The following are a few workshop highlights from the Sydney EdTech Conference that I recently attended.
Scratching the surface of capabilities
One of the workshops that I attended was run by Conny Mattimore, Deputy Principal of Rooty Hill School where the EdTech Conference was being held. The workshop was about 'Scratching the surface of capabilities'. We were shown examples of how digital tools were being used by students to demonstrate to their teachers various capabilities acquired through various learning tasks.
I had the pleasure of working alongside one of the students, Vinuji Gallage, who worked through some Scratch activities with me. The great thing about interacting with Vinuji, was watching how intuitively she was using the digital tools to demonstrate her ICT capabilities. The main motivator for Vinuji was the fact that she could see how what she was doing, was contributing to her overall grade scores.
Cultivating Growth Mindset
As well as Lindsay sharing her experiences as a classroom teacher, and her extensive range of resources with those of us who attended who session, the activity that had a lasting impact for me, was the bingo activity. This activity required attendees to work in small groups of 2-3, to identify various tasks that we undertake as teaching practitioners, to enable our learners to develop a growth mindset.
Getting Creative with Google Sheets
The most constructive workshop that I attended that impacts directly on some of my current practices, was the workshop run by one of my colleagues Gerhard Vermeulen entitled Getting Creative with Google Sheets. There are so many different functions within Google Sheets that I was unaware of. One of those functions is the formula that allows the colours of individual cells within a worksheet to change, depending on the entry within the cell. This is particularly useful with the VTaL Tracking Sheets that I use to enable students to track their own progress. I am unsure whether the formula can be integrated into Hapara Gradesheets, which I'm also using as VTaL Tracking Sheets within Workspaces; however, it will just be a case of experimenting to see what works.
