Reflections on Google in Education Conference: October 2014

I went on a conference last week. It was the first day of my half term and I travelled all the way up to London with a heavy suitcase that I had to lug around with me. This to me is evidence that I must have thought I could get something from it! Also evidence that I was going to sunny Sicily the next day. Now I am not someone who gives up holiday easily, so do so unless it was for something really special. It was a Google in education summit. As with the summit I attended in May I got a lot from it.

A few things which I have been pondering during my holiday have been the following.

• How to start using videos more in my lessons.
• To stop telling my students to just ‘research’ on an ipad
• To work out how to start using coding in lessons.

The other great thing was to spend time chatting with other teachers and hearing their perspective on technology and what they have been doing in the classroom. I’ve been really thinking about how to improve my coding which is so basic and heard about a website called Computing at Schools that has lots of different courses I could go on. So far they mostly seem to be a very long way away, but I will keep checking back. I definitely want to understand how the Raspberry Pi works.

With videos I have set up a Youtube channel which I am going to get going this week and I will try exploring some flipped learning with some of my older students.