Planes, trains, and automobiles…
Spent yesterday on planes, trains, and automobiles. Started the day off with an early morning flight from Melbourne to Sydney. I traveled with Mark Yaxley, Studywiz’s Asia/Pacific account executive. Its a short 1 hour flight. We landed, collected our bags, and found that we had no good solution as to what to do with our luggage because we had about 30 minutes to get to our first meeting with the New South Wales Dept of Ed team in downtown Sydney. At the end of the day, we would be back at the airport to fly out to Hobart, Tasmania.
We got onto the city metro train with all out gear, and made our way downtown. The NSW DOE is in a beautiful “old” building. Unfortunately, we were in such a rush, I have no photo of it. The group we met with had a lot of questions about MLTI. Their lead person was quite familiar with TPCK and was very interested that we also knew of it. She was not familiar with SAMR, and we spent some time talking about it. From their line of questions, it was evident that some sort of centralized 1:1 effort is underway, but I’m betting they are in contract negotiations or something where they are unable to speak freely of it. Hopefully this little post won’t blow up the process, but it doesn’t seem to be too much of a secret, just something they couldn’t provide details about to me.
Overall, a good meeting, and I think we’ll continue to talk with them as they roll out whatever it is that they are doing.
We headed down to the harbor for lunch and to meet up with Ray Handley. Ray is an Australian involved with alternative education efforts in Sydney. He spent about 5 years in Maine working at the Windham Real school when Sue Gendron was in the Windham district. He responded to a job listing and Sue hired him. We had a great lunch in a little restaurant on the boardwalk with a view of the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Ray will be visiting Maine in January to begin doing more research on alternative ed programs. I’ve got some photos of the harbor, but I don’t have the cable with me just now…its in my other bag that is still in Melbourne. I’ll post them later!
After lunch we rushed off to our next meeting with a friend of Mark’s. They worked together previously in Japan. He’s now back in Sydney, but travels throughout far east still. He’s running a language school to teach English as well as to teach teachers to teach English. Interesting business/school. From there, we went up to meet with Apple Australia. Conversations were about MLTI, Apple, and unreleased products (just kidding).
Because the day wasn’t busy enough, we rushed off from there back to the train to get back to our flight to Hobart. Upon landing, I find myself here on Tasmania. Its clearly smaller, and more laid back here from what I’ve seen just in driving to Geoff’s house. We’re definitely not in the city anymore. Geoff nonchalantly pointed out a spider on the wall last night that was probably about 4 to 5 inches across. “No worries, they won’t eat you.” I woke up this morning at 5 am (that’s a record I think) to a bunch of birds singing.
Anyway, you’re caught up! I’m betting many of you out there are preparing to eat some Thanksgiving Turkey just about now. I’m on to Friday myself, but Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Sounds like the trip is going well. Happy Thanksgiving! Can’t wait to hear about the China part of your trip.