So while many of my colleagues are still enjoying themselves on their Summer holidays, I was tripping off to Melbourne ( poor me) to attend the HEIA national conference. This is my first national conference and I wasn't sure what I was in for.
First session was with three note speakers that talked to us about Domestic Violence - the hidden borders. Clementine Ford a well known feminist in Australia, who has appeared on numerous tv shows and written a book on "Fight like a Girl", AFL player Luke Ablett who now spends his time speaking to professional sportsmen about domestic abuse and Dr Debbie Ollis. I found this session really interesting especially when Clementine Ford spoke, she is so strongly opinionated, not all I agreed with, but many made me think about how I have addressed students, boys especially, in my class. She talked about how we react to comments such as "your crying like a girl", "what are you a girl" or "toughen up" and "it's okay Miss i'm just joking" after a sexist joke is made. By allowing these comments to be made, are we allowing the first signs of abuse towards women to be installed into our society and by ignoring it or laughing it off are we encouraging it to continue.
Second session on day one i was really excited about - Engaging and shaping 21st Century minds. In this session we were introduced to a wide range of different technological tools that we can use in the classroom. Some I had seen before, but there were others that I wanted to try or have a second attempt at. A quote the speaker mentioned that resonated with me that shows the shift in education was"Kindling the fire rather than filling the vessel"
this reflects how education today is all about getting the students on board, use them to create the ideas and direction of the lessons, rather than them just coping endless amounts of notes of the board in which the notes are never reread or used effectively. She gave us these four attributes and skills list which reinforced some of the ideas about a 21st Century Learner.
I have set myself a goal of redoing a couple of my units early on this year and instead of using just powerpoint i want to try and use Prezi again and see if i can actually get past the first part of it, before giving up, Its not enough anymore to just put key points on a slide and think that's going to grasp the students attention, I know when I am being talked to I find things that are consistently changing in front of me, maintain my attention more. On the left you will see an an example of my aviator who you can customize so that it is to your liking, as well as editing the background so that it has one of the students practical pictures instead. Then by simply either talking into a mic or writing a wee script you can reflect on you practical. I thought this was a nifty idea and am hoping this could be quiet a good reflection tool for my junior classes.
A couple of other options I will experiment this year will be Sway - a presentation application that can embed pictures as it has no copy right regulations, You can use as a way to reinforce what u have just covered in Kahoots or notes and Inscrutable which are tutorial videos good to use when you are not always available to get around every kid or don't know something then they can find and watch the tutorial
Something that i didn't know was that embryo fluid starts to take on the flavours of the foods that you eat quiet regularly such as garlic, carrots chilli, therefore when born you will find that the child has a stronger liking towards those foods more often than not because they are used to having them in the womb. The third key point i took from this session was the idea of Sensory Branding - you link certain products with other parts of your sensors such as when you walk into Star bucks you smell the coffee.
The last session for the day was with Joanna McMillan about Empowering the next generation for better Health. She went through what she saw as the six main features for better health: Sleep, Activity, Exercise, Drink, Food, Stress
She also talked about her dinner wheel as you see below that is generally 3/4 plant based foods: 1 Plants, 2 Proteins, 3 Smart Grains and 4 Good Fats
Over the following two days I went to numerous other speakers about how to implement a Kitchen Garden into your school, which will be beneficial for when the rebuild is complete to creating a cafe culture in our class rooms which will be useful for the hospitality classes.
We had two other key note speakers that I found interesting: one was on the obesity epidemic and talking about how communities and individuals need to put pressure on the government to make changes to our advertising of foods, globalization of food. She showed us a great advertisement campaign by coke with the names on the bottle campaign, coke noted that there was an increase of 7% in people now drinking coke, see the video to the left it blows ya mind.
The second speaker we had on the last day was Dr Joel Gilmore who had me in fits of laughter the whole 60minute presentation, he was all about the use of science in the kitchen and looking at the myths of temperature and time of cooking different foods, focusing especially on eggs and steak I've included videos below cause they best show his humor and give you an idea of what he was doing.
My other goal I want to work on is getting the Hospo class more actively involved in the school culture - having their work on display more often and working on a couple of mini projects across subjects (catering arts evenings could be a good start as well as a couple of staff meetings or TOD. I have certainly been re energized by this conference and the passion that many of these staff show in their teaching.
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