Today was another great day at Leyden Summer Symposium. The experience of each person is different according to the sessions they attend, but everyone shared the good fortune of being able to hear the keynote speaker of the day, Chris Lehmann @chrislehmann. He covered a lot of ground, but here are three things that stuck with me:

• only the energy of youth allows the students to survive school
• put a good person into a bad system and the bad system wins
• a hanging masks project where both sides can be displayed, the visible and invisible
  • this is not the actual poster project Chris mentioned, but is along the same line. He showed a poster by a student at his school in their target language Spanish.

And finally, don’t forget to free the hallways, reread John Dewey, and be kind.

After the keynote I went to the Google Apps is the Key session led by Mikkel Storaasli. He had a great presentation put together for the participants and it was in this session that I became aware of the value of Hapara for Leyden. Kim Brown, from Hapara, happened to sit next to me during part of our lunch time and after meeting and talking to her I decided I better attend the Hapara’s Teacher Dashboard afternoon session.

It’s easy to see why the Leyden staff are happy with their decision to use Hapara. It automatically creates folders in Google Drive for all the classes that each teacher teaches and grants permission to the students. At the end of the year it exports all the folders out in an archive for each user and the new year begins with new empty classes and folders ready to go. It offers lots of other possibilities such as the ability to see what tabs a student has open. The teacher can even close the tabs to keep the student on task. Look through the presentation to get a better idea of what Hapara offers.

Another morning session I attended was The Digital Classroom: the shift in both organization and management. John Rossi gave us a lot of information and the hour flew by and left my head spinning with discussions of analysis paralysis. A take away from this session is to keep in mind that when people first start using Web 2.0 tools there is so much to choose from that it can be overwhelming. Now I will paraphrase, but the gist is give them just one or two tools to start off with, let them master those, and move on to other tools as they progress. Telling them enthusiastically that there are ten tools that can do the job in a splendid way, and giving them the list, is less helpful than just suggesting one or two. Later they will discover others and will use them when the time seems right.

One more day to go! Follow the tweets! #LHS1to1