Let's Play! Now Let's Document!

On Friday, I had the absolute pleasure of being invited to co-present at the ECOO 2012 Conference! This conference was being held from October 24-26th at the Parkway Sheraton Hotel and Conference Centre and over 1500 educators across the three days attended. This was a true celebration of learning since each session throughout the conference was dedicated to learning, teaching, creating, collaborating and sharing experiences and expertise!

The session that my mentor, Tania Sterling, and I presented on was entitled "Let's Play! Now Let's Document!" and its focus was around three big ideas and areas of professional inquiry:

How can we leverage technology to capture learning?

How can we use assessment data to inform practice?

How does technology support home-school connections?

In order to summarize our initial thinking when tackling the area of assessment in FDK and how we could best utilize technology to make it meaningful, we turned to the curriculum document. After pulling out the key words that we felt connected technology to support and enhance pedagogical documentation and student learning, we decided to make a Wordle to capture our thinking:

We were completely overwhelmed by the number of participants who came to our session and actively participated with insightful questions and thoughtful connections to their own classrooms. Moreover, we were excited to see that quite a few of our participants were not actually in an FDK classroom but were rather intrigued with how they can trickle technology upstream across the grades! This was an amazing learning moment for us, since we truly valued and appreciated the ideas being shared from different grade perspectives. We had incredible feedback after our session which assured us that we gave our audience the opportunity to leave our session "thinking" about their programs and how they can integrate technology to document authentic learning experiences in their classrooms. 

I was absolutely honoured to be a part of such an event and look forward to many more opportunities to share my learning in the future! Thank you to my Administrator, Greg Collins, for supporting me in this journey, to my mentor Tania for continuing to inspire me, and to my amazing DECE, Heidi Theis, for being a wonderful partner and staying open-minded to all technology we have been exploring in our classroom!