I arrived in Sydney Saturday morning, July 7 at 8am. The flight from LA was 15 hours. After taking a bus to a bus station in the city, I took another bus to my hotel and arrived around 10:30. My room wasn’t ready, so I enjoyed lunch at the hotel café and used their wireless access to let my family know I had arrived safely. Around noon, my room was ready and I went to my room and rested until 4pm. At 4, there was a reception to meet the Action Research team. We are a group of about 48 people this year. It was nice to finally put faces with names I have seen on our team website for the past few months. After the reception, about 10 of us went to eat at a restaurant. We returned around 9 and I went straight to bed to try to recover from jetlag. I woke up quite a bit throughout the night and finally got up around 5:30am. On Sunday, July 8, we spent all day being trained for our action research (AR) project. We met in small groups a little with our AR team. After the training at Scotch College, we returned to our hotel and had another welcome reception for the AR Team. The former president of IBSC welcomed us and thanked us for being on the AR team. After the reception, I went to dinner with about 20 people. We took taxis to the restaurant, so I was able to see a little more of the city of Melbourne.
On Monday, July 9, we had more training on our AR project. We spent more time in our AR group working on our question for our AR project. My question (though it may change throughout the project) is “How can the use of various Web 2.0 tools help to facilitate the creative thinking process in third grade boys?”
We then attended the conference opening. The Scotch College orchestra and choir performed. It was absolutely amazing! The keynote was after the opening. It was titled Practical Disciplines for the 21st Century Mind by Rufus Black, Ormond College, The University of Melbourne.
After the keynote, we had a kickoff reception at Scotch College for all 475 delegates. There are 12 countries and 165 boys schools represented at this years IBSC conference. I have met people from many countries around the world. The conversations are amazing. Buses took us back to our hotels after the reception. I went to dinner with a group of about 8 people.
On Tuesday, July 10, we started the conference with a keynote by Julia Atkin.
We had a morning tea break (tea breaks happen in the morning and afternoon in Australia), then went to a breakout session with students for a discussion on creativity. Hearing from Scotch College students was a neat experience. After that was the first session. I went to iPads & Inquiry...a recipe for creativity and reflection. I ate lunch on campus with several from the action research team. The afternoon keynote was Andrew Fuller on mindset. I really enjoyed his message. He was very engaging.
The afternoon session I went to was last year's action research team reporting on their results. We were encouraged to go to one of two sessions like this to know what to expect when we have to present at next year's IBSC conference in Virginia. We walked to the metro and took it back to our hotel.
We went to the Melbourne Cricket Club stadium for a formal dinner. I tweeted a link showing them bringing in haggis as an appetizer with bagpipe players. There was beef (steak) and fish for dinner. Dessert was an apple tart. After dinner, buses took us back to our hotels.
I am enjoying meeting lots of new friends from around the world and hearing all about things they are doing in their schools that we may consider for PDS.
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