Today I travelled across the country to Oaklands College for the informal ILT Champions conference which was set up by Peter Trethewey.
I was presenting on micro-blogging and we looked at Jaiku, Twitter and Flickr.
We didn’t have a huge amount of time, but I feel we had a good discussion, even if we did go down a few ratholes.
In the afternoon in an open session I led, we discussed spaces, web 2.0 and aspects of Keynote.
I attended a very good PowerPoint session led by Dave Foord in which he covered the “magic” of PowerPoint. He made the very valid point that as a lot of staff are familiar with PowerPoint using it to improve the interactivity and engagement of learner, and this is probably a better option than trying to do similar things with new or different software. I also said I would link to his interactive heart PowerPoint presentation.
Earlier in the day, Richard Everett gave an illuminating overview on how Oaklands College were moving forward the college in the utilisation of e-learning.
One thing I like about Richard’s approach is that he focuses on the pedagogy and the learning, and using technology to support that process. With him, it is never just about the technology.
I enjoyed Ellen’s session on speech to text and text to speech technologies, her demonstration really showed the value of this software for learners.
Rob Englebright’s session on VLEs led to a really good discussion on how local colleges need to interact and engage with the LEA in their area and the LEA needs to do likewise.
Overall it was a really good day and a good idea. Thanks to all that helped to organise and run the event.
Hopefully there will be another day like it at another college.