Take Aways from Learning 2

The Learning 2 conference came and went in a flash. Three days of reimagining learning brought a plethora of ingenious ideas, passionate practices, and tantalizing tech tools to help us grow as educators and reconsider the status quo of learning.

For those that didn’t attend the conference, the conference is organized around 5 elements: cohorts, extended sessions, workshops, unconference, and Learning 2 Talks. Cohorts allow participants to interact with other participants doing the same or similar job. Extended Sessions are deep dives into an idea or process on offer by one of the Learning 2 Leaders. Alfredo Papaseit, the SSIS ES Tech Coach, did an Extended Session on coding and physical computing for younger kids and Rebecca Jardin, the SSIS MS Art Teacher, did an Extended Session on reimagining your classroom with visual learning.

Workshops are 1-hour vetted opportunities to learn something from another teacher or student presenter. Evan Weinberg did a great workshop on standards-based grading. We also had two groups of SSIS high school students do workshops. One group presented about Technovation, a girls’ coding club, and the other group presented about coding with the Python language. Unconference sessions are ideas suggested by participants they would like to discuss in more depth and in an unstructured environment. They are proposed the day the unconference session will occur. And, finally, Learning 2 Talks are TED-like talks where Learning 2 Leaders, students, and others do a 5-minute talk to all participants on something about which they are passionate. SSIS teachers Robert Appino, Alfredo Papaseit, Rebecca Jardin, and Grade 11 students Kaithe Fadreguilan and Nikita Chronis all did L2 talks. Their talks are viewable below. The entire playlist of Talks can be seen here.

Because I was working the conference, I was only able to pop in briefly on these elements of the conference. So, I turned to some of the SSIS participants for their take-aways from the conference. Thomas Redfern said one of his biggest take-aways had to do the role of tech coach. He realized and hopes others can come to realize that this role is not about being a fixer. He feels a Tech Coach is more of a technology educational consultant that can help others to consider different perspectives and uses of technology while not being an expert on everything.

Anne Lauer said her favorite moment was John Rinker’s Learning 2 Talk, which she felt focused on ritual establishment. Alex Bunting and Polly Butz big take away revolved around the “disrupt time” idea that was presented by the winner of last year’s L2 grant (and former SSIS teacher), Lori Uemura. Disrupt time is when students are given time in the curriculum to explore ideas and topics about which they are passionate. How this is organized and what kinds of assessments are involved can vary. The main idea is that students will be more motivated if they are allowed to pursue ideas about which they are passionate. This idea was reflected in Kaithe’s L2 Talk, as well. Clare Alexander echoed this point, stating that the idea of student choice was common theme in the conference and is something she intends to implement in her Geography classes. They all agree that there does need to some structure built into this process, however. A free-for-all would be counter-productive.

You can still review everything that was shared via the #learning2 Twitter hashtag by clicking here. If you would like to chat more about and/or implement any ideas you learned or heard about at L2, please let me know. Let’s reimagine learning and make education more relevant for the needs of our learners.
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