Once again, this two day conference was a brilliant opportunity to network with colleagues and up-skill in a number of areas. Below is a brief summary of the workshops I attended…
Responsive Web Design
This workshop showed participants how to create responsive web pages using both grid and flexbox. Prior to this workshop, I had not realised that these two methods worked well together and had been under the mistaken impression that grid replaced flexbox when this is not the case.
The presenter was outstanding and I came away with a number of useful techniques that can be shared with Level 3 students who are doing the Digital Media standards
Github & Version Control
For some time it has been my goal to learn how to use Github ‘properly’. The reason for wanting to do this is that Git provides powerful, free version control and students who can show that they routinely use Git are massively advantaged when they go into the workforce / on to further study.
In many ways this was one of the most useful sessions of the conference as we learned how github is used in the real world and also got to see what collaboration using that tool might look like.
Programming & Logic
In this session participants were given an insight into how problems could be broken down into smaller components and then coded using Python. This was incredibly valuable as the new Digital Technologies programming standards require students to be able to do this – so having a session working through how this might look was extremely useful.
The presenters gave some guidelines on how programs could be developed and also mentioned some stylistic criteria that would help student programs to be flexible and robust.
Overall Reflection
I really enjoyed this conference and gathered a number of ideas that I’d like to trial going forward. In some ways it is a pity that this PD was not available before I created my programming / web resources but it is not too late to put the ideas that were presented into practice. One of my goals for 2020 may well be to encourage my students to use github as a version control system for all of their outcomes.