Microsoft Summer Camp
Microsoft Summer Camp

Microsoft Summer Camp

It’s been a positive first day, meeting plenty of enthusiastic and passionate teachers, twitter folk and online collaborators, making new connections is always a welcomed experience. Smartphones are commonplace, laptops are charged and staff are ready for action.

This group of educators represents a full complement of education sectors, primary, secondary, tertiary, special education. One colleague represents an education advisory service and another teaches in Welsh. The overview is broad but the emphasis is on creating resources ‘for teacher by teachers’ tapping on the ideas and practice of the educators presented as an INNOVID. A short punchy Community Clips screencast showing how Microsoft software can be re-purposed for learning impact.

For example, plotting coordinates / locations onto an Excel spreadsheet to then create a 3D surface map.  Moreover, once built the students can rotate, explore and amend the points to deepen their understanding. Now, I admit I am not a geographer but that resource sound intuitive to be, a viable use of technology for learning. Geographers, how would you  develop / enrich the lesson?

Small groups first thought through the INNOVID concept before drafting their potential INNOVID ideas in small groups. We re-grouped and share our ideas. One point of reference. All the walls in the conference room we were using were ‘wipe walls’ or frost blue wipe windows. After the ideas were collected it made for a very creative, reflective setting.

Tomorrow we build them.

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