In Charge of my Learning

Just back from an amazing and full on three days of learning with the 2014 CORE eFellows (Tim, Anne, Bec, Rowan, Vicki, Ben) and our mentors (John & Louise) in Christchurch, I was on my way to the Educamp in Hawkes Bay, which was organised by Juliet, Maurice and Rohan.

Coming home on a Friday evening and then having to get up very early the next morning, is not easy, but that is exactly what a passionate educator do.  I give up my time (with my family) to learn from, to engage and connect with other professionals.  

What is the reason why so many of us are doing this? I think it is because we are aware of the fact that we are playing a critical role in enabling the educational achievement of all of our learners, and therefore we need to keep on learning ourselves.

Around 80 educators were gathered from around the North Island.  The wisdom was in the room with great conversations led and inspired by passionate educators.

We started off with the usual Smackdown, where some attendees shared something they thought was useful and worthy of mention. I was grateful to hear beforehand from Tim, that there was a slide with my name added to it, to share about #TeachMeetNZ.  Phew, I had to think quickly as to what to say about this amazing project by Sonya and I hope I did it justice.  

After that, we used stickies to indicate our interests to form an 'unconference' for the rest of the day.

As usual, the learning and conversations did not stop when the educamp was over, thanks to my travelling companions Annemarie and Alex.

Evidence that even these discussions are valuable is reflected in this tweet:

It was fabulous spending time with like-minded educators and I am grateful for new connections made. 

~ "The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you." - B.B. King ~