Day 1 - MassCUE 2013 Conference

Pretty impressive, not to mention how cool it is to be at Gillette Stadium!  According to the organizers, 2,200 participants and, more importantly, 61 of them are school superintendents.

Keynote speaker, Tony Wagner, focused on how our education needs to adapt to how our world is changing. And technology can be an important tool to help facilitate that change.  His talk was less about championing technology and more about a fundamental change in how we organize and execute our educational system.  Among his main points, the contradictions between how our schools actually functions and what the expectations of our economy.

Among the workshops I attended focused on 1-to-1 initiatives, Google Apps for Education, a new product from WPI to help teachers manage student feedback, student portfolios and using simple computing tools in innovative was to engage students, especially in science. One of the things that was so impressive about the workshops is that most were led by classroom teachers who could speak very directly about the application, how it improves their practice and what a difference it has made for their students.