Rewind 2015

This past year was - professional wise - a very good year. At the beginning of 2015 I was invited to do a talk for new students (6th graders) and their parents about future education and at my school was selected to speak at BETT (London, UK) with friend and SMART Exemplary Educator Emil Waldhauser about the Global Collaboration projects we did with our classes. Throughout the year I did some other presentations during the 'week van de mediawijsheid' (digital footprint week) at two schools in our community and a presentation about SMART Notebook and interactive whiteboards at at a geography teachers conference. And at last but not least I made it to the European part of the EdTech team ... How about that?

I also was selected to attend SMART amp Champs (Madrid, Spain) and the global SEE Summit (Calgary, Canada) with friend and colleague Henk-Jan van Mierlo amongst many others whom I got to meet again at these SMART professional development conferences which were amazing and gained me a lot. I even got the chance to speak at a staff meeting at SMART HQ which gained me SMART kapp iQ for my SMART Collaborative Classroom. Very happy with that!

Besides the use of education technology in my classroom such as the multiple SMART Boards, the new kapp iQ, 1:1 iPads, SMART amp and Google Classroom I did a few field trips with my classes. The trips to SEE Cédric Mainil in Belgium and to Emil Waldhauser in the Czech Republic were the best. I introduced LEGO in my classroom, and am just getting started with that ... al this passes by in this short video that I created. Enjoy.

Creating Global Learners III

With my World Citizenship classes we collaborated with the class of SMART Exemplary Educator Emil Waldhauser in Rakovník in the Czech Republic during the first weeks of September. This was meant to be an experiment on how to use SMARTamp workspaces between different countries, instead of within the school or district. I've done a few collaboration projects with Emil before so setting up was easy. We both agree on the fact that todays students should be taught to be so called global learners in order to become a responsible global citizen.
Emil prepared a few questions and shared them in a SMARTamp workspace, so that my students could answer them in small groups. My students were able to sign in, due to the fact that Emil created a school account for my classes to join the class and workspace in the domain of Gymnázium Zikmunda Wintra in Rakovník. Some of my students took this first session very seriously and some didn't. Even though they had fun, collaborated and were really surprised that they could work within one workspace with the Czech students and that they could actually see in real time what our contributions were. Magic.


At the beginning of October I traveled to the Czech Republic with a large group of students to visit Prague and to Rakovník. We payed a visit to Gymnázium Zikmunda Wintra as well, where my students attended a few lessons and of course with teacher Emil Waldhauser. During his class my students were working with an amp session again. During classes I was interviewed by the local press together with the principal of the school and we stated out that both our schools (and personal) really liked working with each other and that we thought that students growing up as global citizens was very important. We agreed on working and collaborating more together ...