Broken Toyz

Allen pointed out this morning the following statement and I must say that I agreed on this one. "Who is crazy enough to present after a night out with Broken Toyz?" Well, it was my turn today so I guess I'm crazy enough. This morning wasn't going very well and I had little trouble with the mild headache and little sleep I had the past night. Anyway, I was up and was about to do two presentations today! One with Kate Seward (whom I met at the Summit in 2011 and I have been collaborating with the past school year) and one on my own about Global Collaboration. This was also the day that my eldest daughter Faye was about to turn eight and whilst following up on the news about the MH17 flight that was shot down from the sky above Ukraine last week, this day was a national day of mourning in the Netherlands because of that.

The topic of today was 'It takes a teacher to grow global understanding' and my presentation and how to set this up in your class room was due today. We started with an open discussion about SMART amp lead by Erica Arnoldin concerning our experience with amp after the SMART amp camp from yesterday. After that the whole group could ask questions to the developers team and loads of requests and feedback was released from the SEEs. I was kinda worried that a lot of requests were about the fact that powerful tools from Notebook should be added in amp, but in my opinion that's not a good thing. Notebook is mainly a teachers tools, where amp is a collaboration tool for students and they shouldn't be the ending up the same. That's all I can say about these NDA sessions.
After the lunch break and before my workshop about Global Collaboration, there were some small presentation of SEEs that have already done some Global Collaboration just to inspire the whole team of SEEs and prepare them for the workshop later this day.

Lise and I are getting a selfie with Neil!

Look what Rafranz gave me! A Sheldon flash drive!

The first presentation I did together with Kate while she was not present at SMART Technologies HQ, but called in from her home address using Bridgit. We'd created a Notebook-file together prior to the summit and showed and shared our experience with our colleague SEEs (present and the ones that joined in via Bridgit) just as Bob, Giovanna, Maria and Chris. We did a great job (well, mainly Kate, because I was still suffering from the Broken Toyz thing ...). And after this show the Global Collaboration 'how to' was on. I had about 90 minutes and the SEEs needed to work and collaborate with each other in small groups that were lead by an EMEA SEE, so there were 24 small groups. The outcome was a Global Collaboration lesson plan for the next school year and needed to be shared in the Gold Star SEE platform. There were some good things going on and I got a lot of positive feedback on my presentation. The SEEs were very happy to work in smaller groups on hands-on assignments. It turned out to be a good day after all.
During the day I interviewed a few SEEs that I have worked with the past year and asked them what was the main benefit from doing such a project. And did I use eXtreme Collaboration? Oh yes I did!

Yulia, Hamdy and Michelle giving their feedback on our projects.

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I have shared my presentation via Twitter and a SlideShare version is available here: