Hamilton Regional ICT PD Meeting

Well...this was a more valuable trip than i thought it was going to be :-)
By the look of the agenda i wasn't too sure but as usual it was a great opportunity to network - find out what is happening in other clusters, and participate in PD workshops. The first couple of sessions were 'advertisers' - products were a smart tablet - a sort of remote control way of operating the laptop which was attached to a dataprojector. I guess this was a useful tool as it could be passed around the class and students could have the opportunity to interact more directly with what was happening on the big screen - it also had a screen shot saving capability. Citech (spelt it wrong?) are promoting it and have said if any schools want to trial it free of charge they are welcome to contact them. The other product was an Intranet/Website 'solution' called IntraSchool (one more to add to the list of growing online tools) The benefits proposed for this particular system was that it was really simple to use and very cheap compared to others.
Sherry Crisp delivered a couple of workshops - the one i went to talked about online resources for teachers - we looked closely at Trackstar which could be found along with some other useful online tools at http://www.4teachers.org/. We also talked about Blogging & we shared some examples from our cluster. Richard went to one about Action Inquiry which i have already lost the notes from - oops.
The Facilitation Strategy workshop really used techniques that we already use in the classroom - cooperative and thinking skills strategies to promote discussion and sharing - have to practise on the management team at our next meeting :-)