It's about the kids

The Plymouth e-Learning Conference (PeLC) is over for another year, but the memories and the reverberations will be there for a long time, methinks. Delegates from Ireland, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, USA, Canada, Argentina, Oman, Austria, Lebanon, Italy and Australia, as well as from all over the UK, attended the event this year. I got the impression from all I talked to, that people were thrilled to be at the event, keen to engage with such a passionate and knowledgeable audience, and extremely excited to listen to our world class speakers, Stephen Heppell, John Davitt, Jane Seale and Shelly Terrell. The #pelc11 Twitter stream was alive and kicking long before the event started, with over 300 tweets before the conference started at 1pm.

The weather throughout the conference has been perfect, as we promised - clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine show the seaside city of Plymouth at its glittering finest. PeLC started with a free day, which welcomed children and their teachers from several local schools, and several more schools around the UK via technological means. One of the highlights of Day 1 was the student voice technology showcase, hosted by Dan Roberts, in which children from both the primary and secondary sector regaled the audience with their astounding and inspirational uses of digital tools in the classroom. The session prompted Matt Lingard to blog about how much the children had impressed everyone with their enthusiasm for learning. They were clearly very confident and extremely articulate, and seemed completely undaunted by their surroundings and audience. Children it seemed, were everywhere at PeLC on Day 1, playing with small humanoid machines in the Robot Show, trying their hand at Internet Radio broadcasting with the wonderfully entertaining Russell Prue, and sampling the excellent food in the main atrium of the Levinsky Building.
Another highlight of Day 1 was the evening Teachmeet where several teachers and many more student teachers were chosen at random to stand up for a few minutes to share their ideas and experiences on how to harness the power of learning technology.

Yet Day 1 really belonged to the children, and the conference reverberated with their energy. It was a joy to have them joining us at the conference, and we will certainly be planning more children focused events next year, because let's face it, our kids are not the future - they are the 'now'. (More reports from the conference later)

Images by Jason Truscott (More pictures of #pelc11 here)

 
It's about the kids by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.