I’ve given a number of keynote adresses at conferences over the past few years. While it is always an honour to be able to share your work with others, my experience at the BYTE conference in Neepawa Manitoba was unique. More of a focus session than a full keynote address, the 15 – 20 minutes I had to start the day with approximately 300 educators was interesting.
Short, fast paced and a challenging thing to do, I thought it was worth sharing. (scroll up to the 6:00 mark for the sound and the keynote to actually begin)
As well that morning the folks from BYTE asked @Tyler_JL, a pre-service teacher who doodles a la Gulia Forsythe to capture a representation of my short talk. This is what he came up with:
My first time at BYTE. A great gathering of people and a group of interested educators trying to push the edges of possibility.
I did a similar keynote this week in Nanaimo at their teachers’ convention. There were 4 keynotes of about 20 minutes followed by 1 hour breakouts by each of us. There were about 700 teachers in total so the breakouts were between 150-200. The afternoon featured 2 hour sessions by the 4 of us as well as many other teachers so those were groups of 30.
I really liked this format and I think it honors the notion of active learning in that the initial talks provided foundation and teasers for the following sessions that were much more hands on.