School comes en masse to ULearn

Sandy Anderson of Arthur Miller School in Napier talks to Murray Thoms of ActivBoard at today’s ULearn 09 conference in Christchurch. Photo by Matt Templeton, (12), Cobham Int, CHCH.

The entire full-time teaching staff of 13 from Napier’s Arthur Miller School were at this year’s ULearn 09 as their professional development for the year.

Principal Sandy Anderson said a few years ago four teachers from the year one to six school attended the CORE Education conference and went back extremely enthused and motivated.

ULearn 09 focused on innovative teaching and learning for the 21st century and this year attracted about 1750 delegates and featured 400 national and international speakers.

As a decile eight school, Arthur Miller does not have a lot of funding available, so the teaching staff agreed they would “put all their eggs in one professional basket” and attend ULearn 09.

“We thought to do it properly to get the most value out of our professional development dollar, we’d all go,” Ms Anderson said.

 Staff had been able to attend a wide variety of breakouts and sessions.

 “The breakouts were inspirational and also affirming – we could see we’re doing okay on our journey. What’s also been good was the power of the group sharing what we’ve all learned,” she said.

The junior, middle and senior school teams had gone to several workshops together and had already come up with some action plans for implementing what they’d learned.

“Bringing the whole team out of our school context together has been good team building. For something as important as ICT, you’ve really got to have some senior management here so they can get a picture of where to next.”

It had also been useful to see the digital devices on the market – Ms Anderson had several ideas about what could be added to next year’s technology budget.

“And we’ve had a bit of fun being here.”