Also the Phoenix Film Festival finished its first ever awards ceremony on April 30th in the PAC at Korea International School. Greg Israel and I would like to congratulate and thank all the students and teachers who were involved in the process. We’d also like to thank Apple, Korea for donating 9 iPod Nanos to the event and the KIS administration and PTO for ponying up the money for the other Nanos. We had 31 films from five countries and seven different schools. The winners list can be viewed on the Youtube channel as well as the awards ceremony.

I’ve been thinking about what a great activity Yes, And was yesterday. It really does put people into a different mind-set and allow some more creative and original thinking. I want to return to Korea International School and do the activity with the middle school team. This is the first year of 1:1 in the middle school, but the teachers are really trying new ideas in the classroom, which is wonderful to see.

I feel very comfortable with the project my group is in the process of fleshing out. Cultural Perspectives was such s great topic to begin with because there are some many directions people can go with it. And as a group we did a great job narrowing the subject to something workable and realistic. Very excited to get started on it!

I’ve also enjoyed the overall positive attitude of the whole conference and attendees; what a great group of people to be with!

ADE Day Two: iShop, Web 2.0, Mission Impossible!

Day two continued the energy from day one with another amazing activity and a chance to meet in Singapore’s iShop. If I had a $10,000 to spend at will, it would have been gone quickly at the iShop; but, what really made the day was the Mission Impossible activity which required us to get into new collaborative groups and wandered through downtown Singapore to solve a murder mystery treasure hunt. Our group needed to take photos of downtown locations and report to “supervisors,” who were located around different places of importance. At each stop, we needed to gather evidence and use it to produce our own version of the murder. Once we made all of the five stops, we rushed back to the iShop to assembly the photos, film clips, and sound bites into one podcast that explained the entire murder scene and the events leading up to the horrible event. Our group discovered that it was Gilbert, one of the Apple managers, who committed the dastardly deed. Another great day of team work and playing with computers.

ADE Day Three: Exploring Singapore!

Back on day one, near the end of the day moments before we broke for dinner, David Gran, David Larson, Mikey McKillip and myself formed a group under the project category Cultural Perspectives. At first we brainstormed about culture and different elements of culture and how we could see all those different elements very clearly in Singapore due to its rich history of multiculturalism. It was either Mikey or David G. who mentioned that the first thing he does when he wants to travel to another country is check out information of about the local cuisine. Then we discussed how recipes from a country tell a person a ton about the culture and history of the place. For example, Singapore has four main influences, Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian, which can be clearly seen, or tasted in this case, in the local dishes. An idea was born! On the morning of day two, David G. came to breakfast with the idea for the name — iTooth: The Educational Food Revolution.

Which finally brings us to day three, our chance to eat our way through Singapore. We stopped at food stalls from different areas of the city: Little India, the Arab district, Chinatown, and various Malay wet markets. Unfortunately, I had to surrender early in the day to the eating due to a horrible churning in my stomach. Usually I have an ironclad constitution, but something from the day before was playing hacky-sack with my innards; plus, it was very humid and hot outside, which didn’t help the situation at all, and finally, by 10:00 I had drank more coffee than I usually consume in three days and eat more than I usually consume in an entire day. But I fought through the pain to provide moral support to the boys in their gastric adventures. It requires mentioning that Mikey is an inhuman eating machine; honestly, the guy must have a hollow leg or something, because at every location he ate a massive amount of food and always seemed prepared for more. Strong work, Mikey!

ADE Day Four: Project Work Day!

The conference was wonderful because of all the time that was built in for collaboration with other teachers and a fantastic example of that was the two back-to-back days of project work — outside to gather data and inside to build content and organize. It makes for awesome results in teacher creativity and collaboration and I think the projects that all of the group projects produced display this fact. Also, I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to work in than David Gran, David Larson, and Mikey McKillip who are gifted teachers, technology advocates, and simply funny guys. I really enjoyed our two full days of working together. It was so nice to have a group of people with a can-do attitude and a sense of humor. Thanks guys! It was a pleasure.

ADE Day Five: Presentations!

Truly an amazing day for education! Each one of the presentations displayed such wonderful inquiry-based learning that uses technology. Sharing these products with our home schools and the educational community at large is very important. Use the wiki, use the Ning, and use ALI to continue sharing and building. I also learned about Google Sketch Up which appears to be an amazing educational tool.