Have you been following the feeds from Microsoft’s Worldwide Innovative Education Forum in South Africa this week? Do you know what it is all about? If you haven’t looked at some of the stuff yet then a great start is looking on twitter at #msief and look back at the archive and links.
First of all it is a fantastic achievement that both Simon and Jan (@janwebb1) have made it to the semi finals and stand an excellent chance of winning an award as I complete writing this post. Well done to the UK team led by Stuart Ball (@innovativeteach) who are continuing a great tradition since Alessio won an award in Helsinki many years ago (you can follow Alessio on twitter (@asober) – send him some tweets asking him about his deep zoom sexual reproduction project) Out there at the moment is also Ewan Mcintosh (@ewanmcintosh) & Merlin John (@merlinjohn) here is a recent blog post of his on the South Africa event – http://agent4change.net/events/microsoft-innovative-teachers/729 so look out for some of their tweets too! Actually in addition bizarrely Saltash.net school are also represented in the awards through a collaborative project called Greetings from the World which we took part in with Abi a teacher from Croatia (@abfromz) so fingers crossed for her project too!
I was also lucky to win an award in Hong Kong in 2008 for my project titled Recharge the Battery you can read more about it here:
At last year’s Worldwide Education Forum in Brazil Mandeep Atwal and Ollie Bray won awards there for the UK. You can read more about that and their work in the blog post I wrote last year about this:
Also as I have been following the tweets, browsing the photos on facebook & flikr and watching the video clips I have been reflecting the last day or so on the journey that many of the teachers who have been recognised by winning awards previously and have then go on to other things. If I think about where my attendance at the worldwide education forum in Hong Kong has now taken me it is simply amazing, the highlight was going to Washington with Microsoft in 2009 to speak to the Obama administration – you can read that post here:
Finally it isn’t just about winning awards etc although the recognition of this is fantastic for the students, teachers, schools and communities connected with it but about the long standing partnerships that are formed from these events. Our school and many of our teachers and students have benefited massively from this and still continue to do so over two years on. You can read about one of the projects here: http://bit.ly/lQCVM
If you are interested in being at next year’s world finals then you still have time to submit a VCT for the UK Innovative Education Forum held in Manchester later this month – the deadline is the 1st of November so short notice but still time – you can find details of how to do this here: http://bit.ly/d6TeC6
Or if you haven’t got time to put together a VCT then book a place at this year’s conference and find out more about these events, more details can be found here: http://bit.ly/asqb5A