After our proposed shopping day before the conference was to start was cut short due to the weather and late departure from Wellington, we arrived in Christchurch to bright sunshine and warm weather. We made our way to our motel and registered at the Convention Centre in due course. The conference was opened on the Wednesday by Chris Carter with a view from the Government. Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach followed with some inspirational ideas. Bruce McIntyre responded on behalf of the business sector amid yawns and quiet chatter. He was not the most inspirational of speakers. Following the opening, we went to our first two breakouts. The first was on using ICT in the classroom from a school in Auckland. We got to converse with students from his class online but got the impression all was not as it seems. Our second breakout was listening to two young teachers from a Christchurch School talking about the Inquiry Process in their classrooms. This was interesting and provided guidelines ideas for us to take back to our school. The Keynote speaker on Thursday was Steven Carden. He spoke for over an hour with no notes and spoke from the heart. Very enjoyable and inspirational. Further breakouts that we went to followed the same lines. We will look at attending breakouts from keynote speakers when we go to Learning at Schools in February. This way we may achieve more value on our learnings. Overall the conference was enjoyable but not as inspirational as we wanted. We got back and produced a photostory of our journey which we shared with others at school as well as some ideas to shape to our school requirements.
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