Posted by Jeff on Nov 27, 2008 in
Education Wednesday was the end of the VITTA conference. I met a teacher and a pair of students from a school in Victoria province who use Studwiz and the Studywiz Mobile Interface. They did a short presentation at the tail end of my presentation. Unfortunately, our session room was about the size of a dorm room (I think it was a dorm room…really…) and the attendees numbered no more than 5 or 6. On a positive note, 2 of them were members of Victoria’s State Department of Education team. One of them I had met the day previous in my meeting with the Victorian DOE. That at least shows that the conversation we had struck a chord.
Later that day, Geoff and I went to visit the Coberg Senior School. The school’s Principal Don met us and gave us the tour. They are fortunate to have a chance to rebuild not only their school culture but their facilities to match. Listening to Don speak about their school, its operation, goals, and attitudes, he might as well work for MLTI. It was a very good meeting, and nice to see others who see the role of school and the role of technology in school in the same light as we do in MLTI.
Tags: Melbourne, VITTA
Posted by Jeff on Nov 25, 2008 in
Travel Monday and Tuesday were full of meetings and presentations. I won’t give you the blow-by-blow of each meetings, but they went well and included a senior advisor to the Deputy Premier and a group from the Victorian state education department. I also opened up the Principal’s strand for the VITTA conference with a presentation about MLTI.
I’ve not really badly jet lagged, but I have been waking up before sunrise and falling asleep with the lights on…meaning, I don’t remember when I decided to go to bed, but I awoke at about 1:30 AM and the lights were still on. But it has given me the chance to take a few photos of sunrise and the night skyline of Melbourne.
Sunrise in Melbourne
Melbourne skyline in the morning
Melbourne Skyline at night
Tags: Melbourne, Travel, VITTA
Posted by Jeff on Nov 8, 2008 in
Travel Greetings all,
I’m going to give it a try and see if I can keep up with posting to this blog while I’m traveling. To start, let me give you a sense of where I’m going to be. I leave on Saturday, November 15 for our nation’s capitol. I’ll be in Washington DC through Wednesday at SETDA’s annual Leadership Summit and Education Forum. I’ll return to Maine for a day before heading off to parts unknown (at least for me).
The major part of the trip will take me on flights from Boston to Melbourne, Australia. While in Australia, my draft itinerary includes the VITTA conference and meetings with various school and government officials to talk about their 1:1 efforts in Canberra, Hobart, Sydney, and Melbourne.
I’ll leave from Melbourne for Beijing on December 1 where I will meet up with the rest of the group from People to People. We’ll be traveling to Guiyang for a conference on Education Technology. At the end of the week, we’ll return to Beijing where I’ll meet up with my father. He and I will head off to visit our family’s ancestral home in Fuzhou City.
Well, that’s about it for now!
Tags: Itinerary, P2P, SETDA, VITTA