EdTech Auckland; Time to Wonder

There are no new ideas. This was the idea that keynote speaker Lisa Highfill opened with at Aorere college this morning. She experienced this first hand as she watched her inventor father come up with new products, prepare to launch them only to find another company had already produced them.

This might sound a little defeatist, but she went on to explain that the value in an idea is putting it out there and sharing it. Instead of focussing on new ideas, Highfill suggested that we focus on sparking curiosity in our learners, so that they create, build on and share good ideas with one another.

                               

We considered different ways to elicit student thinking, dreaming and wondering. This could be through engaging multimodal sites, stories, videos, google earth... But they must ask questions and discuss their thinking with one another. This aligns very closely with the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy of Manaiakalani, as we spark our students thinking through immersion assemblies, multimodal sites and trips, but we ask them to inquire into these ideas.

For Lisa, this inquiring began with the invention of Hyperdocs. It was her and her colleagues who first coined the term and created multi-modal docs to increase engagement and student agency. She noted that they did not name them hyper due to hyperlinks, instead the word hyper is chosen to mean alive and energised. In these hyperdocs, students are given a range of choices from how they access the learning, to how they create and shared. 

She encouraged us to share our own rich learning experiences with others. We must continue to spark our students wonderings.