EducampAKL 2015

Just been to my first Educamp in Auckland at Tamaki College.  Thanks heaps to all the other
engaged, innovated, inspiring people that made the day great.

It is time for me to reflect on what happened and what I learned and try to condense the wonderful day into mere words and concepts.

Learning Spaces

The main discussions that stimulated my thinking were about using different learning spaces for students in the digital environment, the main ones that we talked about were the new Hapara Workspace and Google Sites...

  While I have not got a full understanding of Hapara Workspaces yet I have used Google sites for this.  There were several teachers using Sites successfully in lots of different way to interact with students.  The sorts of things I saw were sharing docs from drive,
calendars, videos, instructions.

I found that sites worked when I did it but took a lot of maintenance that didn't directly benefit the learning outcomes for my students.  I am keen to have a really close look look at Hapara Workspace and see how that can work.  I have got high expectations as it is designed as a tool to achieve this outcome of a learning space.

The second thing that caught my attention was Tanya talking about blogging.  She talked about a platform called medium that is designed on research about the best format for readers of an internet blog.  I like the idea of a theme/layout that makes it easier for readers and is based on research.  I think I will take a closer look at Wordpress.com to try and make my blogs more accessible for people.

UPDATE: So after looking at Medium and dabbling in Wordpress.com I relooked at what I could achieve with blogger which I was currently on.  I think I can achieve the things I was looking for simplicity, clean, focused, through customizing the blogger platform.  What do you think of the my blog design?  Have I achieved these goals?  Anything missing or need changing?  Appreciate your feedback.