This series of posts is all about my magical, mystery tour of Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington state, USA. You can follow the feed of what happens over the next week by using the official #msftpil or the unofficial #chickengates.
I have been extremely fortunate to be selected to attend Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Institute where 50 top educators from all over the world will attend a weeks training with Microsoft and have the opportunity to share good practice and develop future collaborative projects.
While the institute was going on in a building close by was Microsoft’s US Innovative Education Forum where over 100 finalists from all over America had to come to talk about their classroom projects. We had the opportunity to go around and talk to many of them and I came away with some really amazing ideas and connections to really exciting teachers.
The winners have all been announced – it is worth checking out the link below about the winning projects as it may give you some ideas about future projects that you could be involved in.
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/aug11/08-01IEF11PR.mspx
Two of the winners mentioned I had the opportunity to talk in more detail about the projects – the first Kelli Etheredge who I connected to on the Partners in Learning network and twitter before I even met her has a fantastic project using OneNote with the Count of Monte Christo to conduct live trials. The second is that I was fortunate to accidentally sit on a bus whilst there with Colin Horack & Anthony Sablan from Washington about their amazing student voice project which sounded brilliant. These two among others are definitely worth reading more about.
Thanks for the mention, Dan. It was so great to meet you face to face, and I hope that we can find ways to connect our schools in the future.
No worries Kelli was great to meet you and look forward to collaborating in the future 🙂