Professional+Development

BUCKLANDS BEACH PRIMARY SCHOOL

Learning@School Conference, held 24 – 27 February 2009 in Rotorua

Evaluation

Six staff from Bucklands Beach Primary School attended the Learning@Schools conference in 2009. Overall, people found it to be excellent, with lots of opportunities for learning, networking and challenges to thinking.

People felt it was a great venue, with conference facilities, presenters, equipment and buses all well-organised. They also found the atmosphere friendly and staff/organisers helpful. In general we felt the food was very good, obviously with the exception of the conference dinner.

All keynotes and breakouts were useful and we gained a lot from all of them. There was a good balance between big picture and practical classroom ideas available. We did feel that there was conflict at times between the messages given in keynotes and those given in the breakouts (e.g. the need to think carefully about how we’re using ICT and the quality of the teaching and learning vs promoting using things like chat-rooms for what was really very low-level thinking because we should be using the technology that the children are using/will be using). This is where follow-up discussion in our school group has been useful to talk some of these issues through.

Selecting the breakouts was very time consuming and possibly could have been more user-friendly. Some sort of system where all options for a breakout session could be viewed on a desktop space for arrangement and selection would be helpful. Unfortunately, one of our teachers had selected her breakout sessions and had the confirmation printout with her, but it hadn’t gone through. However, conference staff couldn’t have been more helpful and they went out of their way to accommodate her in her chosen breakout options even though these were full.

We had a mixed response about the accommodation. Most people were very happy, but as we suggested to the Millenium, if the only rooms available are smoking rooms (which we felt were substandard) we would prefer for them to say they are full and allow us the opportunity to find alternative accommodation.

On the Friday morning during the ‘unconference time’, BBPS met as a group and shared/reflected on what we had learned and how it could apply. We also looked at next steps for our school. We found this time extremely valuable.

We all really valued the opportunity to attend the conference and feel confident that we have come back with many excellent ideas, challenges and practical ideas to take BBPS further forward in ICT.

2008 Cluster Professional Development