Jan 29 2008
LISA conference – International Schools Conference 2008 at TASIS London
Another training day, but with so much to do was it worth it? Well yes in many ways these days can seem less that useful, but in terms of meeting and discussing with other teachers about what they are doing; it either gives you a few new ideas or makes you wonder why so many teachers are so inadequately trained. More about the workshops I went to a little later, but first to the keynote.
The keynote was by Dr Robert Evans, a psychologist specialising in school change and reform. A fantastic speaker who from obvious extensive experience discussed the issues with which schools no longer face problems they can solve but dilemmas they can only cope with in the long term. He described many funny anecdotes of the expectations of our teaching profession often likening it to the work of monks or other religious based employment. His book – The Human Side of School Change, was the obvious starting point to discussing how society has changed so much that its expectations of a school are now much more while at the same time the difficulties for children to leave school with adequate qualifications get more and more difficult. As such he suggested that school communities almost are representing a counter culture of values compared to everyday family life, and often are expected to instill these morals and values with little backing. I would suggest for more information you read around hid ideas, a good starting point would be Kathleem Cushman’s article.
So to the workshops, which were ran well by both leaders:-
Research Methods Using the Internet – was an interesting workshop with may ideas to resources, of which a great deal I had heard of. However the most interesting point, came from the ideas of how swamped teachers are with resources and websites these days. How do we cope, and if I ask that question how do students cope? Often I am swamped even though I use techniques including del.icio.us bookmarking, and reading websites via bloglines clipping all essential posts.
First Robotics Competition Workshop – was a wonderful presentation into participating in the First Robotics student robot building competition. Looks like an excellent opportunity, but very difficult to run with such a small Design and Technology department at my current school.The American School in London ran the workshop who have been entered in the competition for the last few years, they even have a website called the Griffins. Over the next few months hopefully we will research into the idea, and maybe with a few keen students branch out into the world of First.
So an interesting day in all, and great to be able to look around another private American school in the shape of TASIS. Which has a wonderful campus, but most useful was to meet the IT staff and chat through their experiences of areas including laptop program, VLE’s and much more. It is unfortunate they do not run the ITGS course at Diploma level as this might have been the perfect opportunity to collaborate with their students.
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