Leading with a Digital School conference – Gold Coast

I have just returned from my keynote address at the Leading with a Digital School conference where the conference used the KeePad response systems for evaluations for each session and the overall conference. It was an interesting experience and there are some for’s and against for this technology.

For the conference organisers, it means that the conference evaluations and feedback are collated and readily available at the end of the conference. From my own experience, I know how time consuming this can be when undertaken manually. Often several nights work. The KeePad system also provided instant graphs in relation to questions and allowed yes and no responses as well as multiple choice responses. It does not allow for written comments to be included. There are significant time savings here.

Each of the keynote speakers were asked to incorporate three questions into their presentation and I thought this was an interesting idea to get real time data and opinions to the presenter from the audience. One of my questions was split 50 – 50 by the audience, yet the others showed a distinct preference. I think this has possibilities for presenters and how to tailor make presentations on the fly.

There are a few negatives to the response systems as a conference tool, and the first is ensuring that all response systems and signed out and of course returned and signed in.
The second is that every presenter needed to load the KeePad software on to their laptops and then undertake basic training in how to use the system. I believe that despite the training, several presenters had glitches and not all session returned the data as had hoped for.

The final session of the day collected overall conference responses; however a large number of people had left before the short after lunch session and a number of people, including myself had returned their responder at lunch time to reduce the rush to return them at the end of the day.
I think the debate is still out. While the logistics would certainly be easier in a school with smaller groups and teachers who are familiar with the system, there is still a need to have a good understanding of how often, when, with who and why we are using them. But shouldn’t we be asking the same question in relation to all technologies, netbooks, Interactive whiteboards and more.