educational technology

I had the great fortune of attending Minecraft Mentor Meetup during the Games for Change Event in NYC this June.

Enthusiastic Minecraft Mentor cohort included educational training companies, STEM instructional facilitators, and school digital leaders from across various countries/continents – Australia, Israel, UK, India and US.

The purpose of the meetup was to foster connections between mentors, learn from peers, promote creativity, collaboration and project design by putting the mentor minds at work. True to typical Minecraft session formats, the session began with ‘Get-to-know’ followed by ‘Learn & Play’; ‘Prepare to Craft’ and then Design to make a difference.

Led by the most welcoming Minecraft leaders Sara Cornish and Meenoo Rami, the event began with an activity to brush up on our networking skills where we were given a card each as we entered the room with the image of a Minecraft agent or tool that were colour-coded to aide finding a matching partner. This was an ice-breaker activity for ‘getting to know’ other mentors in each group table.

Once familiar with each other, the group was thrown a challenge to ‘Learn & Play’ and ‘Prepare to Craft’ together. Minecraft Mentor Meetup Build Challenge was an opportunity to informally mingle with each other over food and beverages to discuss what we could build in accordance with the given challenge card. It was a great way to explore ideas around the given theme which in our case was to build a Pixel art piece. We all had an opportunity to think and create in the given Minecraft world and learn from each other’s expertise. Personally, for me it was a wonderful learning opportunity as my expertise lies in designing plans rather than creating in Minecraft world and this gave me access to seek advice to improvise on my work from mentors that have had more experience.

The next challenge given to the global mentors was to design a plan that could help create a global impact using Minecraft. Suddenly the room was buzzing and noisy as each of the mentor groups got thinking of a unique way to create an impact. Being a curriculum writer, designing plans comes quickly to me and with the best to brainstorm with we came up with a plan that was a call-to-action towards a more tolerant world. With much going around us, students today need to be more open-minded than ever towards accepting other cultures, religion and respecting diversity.

To cap off the brainstorming session, the floor was opened to all groups to present and share their ideas and plans which brought in perspectives, diverse project ideas covering range of subject areas and age groups. Talking to and hearing fellow mentors helped motivate me even more to learn and gain experience using this framework and even create my own project. Bringing this huge learning back home, my enterprise, De Pedagogics, will soon be hosting a Minecraft Meetup back in India real soon.

Thanks to Minecraft team especially Meenoo Rami and Sara Cornish for bringing the best and brightest mentors together and provided us this dynamic workspace for 3-hours (that ended sooner than expected) to meet, learn, explore and grow.

Summer is here and it’s a great time to do so many things that you’ve been thinking about and never found time to do in your daily humdrum. One such thing is learning new teaching learning practices or being active on social media to learn from others and share your practices. It’s extremely important for 21st century Educators to continually upgrade their skills and knowledge to bring the best learning environments to their classroom.

15 educators in India have already taken the challenge and many more are working on it, how about you?

Here’s a challenge for all you educators out there – Play this BINGO with us!

SUMMER PD BINGO CHALLENGE

SUMMER PD BINGO

here are the links to the above mentioned sites to help you:

TWEETMEET: Handle: #MSFTEduChat @TweetMeet Central Consider taking the TweetMeet courseon the Microsoft Educator Community.

Code.org; Education blog; Skype contacts; MEC; Sway; Pinterest; TeacherspayTeachers; TedTalk

Complete this BINGO, challenge at least 3 more educators to do so and Tweet about it. Tag us as you tweet about each task you complete your challenge @Depedagogics #SUMMERPDBINGO and we’ll make sure we help you build your brand as a self-motivated life-long learner!

Get set Go!

De Pedagogics announced it has become a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner (AEP), demonstrating its ability to meet Microsoft academic customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment. To earn a Microsoft AEP authorization, partners must complete a test to prove their level of academic licensing and market expertise.

The AEP program is designed to train participating resellers on Microsoft’s Academic licensing, authorize them to purchase and resell Microsoft Academic licenses, and demonstrate to potential customers that they are approved and knowledgeable academic partners.

De Pedagogics is passionately is engaged in nurturing education and bringing learning closer to the learner. De Pedagogics has a broad network with educationists who specialize in varied domains and offer guidance and mentorship to meet the needs of the educational institutions.

“This Microsoft AEP authorization shows our commitment and specialism in the academic IT marketplace and demonstrates our knowledge of Microsoft and its academic products,” said Meenakshi Uberoi, Founding Director, De Pedagogics. “We hope to accelerate our academic customers’ successes by serving as technology advisors for their IT requirements.”

“By becoming AEPs, partners show themselves to be committed and trained in providing discounted Microsoft academic products to the education market,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of Education for Microsoft Corp.’s Worldwide Public Sector. “This authorization, along with our other education partner initiatives, gives our partners recognition of their areas of expertise and our academic customers the confidence that they are buying from academic IT specialists.”

The Microsoft AEP Program is designed to authorize and equip organizations that deliver academic products and services through the Microsoft platform with the training, resources and support they need to provide their customers with superior experiences and outcomes.

De Pedagogics is a Global Training Partner of Microsoft in Education for bringing their technologies, certifications and programs to schools, colleges and universities.

We also work in partnership with schools, colleges and educators in varied capacities to design and develop curriculum; write content; develop range training modules for educators and students to suit their needs and provide support for technology, pedagogy and content integration.

Microsoft acknowledges and brands school that shows leadership by demonstrating a strong vision for educational change. We partner with the school to explore growth; adjust and respond to changes using technology and to facilitate their path to becoming a premiere school. We are passionate about empowering students to learn on their own terms and include student voice in the process of innovation within the educational system.

Connect here for more information, thepedagogics@outlook.com

Thank you Jaipur for engaging actively and being participative to make Nurturing Education Summit 2017 a great success!

The day began with the welcome address and the principal’s address followed by participants choosing to attend the session that they wished to be a part of. Here’s glimpse of the Jaipur Summit

Sharing participant’s thoughts at the end of the day

IMG_9176 (2)

Looking forward to many more sessions

Very happy and proud to share that De Pedagogics is now Microsoft in Education Global Training Partner.

You can connect with us to book training sessions here
https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/education/training-and-events/trainers/default.aspx

Thank you all for placing your trust in us. We hope to continue nurturing education and bringing you the best experiences.

We are all set to spread our wings!

Nurturing Education Summit: Professional Learning for 21st century Educators is presented by De Pedagogics, in partnership with a leading Host School of the city.

Join the Nurturing Education Summit team as we empower, explore and engage to talk about layering learning content with pedagogies and match the digital tools to create immersive effective learning environments that can support educators in the delivery of exciting concept-based, competency-driven curriculum. This full day of training will equip educators with the understanding and application that they seek to reimagine education in the classroom and thus school.

Be prepared to be engaged in challenging and fun activities while exploring evidence-based practice surrounding computational thinking and creative technologies through these training modules.

For further updates, click here

See you there!

Dear Educators,

Sharing a thought here from IBPYP blog, would love to hear your comments-

“…The pedagogical principles that underpin IB programmes recognize, and indeed emphasize, that learning is a social process. Such learning must be underpinned by an ethic of care in which all those involved as teachers and students share an interest in supporting the learning of each other.

… importance of creating cultures in schools that have at their foundation an ethic of care. However, care is not something that flows in one direction from teacher to student, but should be seen as an aspect of the organizational culture that radiates in all directions.

How does your organisational culture radiate CARE in all directions? Comment

Insightful speaking and presenting experience at #Office365Summit held at Guangzhou, China for educators and school leaders from international schools across China, hosted by by @21CLInternational at American International School, Guangzhou, China

Held 3 sessions on:
– Personalised Learning for Diverse Learners using Learning Tools in #OneNote
– Redefine Learning with #Microsoft Classroom in Office 365
– Stay connected with #Yammer

Spoke about ‘Power Up your #PowerPoint’ during conference TeachMeet

event-invite

Welham Boys’ School, Dehradun in partnership with De Pedagogics, would like to invite your teachers to Microsoft School Event for a walk through and hands-on experience of Microsoft enabled learning environment on January 25th, 2017.

This is a training event for the educators designed to give them an insight into the latest trends in education. The focus being, ‘Teaching with technology using Microsoft tools’ to enhance their ability to create, share, collaborate, and present information both inside and outside of the classroom using OneNote, Sway, Forms and OfficeMix. The aim is to promote teaching with technology, rather than teaching the technology, where students and teachers will explore the potential of new technology for transforming learning outcomes.

You are requested to intimate the names of participants (2-3 teachers) by 18th January 2017