Tuesday

• Unofficial Geocaching workshop – great to introduce newbies to the addiction
• Pecha Kucha session in the Limes Room – I think this was filmed so will find the link for it
• Twitter dinner

Wednesday

• Keynote: Lee Crockett
• Breakout One – this was my workshop <G>
• Breakout Two – Inspiration, Ignition, Impact with Paula Jamieson
• Keynote: Steve Wheeler (aka @timbuckteeth)

Thursday

• Twitter breakfast
• Keynote: Lane Clark
• Breakout Three - Change, Creativity, Curriculum & Community: Succeeding in Spite of the System – Chris Betcher
• Breakout Four – Apple sMacdown
• Conference Dinner

Friday

• Breakout Five – Trades Hall visit – had a quick mini-lesson on the Promethean board
• Breakout Six – eCompetencies – Linking eQuality teaching directly to the Key Competencies with Kellie McRobert
• Keynote: Stephen Heppell

Prizes

I won a couple of fantastic prizes and must thank the sponsors for those:

• HP: My DP has already responded about the 42″ digital sign I won – we’ve just completed a new admin area and I know it will look fantastic there
• Learning Media: I spent my 2 hours at the airport waiting for my flight reading the teachers manual for the Write Tools – can’t wait to get stuck in – and when Murray Gadd next visits I’ll do a show and tell with him

And as for the other freebies:

• Xirrus – while I know the t-shirts I got weren’t so much a prize as a giveaway I want to say thanks for them – they’ll fit right into my wardrobe!
• DLink – best gadget ever – the screwdrivers – a must for all us geeks
• Apple sMACdown – my new earbuds are very welcome – they’ll be residing at school – and will be very handy for my kids recording using the iTouch/iPhone

As always one of the huge bonuses is meeting up with my Twitter PLN – it’s great to see the international tweeps here with us kiwis. Thanks to all my PLN the personal input was amazing!

The demographic information I got from it goes like this:

Length of time on twitter:

• 15 — 2+ years
• 32 — 1-2 years
• 10 — 6-12 months
• 15 — less than 6 months

Occupation:

• 37 — Teachers – both Primary & Secondary
• 35 — involved in some kind of ICT facilitation – some as part of teaching job
• 4 — Librarian or Library Specialists
• 6 — Senior positions – Principal/AP/DP
• 7 — Other jobs – some in education, some not (some I wasn’t quite sure what the job was!

I then asked why they used twitter. I discovered that there were some broad areas here:

• Connection
• Collaboration/Collegiality
• Information
• Fun

There were many examples under each of those areas – too many to post them all so I’ll pick out a few examples for each.

Connection

• Link with people in NZ & around world with similar interests/global connection
• Other teachers/educators have same vision for enhancing teaching/learning in their classrooms
• Keep my thinking fresh by extending my prof. network & interacting with people I would not normally have the chance to connect with

Collaboration/Collegiality

• Discussions, controversies, new thinking
• Support when looking for new ideas
• Coffee conversations with e-colleagues
• 24/7 access to collaborators

Information

• Asking and answering questions
• Sharing tips and resources
• Staying up-to-date
• Keep in touch with what is happening in the outside world – especially important for people free-lancing
• Creating wider audience for class blogs

Fun

• Planning fun stuff like Flash Mob @ conference
• Personal – friends & family
• Sharing memorable and humorous events
• Interest, curiosity, new things

Next I asked how Twitter helped professionally

• Difficult to find funds to attend prof. dev. workshops – depend on Twitter & peers to learn and grow
• Able to tear down the walls of my classroom & give my students a chance to connect with people around the world
• Keeps me in touch with the outstanding role models in our (global) education system
• Allowed us to restructure our classes to take advantage of Web 2.0
• I’ve ‘stolen’ and used many ideas in the curriculum or own personal life; made friends; shared my own ideas; collaborated with others; reflected on my own practice and more
• Has grown my PLN, challenged my thinking & ideas about education & specifically the impact of e-learning on pedagogy & student learning
• First place I go to when I have a problem or need inspiration

I also asked them to make recommendations for people to follow — the top 5 people are listed below

• @allanahk (13)
• @teachernz (11)
• @tombarrett (10)
• @suewaters (8)
• @wfryer (8)

Then I asked for “sage” advice for newbies.

• Find strong people to follow
• Make connections with people with similar interests
• Enjoy the spirit of the community
• Give yourself time to develop connections
• Be eclectic in your mix of people you follow
• Jump in & connect

And finally I asked for any last thoughts

• Don’t worry if it takes a long time to ‘get’ – just about everyone says that
• Visit the Blogger’s Cafes at conferences to meet up with people
• 140 characters leads to tight, focussed writing/thinking
• @dogtrax shared a poem he had written called “I dream in Twitter” – it’s worth listening to!

As you can see from this snippet there was a lot of information in the survey. It took me the better part of a weekend to pull this information out and put it into logical order (and work on my workshop presentation!)

I will write up my thoughts of what this all means in another post. I will also post a link to my finished slideshow (once I convert it to PPT from Keynote).

In the meantime the raw data is available here for people to look at. (Personal information removed) Please contact me if you want a downloadable version.

Thanks again to all who participated in this survey. You and your answers validated Twitter as an educational tool!

Thanks to all who contributed … I’ll post results in a series of posts rather than one big post!