Softease at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai

Eugenie and Danielle recently returned from Shanghai where they attended the Learning2 Conference at the Concordia International School in Pudong, Shanghai. 

The conference was centred around a Web 2.0 Tool called Ning, a social Networking Tool. It acted as a  conference scheduler and management tool and generally brought everything and everyone together to allow Communication, Collaboration and Connectivity. Every delegate got a Ning account and joined the network of people. Here they could have a home page and put up Blog information of interest.You could invite other Ning delegates to be on your contacts page and leave messages for each other. This was to be a paperless conference and every delegate was set up to talk through Ning and Twitter for the three days. 480 delegates registered on Ning!

It was a truely awsome event with Educational Speakers from all over. Click on the Ning symbol to enter the site. There were about 9 sessions where you could listen to any number of people sharing their thoughts and ideas and technology all based around Web 2:0 in Education from Primary through to Upper Secondary. In between set sessions there was ‘Un-Conference’ time where, through Twitter, groups met to collaboratively share and discuss a topic of interest.

During one of these sessions our very own Doug Dickinson was able to deliver his paper from the UK via a Skype link. It just showed how with some very basic technology, but using Web 2:0 tools what could be possible. See Dougs Blog and listen to the podcast recorded from the UK while live in Shanghai!

Alternatively copy this link into you favourite Podcast Aggregator such as like itunes.

http://www.dougdickinson.co.uk/podcast/DougDickinso
190907161827/rss.xml

Here are some photos of the visit to the conference:-

We also visited YK Pao School Close to Changning in Shanghai who are a new school with the aim of teaching both in Mandarin and English on a 50:50 split. They have purchased Textease Studio CT, the first mainland School in China to do so. We went along to train the teachers and also to take some lessons with the Pupils. It was quite an experience having our training session translated into Mandarin. It was also very exciting and rewarding working with children from varied backgrounds with English as an additional/second Language.We hope to keep a close link with the school to see how they are progressing with Textease.

Some links to other Speakers at the Conference; Wil Richardson, Wes Fryer, Alan November, Gary Stager, Chris Smith,  Peter Woodhead, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach…to name but a few!