Wow — I had a great time at the Mid-Atlantic Handheld and Emerging Technology Conference again this year. It had all the elements of a great conference: small, high energy, interesting people, very hands on and interactive, and an intriguing mix of pedagogy and technology.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this together and who attended. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on some things that got me thinking there.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend, check out the wiki. All the session and workshop materials are here.

And for those who did attend, I posted some follow-up things from my sessions that answer some questions raised or otherwise might be of interest. (This on-going communication is one of the things I love about PD wikis.)

Last week, I did some hands on workshops in new format — 2 hours! Normally, the shortest hands on session I’ll do is 3 hours, and I prefer 6 hours, especially for beginner podcasting sessions. But I thought I’d give this a try.

Well, I pretty much knew that with only 2 hours, I really couldn’t talk much or give any background — I’d need to do a very quick run-through of the software we’d be using and then turn folks loose to create.

I was pleasantly surprised that this format worked great! Everyone in the session jumped right in and created amazing projects. It was really a great experience.

One thing that made this work is that nearly everyone in the workshops had been in one of my earlier one-hour presentations (not hands on). This provided them the background that they needed, whet their appetites, and left them chomping at the bit to jump in and do it.

Lessons learned:

1. As a facilitator, I don’t need to talk so much.
2. People can jump in and create with minimal instruction and make amazing things in a pretty short timeframe.
3. This is a great format for differentiating instruction in professional development workshops. It lets you work individually with those who want more instruction and lets others get busy on their own.
4. Perhaps an optimal conference format is 45 or 60 min. presentation sessions in the morning, followed up by 2 or 3 hour hands-on sessions in the afternoon.

I’ve been reflecting on how we teach and learn…not with students, but with colleagues in professional development.

Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) don’t always model the use of the strategies we know are most effective for learning. Many PD workshops or presentations are the typical “sage of the stage” fair. And I’ve heard from several different teachers in master’s programs about how dry their graduate courses are.

Good teaching and learning involves students being engaged and active in their own learning. Technology isn’t a necessary component of this, but it can certainly be a useful tool.

As I’ve started incorporating tools like blogs and wikis in workshops, I’ve found that many participants are more engaged. A large part of this is providing options (differentiating instruction). Some people would rather post to a blog; others would rather write notes on post-its; still others would rather just sit and talk. I’m even starting to see the value of Twitter and virtual environments as learning tools.

Everything we can add to the mix provides more tools to reach learners, whether they are peers or students, and that all leads to more engaged learning.

I’m getting ready for a whirlwind 10 presentations in 5 days next week at MAHETC and elsewhere. I’m doing a lot of new stuff, including a keynote called “My Virtual Digital Brain, Thriving on the Chaos of Information Overload.”

Thriving on the chaos pretty much sums up this year for me. I really can’t remember a year when I’ve done as much personal learning in a while. There are so many exciting new things going on, and I’m really psyched about the opportunities for all of us (including, but not limited to, kids) to expand our learning.

If you’ll be in Salisbury (and especially if you’re a reader of this blog or a listener to Karen’s Mashups), make sure to stop by and say hi. You’ll recognize me as the girl whirling around like the Tasmanian devil.:)

Image: Credit Joanna Field; copyright K12 Handhelds