Thursday keynote- Keith Kreuger from the US is CEO of the Consortium for Schools Networking (CoSN). By this stage of the conference it is very difficult to remain focused. In the auditorium I can see many people doing their email- attention has lapsed.

Keith looked world wide at ICT integration and states currently ICT is at a marginal point of use. US gov has been recommending zero money to support ICT use in schools. US call it Educational Technology. Presidential candidates talk on ICT:- $500mill McCain on virtual tutoring and home schooling/ Obama talks about innovation and changing schools-$500mil 21st Century Skills- talking creativity, HOT etc.

Keith focused on developing leaders. These leaders ‘raise the bar’, talk and demonstrate good teaching and changing learning environments, support communities of practice for professional development and renewal, redefine assessment.
A lot of this is not new and I feel that what Keith presented was reinforcing what we are doing well here.

CoSN.org video titles ‘Learning to change’ really good to show parents and teachers. 

Margaret Cox was a keynote speaker on Wednesday, Day 2 of the ACEC conference. She spoke about her research on students’ formal and informal uses of digital technologies,.
She is from King’s College London, University of London.

She tooks us on a historic journey of IT developments over the last 3 decades. Some of the points I took away include-
1.    It is unrealistic to talk about ICT as a term in the sense that it too general. It is more important to talk to teachers about specific applications such as web browsing or podcasting. Asking teachers if they are competent with ICT, may get teachers responding with a ‘highly competent’ by their definition of ICT as using the internet for research.
2.    Time can limit ICT integration. Margaret makes the point that teachers value ICT but only have ‘limited’ time due to other curriculum constraints/requirement.
3.    With the huge amount of things you can do with ICT you cant expect every teacher to be competent in everything. Teachers must be limited to become competent in one application and then build on that.
4.    For teachers to be using ICT the school needs to develop long term plans
5.    She found large disparity between home and school use which is predictable, however it was interesting in the detail of pinpointing which ways through clear questioning- eg when asking children what they do in school and outside school questions would be directed such as blogging- posting a response, responding to other person’s response etc,

Margaret seems to be getting down to the nitty gritty with exactly what children are using ICT for. She has just finished a book which can be googled- “inside the black box”. One thing I took away that I think is valuable for all of us, is that Margaret has given us some well defined ways students and teachers are using ICT which can be used to create baseline data in our schools. We can use this data then to redefine learning practices. Just google her name and go to Becta website.