School comes en masse to ULearn

School comes en masse to ULearn

CORE Education Media Release

9 October, 2009

The entire full time teaching staff of 13 from Napier’s Arthur Miller School are at this year’s ULearn 09 as their professional development for the year.

Principal Sandy Anderson said a few years ago four teachers from the year 1 to 6 school attended the CORE Education conference and went back extremely enthused and motivated.

ULearn 09 focuses on innovative teaching and learning for the 21st century and has this year attracted about 1750 delegates and featured 400 national and international speakers.

As a decile eight school, Arthur Miller does not have a lot of funding available, so the teaching staff agreed they would “put all their eggs in one professional basket” and attend ULearn 09.

“We thought to do it properly to get the most value out of our professional development dollar, we’d all come,” Sandy said.

Staff have been able to attend a wide variety of breakouts and sessions. 

“The breakouts have been inspirational and also affirming – we can see we’re doing okay on our journey.  What’s also been good is the power of the group sharing what we’ve all learned,” she said.

The junior, middle and senior school teams had gone to several workshops together and had already come up with some action plans for implementing what they’d learned.

“Bringing the whole team out of our school context together has been good team building.  For something as important as ICT, you’ve really got to have some senior management here so they can get a picture of where to next.”

It had also been useful to see the digital devices on the market – Sandy had several ideas about what could be added to next year’s technology budget.

“And we’ve had a bit of fun being here.”

ends

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