavily involved in e-learning.

2.  I was hoping to get some great tips about i-Pads/tablet use in class.

 

Please excuse that fact that most of the following is in note form.  It is the highlights.  However, I was somewhat distracted by my troublesome TELA laptop, an HP EliteBook 8560p, which decided to play its silly games during Linda's session.

 

Linda opened with this memorable gem below:

 

We are in education - we are not a business!

We are in the business of sharing knowledge - not keeping it to ourselves!

Linda urged us to look at the keynote speakers - find their five favourite books - read those books - then be like them.

Teaching and learning today is...

• Knowledge Generation
• Student Centric
• Ad Hoc - can be shared around, moved through the school
• Creative
• Open
• Opportunity of Ownership

Rcommended Book:  Now You See it  by Cathy Davidson about attention blindness

BYOD - solves a budget problem for the school
But how do we change our practice and environment to accommodate the kid's needs?
Is your school ready for 1:1 with its wireless?
What about how you spend the school's money?

You can buy five e-readers for one tablet.  You can use one account for the five e-readers.

Get the best server for your school for the job.

Schools with their server in the Cloud can access it even if the school is destroyed by a natural disaster.

Teachers are taking three devices in schools - laptop, phone and tablet.
Kids in a BYOD school have three devices.
Kids in a no BYOD school have at least one device - but you're forcing them onto 3G where there are no filters or protections.

Look in your classroom at what devices you have got?  Desktops are cheaper than a laptop, and iPads are cheaper than a desktop.

Everything is HDMI (hi def).  Get a cable.

Wireless keyboards always need the batteries changing.  Teachers will use it as an excuse not to use it.  For those teachers, keep the wired one in.

Have three focal points in the room.

Touch screen tvs - interactive.
Apple tv - plugs into iPads and laptops.

And then my HP EliteBook 8560p spat the dummy on me again, so I left Linda's workshop a little early and went to tell the nice people at HP exactly what I thought of their products.