XChange Belfast

After at 5am get up and a quick flight across the pond I arrived at the second XChange Conference at the Europa Hotel in Belfast. The aim of the conference is to, 'build on the successful Xchange 2005 event in Birmingham and provides a continuing international platform for debate, where the delegates' knowledge and successful experiences of ICT in schools can be collected and exchanged in a creative environment that seeks to explore and inform the relationship between policy, research and practice about learning. It is second of a series of four, hosted across the UK from 2005-2008. The next events are in Edinburgh and Cardiff in 2007 and 2008'.

The conference is designed to be highly interactive every delegate is equipped with a Quizdom Q5 voting system and each table of eight has three crystal interactive wireless systems to ask presented questions during the conference. So far I have been very impressed with the crystal system. Although it might be unpractical to get a set for a classroom, there must be a way of doing the same thing with wireless laptops? Or perhaps with mobile phones? (I might try the mobile phone idea during my SAGT presentation this year in October?).

I will try and give a brief report of the conference as we go. The official conference blog can be found at http://xchangeblogs.com/communities/xchange2006/default.aspx