A fantastic weekend spent at the ICTENSW Conference in Sydney with like-minded teachers enthusiastic about technology in education, and some inspirational keynote speakers and workshops. Highlights included:

Is doing IT enough? Get IT, do IT, go for IT. Everyone uses IT, but empower students with the knowledge and drive to get beyond just using IT, and get them creating and making.

Rube Goldberg Machines – use this idea of inventions and contraptions to encourage creativity and a little craziness! What fun watching students create with a deliberately over-engineered contraption to perform a simple task. The possibilities are endless!

Computational thinking – it is about the processes of decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithm.

Students as entrepeneurs – empower students to lead by having them run technology teams and IT support within your school.

Machine versus robot –  a machine can perform repetitive tasks but a robot will adjust performance of tasks according to the environment, using sensors to gather information about the envirnonment.

Creativity is education is no longer an option, but an absolute necessity! Adobe has some wonderful apps for storytelling and creating multimodal texts. My favourites were Adobe Slate and Adobe Voice. I was really impressed that the music is royalty free and if you search for photos or images online, it searches for Creative Commons material and credits them automatically at the end! Responsible use of ICT in action!

Always end with prac! – What fun we had with Makey Makey playing music with vegetables and marshmallows! So much fun putting STEAM into action.