A few people already know this story, but it will probably be new to most: I first met Dawn Kendal on an Autumn morning in 1985 outside my Father's house, on what was supposed to have been her wedding day to another man! Dawn had decided to call off her wedding (in Newcastle, 400 miles away), she had travelled down to stay with relatives and here we were talking together in my Dad's garden in the Plymouth sunshine. Ultimately she decided to stay in Plymouth, and the rest is history. You just can't make that kind of story up, can you?
We quickly realised we had plenty in common (even little quirks like both being right handed, but both swapping knives and forks to eat left handed) and we were married on October 4, 1986. I have never been in trouble for forgetting the date of our anniversary - it was a very memorable day, particularly when Dawn was over 20 minutes late arriving at the church and I wondered for a brief moment whether she had bailed out from a wedding for the second time.... It is also easy to remember because October 4th is the date of the launch of the first ever artificial satellite - Sputnik - which heralded the space race, and also a new era in telecommunications. Dawn originally trained as a nurse, but then after our children came along, she took a few years out and then retrained as a teacher, gaining a first class BA honours degree in English Language and ICT from Exeter University, and her PGCE Secondary Education from Plymouth University. After various teaching jobs including two years working within my own university department as an associate lecturer (where we did some research on social media together) she is now a teacher in one of the most technically advanced schools in the UK - Saltash.net. She works alongside people such as Dan Roberts (@chickensaltash), is key stage 3 co-ordinator and is a very popular and innovative educator. I am of course, extremely proud of her. She is @dawnywheeler on Twitter by the way...
So thank you Dawn for our first 25 years together. Thank you for believing in me and sticking by me. Now, is it too much to ask if you and I can go for the 50? ;-)
Silver and gold by
Steve Wheeler is licensed under a
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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.
