#Educamprotovegas

On Saturday 27th February at the crack of dawn I picked up +Fiona Grant and +Karen Ferguson to head south for a day of learning and connecting at #educamprotovegas held at Rotorua Girls High School.  We made it with time to spare and it was a great opportunity to see some of my awesome PLN face to face and meet new educators that I can now call upon.  The day started with a really informative smackdown - where participants had only 2 minutes maximum to share an idea, app or educational gem.


I shared in the smackdown about the +GEG NZ learning community and our upcoming GEGNZ Studygroups that will help educators in NZ attain level 1 in the new Google for Education certifications.
After the smackdown and lunch break we then had the opportunity to select two breakout sessions - I listened to +Steve Katene share the learning journey of Richmond School in Napier where he is DP for his learners and coaches (teachers) which was really inspiring! This guy has great energy and I'd love to take a visit to his school to see it in action.  I'm looking forward to revisiting his slide deck.
I was super pleased to meet my old student teacher and colleague +Robyn Keightley for her first Educamp.  She travelled over from Tauranga and ended up sharing twice in the smackdown and then led a breakout session on the 1:1 ipad journey her school had made.
Thanks to +Annemarie Hyde and +Marnel van der Spuy for being great hosts and organising this event! It was well worth the 450km round trip!
Here are the tweets from the session:

Are you a Connected Leader?

The Connected Learning Advisory (CLA) runs webinars each month, and I was asked to be part of a  Webinar on and for "Connected Leaders" on the 21 October.   The aim of the CLA is to provide interactive opportunities for sharing practice, discussion of key ideas and connection to experts and other educators.

What a great opportunity I thought to give back to the education sector and contribute some gems on helping the sector connect. The other connected leaders were Marnel van der Spuy, Stephen Lethbridge, Rachel Boyd and Annemarie Hyde and together we answered the following:

• What does a “connected leader” look like ?
• In your role as a connected leader, what do you do to support/model/advocate/facilitate e-learning ?
• What attributes do you think you need most, to make this role successful?
• How would you encourage a reluctant teacher/ leader to get connected?

Here is the link to the streaming video: https://coreedu.adobeconnect.com/p1oarmgeqsp/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal