These holidays I’ve been totally occupied with back-to-back conferences. NZAMT10, the bi-ennial Maths Conference, was in Week One at St Cuthberts in Epsom, Auckland and ULearn07, the annual ICT Conference was in Week 2 at the Sky Convention Centre in Auckland CBD.
At NZAMT10 Shane Hill presented in the Main Hall at St Cuthberts on “Play and Practice, the Key to Progress in Mathematics – the Mathletics Story” and I ran a workshop on “eTools for Maths Teachers”. We tried to gate crash Ian Clark’s lively workshop on “Mathletics at Wellington College” but there was no room! I ran a Special Interest Group session for MUGs (MUG = Mathletics User Group) which attracted a good crowd. A bonus was catching up with my old TI mates from Aussie.
Congratulations to NZAMT for running a really positive, pacey and practical conference – and thanks to Auckland for turning on some great weather! My work is well cut out for Term 4 following up on all the class trial requests from this conference as well as the next one!
The ULearn Conference was mainly experienced vicariously. I was grounded for the duration in the trades hall apart from a brief foray to assist Mark Webster from Meadowbank with his great workshop on Mathletics @ Meadowbank. I was staggered at the improvement results his class have recorded an dreally enjoyed the video that the students put together.
Although I was stranded on the stand lots of people visited and it was great to hear about the workshops and keynotes that they had attended. Teachers were very positive about the offerings and I’ve been trolling blogs picking up tidbits of impressions and activities. It was neat to meet those folk whose blogs I keep an eye on (aka lurking!) and to catch up with old friends. Us old hands had a good reminisce about the early days and specifically the first ICTPD Conference at CIT – no phone lines, no internet, precious little power! Its quite funny how many of us are now resident in the Bay of Plenty!
It was great to meet F2F with teachers I had only previously had e-conversations with. Many had participated in the Trans Tasman Maths & Spelling Challenge and I loved hearing about their experiences. It was great to hear about kids turning up for school early begging to do Maths and how in one school when the kids realised that some other students hadn’t yet obtained their Golden Guru status they donated their online time so that they could! We can see the fun happening online but again, its all experienced vicariously. We miss the fun those at the chalk face are having! I’d encourage teachers to YouTube or TeacherTube these events – perhaps an extra prize for the best video clip could be an option?
