Reform Symposium 3 #RSCON3 - An overview

 

The last 3 days was a blast, I kind of fell into RSCON3 accidentally, I noticed most of my educator friends on Twitter were posting the hashtag #RSCON3 quite excitedly. Being relatively new to Twitter, I had never heard of the Reform Symposium and I wasn't quite sure how it would work. To sum it up in a sentence,

"RSCON is a collaborative educational e-conference which transcends time zones, countries and subjects."

I started out on Day 2 by tuning in to Principal El's keynote speech and was immediately blown away. Here was a world class speaker, delivering 45 minutes of non-stop 24-carat educational gold. And I'm sat in my study listening in for free. In the meantime, 170+ educators from around the world are also chipping in, sharing links and setting Twitter on fire with the #RSCON3 tag. It was almost too much to keep up with and once the talks are uploaded to http://ReformSymposium.com, I'm sure I'll be going back over a few of the talks that I missed.


Other highlights are presented on my previous posts (below), but it's worth noting 6 key themes which were covered in most talks:

1. We need to be more free and flexible with the curriculum to ensure students can be creative
2. We do not know what technology the future holds or indeed what the future looks like
3. Both teacher and student learning is becoming more collaborative
4. The more we share/retweet, the more we learn
5. We need to prepare our students for failure and how to learn from failure as well as success
6. Have fun-Teaching is the most exciting job in the world.

For the exceptional closing keynote by Steve Wheeler, there were over 200 proactive administrators and teachers tuning in from practically all the time zones across the globe. I begun to question how many world experts you can fit into such a conference. The answer? I'm not sure, but I think RSCON is probably more scalable than any other conference even (say) TED, given that there is no physical size constraint. So, that leaves it to us and all our peers/colleagues to make RSCON4 even bigger and better! Here's a hashtag to get us started #RSCON4.