Edcamp Santiago

This past Saturday I went to an event called Edcamp Santiago. It is a style of conference - or "unconference" as they call it, about Education the developed in the US and Canada. The one in Santiago was actually just the second outside of North America.

You may be thinking- but hey, you're not a teacher! That is correct. A few of the people from I Love Chile went down to help out and check out what was happening and see what it was all about. In the world of an unconference, there is no set schedule of speakers, instead anyone on the day can give a talk.

While I am not education expert, I did give a talk, and I really enjoyed the whole conference- probably a lot more than I expected. I got to meet a whole bunch of people, mainly profesores de inglés, but there were some other teachers around too.

I shared my timeslot with Matt, we have been recruited as the new editors on the I Love Chile website, so that's some pretty exciting news, which I'm not sure if I already mentioned. So our talk was in two parts- first of all about using media- particularly that of I Love Chile in the class room. Matt has been an English teacher in the past, so that was his section.

As I am the sports guru at the paper, I presented something about sports and language. This is something I have become a lot more interested in since arriving in Chile, and something I want to develop a lot further. So I will give some updates on my ideas on that as I develop them.

So my presentation- which was of course, completely "freestyled" was about the concept of sports and language, and then I talked about how Footbag can be used to develop these concepts, things like counting, identifying different parts of the body and different actions, for example a kick, a stall.

I also talked about how people really identify with their favourite players. Particularly kids, but also the young at heart- they will of course know EVERYTHING about their favourite player, someone like Alexis Sánchez etc, and I talked about how for me as a learner of Spanish is has been easiest to talk about sports, because it's an area I have good knowledge in and am passionate about.

I made a fun exercise at the end, and got each person to say (in English) their favourite sport, player or team. It was interesting to hear some of the answers, and funnily enough Colo Colo or La U were not regular answers. There were quite a lot of tennis fans actually, so they must be disappointed that Chile doesn't have any players at the Australian Open.

In the afternoon Edcamp Santiago made a video link to Edcamp Delta in Canada. While there were a few technical issues, it was pretty impressive for them to do that, and discuss the differences in the education system. Of course education has been a hot topic in Chile over the last year.

During the video link from the Canadian side they were mentioning a lot about technology and how they have all these cool gadgets in their schools, so I asked a question about the focus on sports and exercise in the school- wondering if everyone was just sitting around on their ipads getting fat, but it sounded like they have very good policies on exercise there in Canada, and my question got a really good response, so that was a pretty good feeling.

I also wrote an article about my experience on the I Love Chile website.