21st Century Educator

It has been a week since the Apple Education leadership summit. I have had little time to sit back and reflect as I was straight back to work this week when I returned. What an amazing event though, it was filled with quality presentations and incredible opportunities to network. I was particularly interested in the opening statement at the event from one of the Apple staff. He quite casually stated from the begining that it was a obvious shame that it takes a computer company to put on quality professional development and learning for educators. This has stuck with me for some time now and has made me wonder why it is that our education system is waiting for a computer company to bring us all together to discuss the ever changing world of education. Why does it take a computer company to declare that it is time that we have systemic change in education? I guess the cynic may believe that it is a clever marketing ploy to sell stuff. Well it is true that there is marketing genius behind an event like this, however, there has to be something said for a computer company that invests heavily in a sector that isn’t going to bring the greatest return. There seems to be a genuine understanding from Apple when it comes to the everyday struggles educational institutions face. They get the challenges and see where it is change must occur for the betterment of teaching and learning. This conference was not about computers, it wasn’t even about ipods or any other gadget. It was about education – quality teaching and learning. As I have often said – a good education conference will often leave you with more questions than answers. Questions that you know you need to answer in your own time when you return back to your school.

The clever marketing behind the Apple machine in the education market is not about nice conferences where they make teachers feel good. To me it is in the way in which they clearly display that education matters and that it matters so much that the people they employ to run the education business know about and are passionate about education. I must admit my first reaction to the program when I saw a keynote from the Apple VP John Couch was that this was just going to be an impressive sales pitch. However, I quickly realised how wrong my first impression was. In fact John’s story is quite incredible. Someone who had been at Apple for some years, obviously doing well for himself, retires and becomes principal of a financially bankrupt and failing high school? His presentation looked at Leadership through Vision. Something that he believes brought success to the school he was involved with as well as the success of the Apple business he returned to build.

The keynote from John clearly communicated a very exciting message from Apple. Apple are about partnering with educators and their institutions to help build truly exciting and engaged learning communities. This message was further brought across through the other keynote presenters who all had a clear message that they were truly passionate about. Stephen Heppel was an inspiration, demonstrating exactly what is possible when we take time to think about the basic layout of a learning space. Tom Kelley from Ideo was a truly entertaining presenter who inspired me to think of innovation in a completely different light. Finishing off with someone I regard as a wonderful friend – Marco Torres, with his inspirational presentation “Quite, Complain or Innovate.” To top it all off the break out sessions were also very well organised and full of great ideas.

However, one thing struck me more than any other conference I have attended before. This conference had fascinating conversations happening, mostly facilitated by twitter. Simply by tagging all tweets with #hksummit, we suddenly had an amazing conversation that is still continuing today. The richness of the conversation and the content shared is truly remarkable. It is a conversation that is recorded and easy to follow. The value in this conference was found in so many places, however, the greatest treasure is in the conversations and the network that is built.

Throughout the conference I have noted down what others had to say…. Here are some links to other blogs from the conference….
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2009/05/03/apple-does-it-again/
http://www.levins.net/users/martin/weblog/
Video Reflections

There is so much more to say – but being a media teacher I will probably best say it through visuals… Stay tuned for a video reflection.

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