Just home from NECC 2007 and a side trip to Columbia for an all-day workshop with technology and media educators, and administrators from Richland Two School District, and scanning through some of the buzz about this years mega conference — only to run across a very interesting conference put on by a small school in New Zealand, Flaxmere Kid’s Conference. It’s kids, teaching kids, about how they are using contemporary technologies to do their work.
Educating the Dragon » Blog Archive » Flaxmere Kid’s Conference:
Iron Gate and Peterhead came together to showcase what they have been doing with ICT over the past couple of months. We had groups of children demonstrating how Google SketchUp, Art Rage and PowerPoint worked, we had some working with a green screen and my kids showed off their Talk and Write work with Taradale Intermediate School.
Alas, I think we (NECCsters) may congratulate ourselves a little too much 😉 More about that later!
David,
Kid conferences are great. Costa Rica has been running national ones bianually since Oscar Arias and Seymour Papert helped revolutionize their schools in the mid-80s.
Generation YES (http://www.genyes.com) recommends that students participate with teachers in PD events.
However, the photo attached to your good news is quite instructionist in nature. I don’t know if it’s from the conference itself, but the other photo I saw on the site looks like children playing school, ala Miss Crabtree. If that’s the case, it’s too bad the organizers didn’t create an environment in which the kids could learn together without being taught like at the recent Constructivist Celebration (http://www.constructivistconsortium.org/events)
-=Gary
In answer to Gary’s too very good points about the photos I’d like to say that Yes David’s photo is one from the conference, you find it under the kidsconferece tag on Flickr. The second point aobut my photograph, you have tought me a valuable lesson about the value of adding a description to photographs on my blog…. Error amended, thank you Gary.