Last week I attended the Worldwide ADE Institute in Berlin together with 380 other educators from around the globe. This conference is a biannual event Apple hosts for teachers and school leaders they recognize as the best of the best in transforming education with the use of technology in their classes, schools and universities.
The five day program focused on professional development and global collaboration. Professional development happened through workshops and labs hosted by Apple experts on the use of their products and in sessions from our peers. The ADE community also has a strong culture of sharing experiences.
We also had a focus on producing new content for teachers and students. Bringing together 380 educators from around the world creates opportunities to start collaborative projects that we will see emerge in the next months on iTunes U, the iBookstore and the internet.
In the next few blogposts I would like to share with you some of the highlights I took home. Today I start by telling about some of
the amazing showcases we saw. ADE showcases are short presentations in which an educator gets 180 seconds to tell a story from his work. All together we saw 30 ADE’s showcase what makes them proud of what they do. All 30 were amazing stories but I choose 6 to tell you about.
The first two today:
Students as Internationally Recognised Authors Using iPad – Cormac Cahill
Cormac is an Irish ADE from the best class ever (2011!!) He works with children diagnosed with Autism. The children all had difficulties expressing themselves. The kids now use Book Creator and iMovie to produce books and movies to tell their stories. The books have been downloaded across the globe and the movies have been seen and recognized worldwide.
Through the use of mobile filmmaking and authoring, these children found extraordinary ways of creativity and expression. The works have won international prizes.
Explore some of the books and movies the children made:
https://itunes.apple.com/ie/author/cormac-cahill/id1090572388?mt=11
https://vimeo.com/172729045
Bauman Geniuses – A Key to Success in IT and Coding – Konstantin Biryukov
The second showcase I’d like to put in the spotlight today is that by my good friend Konstantin from Russia. He is the head of IT and a teacher at Bauman Lyceum in Yoshkar-Ola, a small town 750km east of Moscow. To make computer science, programming and coding more relevant for his students, he created the Geniuses Program. Students perform real life IT tasks and recognize and solve true IT problems. Giving them responsibilities empowers and motivates them the excel. Last year I had the opportunity to witness them at work in their school and these kids are amazing. This year they applied for a WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference) scholarship to show the work they do on developing a school app that displays the school in 3D to help new students find their way around the campus. And they got accepted!
Tomorrow two more showcases …
Photo credits: Rick Connors, Greg Hughes