I've been at Woodville Gardens School now for nearly four years in my role as Assistant Principal, and I have learnt a lot. The school, the community, my colleagues have all given me a greater appreciation of things on so many levels. Tonight I thought I would try and articulate a few of these.

A DigiTech TeachMeet was held tonight at my school. A bunch of educators keen on educational technology from mainly the western suburbs here in Adelaide gathered to share, enjoying the comfortable surrounds of our resource centre. Two of my colleagues shared about their practice - for the first time in front of others who weren't their immediate colleagues - and they were brilliant. Julie shared about her use of video making with Year 1 students in their History Inquiry and Kellie shared about her long term practice of Discovery Time which has elements of inquiry, technology and making all wrapped together with her Reception students. Seeing them both present so well gave me a greater appreciation of the high level of teachers we have at our school. Granted, these two are exemplary but the fact that what they talked about is as good as anything happening in any school in Australia made me proud to be their colleague.

This school has given me a greater appreciation for how tough some kids, even here in Australia, can have it and that our society still doesn't really know what to do about it. The media likes to come down hard on schools like ours for our NAPLAN results which don't match schools where everyone comes to class well fed, in clean clothes, with a full night's sleep, without memories of trauma or abuse and from a household with all of the amenities that modern life can provide. Some of our kids do pretty well considering that some have to go home to be substitute mothers or to be unpaid cleaners. Some of our kids have been speaking English for less than a couple of years and for some, school is the only place with comforting rules and safety and where the adults in charge have to speak nicely and listen to their point of view. It has made me very appreciative of how I can provide so much for my own kids and how really they want for very little.

I have a greater appreciation for other cultures and how difficult it must be to be in a place where all of the norms of your world that you grew up in are all out the window. At the same time, I can see how appreciative many of these parents of varying backgrounds are of the opportunity that education can open up for their children. I still enjoy the sight of seeing kids of varying backgrounds walk out of the school grounds deep in conversation with others talking about going to Vietnamese lessons, or what happens at the local mosque or their last trip up to the bush. End of term class parties are certainly a great mix of cuisines as home made spring rolls sit alongside samosas and Tim Tams.

I'm super appreciative of being part of a large leadership team. We all bring our individual strengths and talents to the table but we are pointed in the same direction. I've learnt stacks about multicultural families from my fellow AP, Anna. I've got a much deeper understanding of special needs students and the support required to make a difference from our coordinator, Dee. I've improved my restorative justice skills and "turning things around" conversations from watching our counselling team, Liz and Marek in action. The Heads of School, Ashley and Marg, who both have time to listen to me lay out my concerns and issues and offer their advice in moving forward. Add to that a hugely influential Principal, Frank (two weeks away from retiring) who has shown me the value of the big picture, and the difference that innovation can make in a place where conventional thinking and traditional ideas will be limited in their impact. I have a great appreciation of how much I learn from these people, my colleagues. I'm lucky to be a part of it all.

And when I get to play the role of host like tonight, it is nice to appreciate working in a facility that is less than five years old, where the technology is at a high level and where the kids who come from either complex or disadvantaged backgrounds get a place that they can be proud of, that is theirs.

This year was the third time that I have been to EduTech. In 2013, I went with Frank, my principal and we noticed that a number of South Australian schools were sending groups of teachers rather than just a couple of members of their leadership team. I must have been in a major blogging slump then because I didn't reflect on any of that conference although Dan Pink was there, so was Gary Stager, Stephen Heppell and Alan November, along with Skype-ins from Sir Ken and Salman Khan. So in 2014, we expanded the group going to include my fellow AP, Anna along with three teachers who represented the Early Year, middle primary and upper primary teams. That conference featured a huge line up of big edu-names, none beamed in, including Sugata Mitra, Sir Ken, Ewan McIntosh and Ian Jukes. I blogged about that experience here.

I think I've become the defacto tour guide for our school because late last year, Ashley, our Early Years Head of School pulled me aside and said that senior leadership had approved funding to take 8 people to the conference in 2015. I know that last year's attendees have all used many of the ideas to improve their practice, to become more connected to others beyond our site and to become drivers of innovation in terms of learning opportunities for our students. So, we ran our process and selected our participants and we headed out last Monday evening for Brisbane. The group was a good mix of year level expertise, experienced and early career teachers, excitement and nerves.

I decided that I wouldn't spend time during talks making notes because I didn't want to be carrying an iPad or laptop around all day - I thought my phone would do the job. Using Twitter, I either posted a quick observation or favourited someone else's tweet to build up a timeline of gathered cyber-notes. I had done my research about who I wanted to see - and was pleased to see that two speakers, Shelly Terrell and Simon Breakspear, who I was keen to see were available after initially being booked out. I even volunteered to speak at one of the four TeachMeet sessions about my Student Leadership program. I hoped to catch up with educators that I normally only get to converse with online but apart from that, I was hoping to be quite open and flexible about my EduTech experience.

Now, I know that EduTech is a commercial event with loads of sponsors, a huge vendor area but I've stated my opinion about that a couple of blog posts back. There are useful things that I might want to consider purchasing for my school and I'm not forced to go to any of the booths. For instance, I got to see first hand the 3D printer that I'd been recommended, and hopefully will be able to cash in on a special they were offering at the moment. The Maker Space area was filled with great making and coding resources (I like Cubelets and Little Bits) but guess what, they cost money.

But the value was in the discussions with my colleagues - What did you think of that? How do you think that would go at our school? What do you need to get things happening? What's challenging you right now? What tells you that you're on the right track? What does this all mean for our students? We sat and listened to Eric Mazur together, then went our separate ways, then met back up and talked and then scattered and then crossed paths again. I got to catch up with online colleagues (Sue Waters, Tom Barrett, Ewan McIntosh), and compare their work with my own, to catch up on the gossip and introduce some of these personal influences to my day-to-day colleagues. I met some more recent online links for the first time as well (Corinne Campbell, Matt Easterman) and chatted with other South Aussie colleagues (Paul Luke, Dave Henty-Smith, Nick Jackson). We got the whole group happening on Twitter - regular users helped the novices to build out their connections in a flurry of first time tweets, retweets and favourites.

If I had to pick a couple of highlights, I would say that the workshop with Shelly Terrell was the number one pick. She talked about and demonstrated online spaces both for teachers and students. She was so easy to listen to and a ninety session passed in no time at all. I also enjoyed Eric Sheninger, whose insights about leadership in a school striving for continual improvement and innovation were invaluable as one who aspires to meaningful leadership. I even bought his book, "Digital Leadership" but stopped short of getting it signed like some did (never understood the appeal of autographs, really). I wasn't as dedicated as I could have been about getting to sessions and missed a few that would have been good. Being a previous delegate, I could tell where the sponsor's sessions were on the agenda and knew when to vote with my feet. I'm not sure what the solution is in that regard - sponsors who have paid big dollars will want their product featured in one way or another but educators are too savvy to get sucked in for anything too blatant.

So, 2015 was still a solid investment for my team. The names weren't as big as 2014 but the conversations we had were just as important. I can't think of any other event that could provide what we got from our two days and expose them to ideas and concepts that will spark action back at the workplace. And I'm looking forward to see how that all plays out.

This link popped up via Ewan McIntosh in my Feedly reader today, and reading the article sent me back in time to 1995, when I started teaching at Flagstaff Hill Primary School in southern suburban Adelaide. The whole premise of the Washington Post piece is that open space work environments as apparently championed by Google are not really working that well, and that the drawbacks are outweighing the anticipated benefits. What surprises me (as it will many educators) is that the open space concept is supposedly new, and this analysis had me thinking back to my first experiences in an open space work environment.

Flagstaff Hill was built in the early eighties when the open space concept was really taking off. Two of the larger buildings had this design, while the other major in the primary section was a double storey block with more separate, privatised classrooms. I was a young teacher straight in from country service and I arrived ready to teach a Year 4/5 composite class - the principal told me that I would be in Blue Unit, one of the open space buildings, built to accommodate six classes with minimal shoulder height dividers between teaching spaces. There were four smaller withdrawal spaces that could be used for working in smaller groups and in the centre of it all was a "well" a recessed section where a class could sit on the ground in a rectangle pattern with their feet in the depression - conceived as a common meeting space.

This view looks back into the centre of the unit. There is a semi-permanent corner divider in the centre of the pic, and off to the right in the background you would find the "well" and then beyond another teaching space. You can tell I liked dangling displays back then!

The coveted class areas were in the four corners of the building where teachers could lay claim to two solid brick walls, while in the centre were two class sections where the front wall where the whiteboards were mounted being the only solid part of that classroom space. It was to this space that I was directed. I met the vacating teacher who gleefully told me she was getting out of Blue, and heading over to Orange building where she would have her own room and not "have to share" any more. I guess she had decided that "open space" classrooms were not for her.

This is looking frontwards to the only permanent wall in my 1995 classroom. Note the trays and portable dividers that separate my classroom from my neighbour's on the left side of the image.

I was lucky that I lobbed next door to a teacher who would become my closest friend in education, and we used the openness to dabble in team teaching, and to explore progressive teaching methodologies over the next eight years (although not without shifting around the Blue Building, and then eventually into the vacated library). So, I think that we were able to make the open space environment work but it does take a certain mindset and there are a lot of differences when compared to a traditional classroom where the door can be shut and the rest of the world kept out.

Noise and visual distraction were a factor in open space classrooms for sure. I recall agreements around times of the day when things were asked to be a bit quieter and everyone was always mindful of the effect their learning activity was having on their neighbours. In that way, because in a few steps you could see what every class in the unit was up to, that mindfulness tended to work favourably. Until .... you got a colleague who didn't want to embrace that ideal.

I remember one teacher, in our building for the year, who didn't concern himself with anyone but his own classroom. He loved doing construction stuff with his students and we used to joke that it sounded like the scene from the beginning of the Flintstones where the whistle blows in the construction yard and Fred just abandons his work and heads for the door. He also used to have a tradition of the "tray tip". If he found a student's tray of belongings to be in a less than stellar way, he would hold the tray aloft over the child's desk and ask the class loudly (and of course, the whole unit heard the whole thing) if he should tip out the contents forcing a clean up by the culprit. This was then followed by a whole class chant of "Tip, Tip, Tip!!" until it reached a crescendo and the tray was upended in front of the helpless offender. The practice was extremely popular with the Year Three kids in his classroom until one day he grabbed a tray of a student who had unfortunately left an unfinished flavoured milk carton in amongst the crumpled up worksheets and pencil shavings. The carton had been in there for several weeks, brewing beneath its folded in spout. So when the "Tip, Tip!" chant started, the student was powerless to warn the unsuspecting teacher about the contents in the tray. The tray was tipped, the carton exploded all over the desk, the odour was over powering, and to top it off, the student then threw up all over the contents. The stench was such that all five classes were vacated for the clean up (and the shared air conditioning system made sure that his error in judgement haunted us all for quite a while).

But when all teachers were on the same page, the environment worked quite well. Swapping groups for lessons was easy because one can see if the other class is ready. A teacher could work with a group in a withdrawal room knowing that other teachers in the building could "keep an eye" on the remaining students working independently. It forced inventiveness when it came to displaying student work. I hung netting from the ceiling and used paper clips to hold art work in place. Collegial consultation was the norm, rather than the exception.

Another hanging display in front of the netting - the pirate ship goes with the dangling seaweed and jellyfish art pieces. If you look carefully, you can see a penguin infested paper iceberg on the right.

I know that when I moved to my next school and had to return to a closed in classroom with only a door connecting me to my next door colleague, I felt boxed in and less inspired. It was harder to see what my colleagues were up to but then again, it probably spawned the next productive phase of my teaching journey where my colleagues and I moved to an online environment (using a wiki and Skype) in order to grab back the natural collaboration that I feel is possible in an open space environment.

Really, teachers have to make do with the spaces they are given. There are plenty more sixties style prefab box classrooms out there as there are eighties style open spaces. My teachers at Woodville Gardens probably have the best of both worlds in their more modern concept classrooms that open onto a shared common area, but that is not to say that they one day might end up in a heritage listed building (like my wife taught in at Lockleys Primary) where thick brick walls and concepts of learning from a century ago influenced the architecture. Teachers and learners don't really need seclusion - the concept of breaking down the classroom walls is clearly not a new one!