Now I'm packing up SETT2013

An amazingly fun week — and an equally amazingly exhausting week

Dear diary… I’m not quite sure how to sum up this week. What I do know is that I’m completely worn out in body and head right now. Filled with impressions from a bunch of lovely meetings, nerves before lectures, which as usual turn out to be silly since they go pretty well anyway. A sore throat after talking our poor guests to death at stand J:32 and ridiculously amazed at how many friends from social media I’ve had the honor to meet in person.

Tuesday

Lotta Bohlin and I pull into the fair parking lot in the rain with a whiteboard on the roof rack and a ton of props for our classroom at the fair. Everything runs smoothly and all the fair people are really, really efficient. And friendly. And efficient. Now it feels real and we’re ready to run two intense days with our own lectures both days as well as the Scandinavian Learning Award.

Wednesday

The sun is shining and I’m waiting for the commuter train at Årstaberg. After a small delay, 15 cheerful, a little nervous, but above all excited fourth graders come running up the escalator together with Lotta, Martin Fernström and Josef Sahlin. Now we’re off to Helenelund! We have a blast on the way and the students ask if they can make films about their expectations for SETT.
What do you even answer to that? :)

Jonas Johansson joins and we meet up with Martin Claesson at the fair together with our dear school leadership. The team is complete.

Martin and Josef deliver the first of our lectures - “Important and for real!”.
A massive queue and many don’t get in, according to Twitter. But it seems to be going great.

At the same time Lotta and her students are holding a Swedish lesson where the students are writing their fantasy novels. And of course they show all the curious visitors what they’re doing. Another group is out on a mission to hand out abilities to visitors, but also to find out what the commercial companies can do for them. After all, it’s the students it’s all about in the end. Some had a bit of trouble coming up with good explanations.

Scandinavian Learning Award - Now it’s time to head down to E8 and present our entry “Recoding Learning”. I already knew our students were sharp, but when a ten-year-old, asked if they had anything to add, raised their hand and explained that “metacognitive” can be a hard word, but it’s something we use every day, many jaws dropped. Nothing rehearsed there. Just smart kids!

A bit short on time, but the presentation goes well and we head for lunch. Since the students and we are also exhibitors they naturally get to sit in the VIP lounge. Getting unlimited soda refills doesn’t hurt either. Here we also meet our director of elementary education Håkan Edman, IT manager Ann Hellenius, Charlotte Dingertz and Claes Johannesson, all from Stockholms stad. The students don’t hesitate to seize such a chance and swarm forward to talk to and photograph them.

After lunch the mingling continues, math-nerd lessons, a few walks around to see if anything exciting is being shown and then it was time to say goodbye to our dear students.

4,000 abilities handed out, a consensus that we should be at the fair every day, lots of exciting conversations and some candy and presents in their pockets and we told them to keep an eye on Twitter to see how the competition was going. Unfortunately, the winner would be announced at the evening mingle. Late Wednesday afternoon Lotta and I stepped out on stage and gave a talk about Bibblis and writing. Fantastic fun to do this with Lotta. And fantastic to feel the buzz in my trouser pocket, where my phone vibrated with all the wonderful tweets from the audience. Thanks for that!

Now it was time to mingle a bit and await the results of the competition. We were all properly tired, but well deserved a couple of beers. We were pretty surprised when it turned out that we won the competition. None of us had considered that possibility. Lotta delivered an Oscar-winning improvised speech after we received the prize from Eva-Lis Sirén. But we missed the students. Eva-Lis had to tweet the message to their hashtag and the replies came instantly. Happy students and happy staff. Then it was just time to pack up and get ready for the next day.

Thursday

A bit stiff in the legs (office rat that I am) I limped into the exhibition hall Thursday morning and was met by my dear colleagues. But oh how empty it was without the students.

Our school leadership had taken the morning shift to talk to visitors at our stand and they were in full swing. They also thought it was really fun. After a lot of exciting conversations it was time to head into M7 with Jonas Johansson to give our talk “Teknikens möjligheter enligt Nesta”, with concrete examples from Årstaskolan’s everyday life. Nearly full and a really fun lecture again.

What strikes us, not only at this lecture but also when we talk to others, is that people are so happy that we emphasize pedagogy and teachers as the main success factor. We rarely talk about IT, but mostly only pedagogy at Årstaskolan. IT is again just a tool. Without pedagogical anchoring, an idea or a vision it falls flat.

”What is clear is that no technology has an impact on learning in its own right…” - taken from the report.

Lunch, lots of conversations, mingling and with increasingly tired heads we start to gather to see Martin Claesson give his talk on the leadership track’s last session. “Concept/Crew – Organisationsutveckling och iPad-projekt” and the audience got a little insight into how our operations work at management level.

And then there was the packing up… Completely exhausted we started taking down our stand, saying goodbye to everyone and lugged our thousand things towards the commuter train. In rush hour. In the heat. Sweaty. Tired. But insanely happy and satisfied.

Summary

I want to extend a big thank you to everyone involved, the organizers, everyone who visited us, all my friends I had never met before and those I had met before, new and old. God, what energy there is in the school world!

For next year, bring in more students. It’s them it’s all about in the end. Maybe you could build a classroom where more could show live examples? All you fantastic teachers, educators, principals and others, make sure to realize all the cool ideas you carry with you! I wish I’d had time to meet everyone I wanted to meet and above all to meet you for a bit longer…

Unfortunately I also didn’t get to see any of the hugely exciting talks that were on offer. But that’s life when you’re an exhibitor. I realize it’s impossible to write a full summary of SETT2013. I’m shutting down now and hopefully we’ll meet at SETT2014. “10-4, over and out!