MrsSmith.ca
Grade 5 South March Public School, Kanata, Ontario
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Flags courtesy of ITA's Flags of All Countries used with permission.
Jen Deyenberg was one of the teachers representing Canada at the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Salvador, Brazil.
Here’s a video she put together of her experiences there:
It’s now Monday, November 9 and I have safely returned to Canada. From my hotel in Salvador to arriving at my doorstep, the trip took over 26 hours. Unfortunately, I have no celebrity sightings to report this time around! The last day of the conference was once again inspiring, exciting and a touch overwhelming. We showed our booths again, and made our votes for “Educator’s Choice”. Canada’s pick was a teacher from Lesotho, Africa who had her students photographing indigenous plants and learn about what value they have. She did this without her school having any computer access. Her students used their parents’ cell phones as cameras, or drew pictures of the plants and then walked to the town’s internet cafe to learn about the plants. After lunch we got back to work in our groups. My group finished our project which was about telling the story of a city.
We used Salvador as an example and a piece of software that I had never used before called Deep Zoom. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to do a project like this ourselves. Here is a picture of me playing the recorder, of course, as our presentation was shared.
Later that day there was a presentation about the many problems we, meaning the entire world, are facing. While much of these problems seem impossible to solve (like poverty, war and global warming), one of main solutions talked about was education and technology. Even the blog we keep is a small step to making everyone realize that we are global citizens and not just people living in the suburbs. The day ended with the gala dinner. This felt like going to the Oscars, or I’d imagine that’s how it would feel if I ever got to go! There were drummers, dancers, and orchestra and lots of good food. The presentations of the awards were very slick and the mood of the audience was electric. Everyone was given a blue and white necklace and had a ribbon tied onto their wrist.
The drumming group was incredible. There were kinds of drums, trumpets and dancers. They played nonstop for at least 40 minutes.
Inside the tent. Notice the orchestra on the stage. The members were high school students who had played their instruments for two years. They sounded much more experienced than that. 
Harriet and Autumn from Indianna, USA, won one of the 12 awards presented that night for their project on Tic Tac Toe and the American Revolution. Here is Mr. Toft with them. 
The first lady of Bahia, Salvador attended the event with her husband, the governor of Bahia.
Thanks you Microsoft Partners in Learning and Salvador, Brazil for giving all of us an experience of a lifetime that we will never forget.
Yesterday, while presenting our project, Mr. Toft and I decided to have educators and technology experts from all over the world contribute their voices to one song. Each person was asked to introduce themselves and select a snippet of music. Later that day, Mr. Toft edited the music and voices down to the two minute soundscape you can hear by clicking the link below.
This was an incredible opportunity to create something with voices from all over the world.
Another busy day. Our morning started with a tour of Salvador. We visited a market and had a chance to see some churches that were built in the 1700s.
I really liked this staff but there was no way I could get away with bringing it home on the plane.
The vendor told me it was made out of a sheep’s skull.
Art is for sale all over the place. I liked this one in particular.
Art was available many shapes and sizes.
Policeman came along with our large tour group. I think they were there to clear away people begging and making a bad impression on their city. They aren’t as scary as they look in the picture.
I found something to buy at this stall.
There were many t-shirt designs to choose from.
This one of the churches we visited today.
These tiles are over two hundred years old. They were brought over all the way from Portugal. This church has the largest collection of Portuguese tiles in South America.
In the afternoon we listened to a couple of presentations about ways to get teachers to change how they teach their students. I know there are at least 400 teachers from around the world who are here right now that have a pretty good handle on that.
Part of the afternoon was spent working in small groups to make a lesson that we could all work together on. I’m very luck to be working with a dynamic group of teachers. They are from Greece, South Africa and Canada.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. We have to set up our booth again and visit everyone else’s booth. The idea is for us to pick a booth as “Teacher’s Favourite”, so we get another chance to see everything. Each country will cast a ballot of their top three choices.
I have it on good authority that it snowed it Ottawa today.
No snow here. It was 33 degrees and sunny. I had to put on my sunscreen twice.
It’s a been a busy couple of days now that the conference has started. Yesterday we had a chance to set up our display and attending the opening events and today we presented our project.
Yippee! We finally got our display set up.
There are lots of pictures of students on the display.
This is Mr. Toft’s badge. It’s very humbling to get to wear a badge like this all day. There educators from all over the world doing amazing things like bringing schools to places where there were none. One teacher in Africa has her students taking pictures of local plant life and finding medicinal value in them.
Here are a very few of the other projects:
South Africa
Mexico
Sweden
Singapore
Last night we were treated to a spectacular demonstration of martial arts, drumming and dance.
It was hard to get a good picture of the people doing martial arts because they moved so quickly!
The drummers, singer…
…and dancers.
Today also included a speech from the governor of Bahia, kind of like hearing a speech from our provincial premier. We also hear from the head of the education part of Microsoft. Mr. Toft and I even made it into one of the slides of Michael Golden’s presentation:
See the red shirts in the bottom right corner?
That’s Mr. Toft and me!
We recorded people saying their name and where they are from as they visited our booth and had them add music. I’ll add it to this blog once I add some final touches to it.
I hope everyone is doing well. Please write and say hello. I’d love to know how and what you are all doing.
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