Connection, PD & Ako

EducampAKl was a complete revelation for me, attending for the first time I had a strong preconceived notion of what was ahead. I'd followed a couple through the twitter feed and had even contributed from afar. However, I had no clue of how much I would get from a day's free PD.

On a personal level, I got to catch up with several colleagues who I always enjoy chatting with and they always have something interesting for me to reflect on. Classroom twitter accounts was one such topic that gave me a lot to think about. PD these days is always an opportunity to get put a face to name and it was a pleasure to meet two of my fellow Kidsedchatnz coordinators. Juliet & Marnel, I look forward to the next time we can meet and hope there is a time shortly when all 7 of us coordinators can sit down to a coffee.

Watching and taking part in the Smackdown I still wasn't sure what I options I would choose to learn about. So I wandered off to the Code Club for Teachers module - fantastic choice!

An hour later, I'm part of a Google Community and have made more connections with teachers all facing the same issues and wanting the similar support. Plus we have some enthusiastic colleagues to help us with our support needs and they're setting us some deadlines for Code.Org! I made light of the fact they wanted an hour of my time over the next month (my wife argues I already spend too much time working).

A week hasn't elapsed yet and this is a summary of progress that occurred because I made a worthwhile choice:

• I've completed 2 modules, including learning in front of my class who have all spent some time with me on Scratch earlier in 2014.
• I've sat down with my self-assessed technology-challenged ex-Mentor Teacher and worked on creating a cool little block of code (results in the video). I love it everytime I engage him in an eLearning task but coding I never would have thought.
• Demonstrated to my class that I can make mistakes, keep learning and fix them.
• They're all interested in doing what I am and so as the final bell went we set up a class code so they could all join Code.org also. 
• One of my boys is already on Code.org so I hope he's prepared to help me learn too.

Lesley, Tanya, Alyx & Sonya thank you, I was on the coding journey but now I have direction, support and best of all motivation as my kids and I will be learning together.