A Handout for a workshop on "When Teaching is Fun"

I used my Mac and a projector to capture some of the thoughts that were generated during my workshop at the Primary conference (a gift from my "Technography" days), and appended them in a notes file to the handout I had prepared for the session.

As you might glean from those notes, what I hadn't prepared for was the depth, creativity, enthusiasm and playfulness of the core participants, all of which was revealed in its fullness in a short game of Tabletop Olympics (a.k.a. Junkyard Olympics, and soon to be known as "The Junkyard Games"). What you see in the photo is a spontaneously generated version of Junkyard Bowling, which, according to its re-inventors, was clearly a sport of Olympic proportions.

All of which gave me a sense of hope for education. Somehow, despite all the bureaucracy and standards and testing that has dominated the inheritors of the No Child Left Behind legislation, there are still teachers who believe in play, who make things fun, even when fun doesn't count.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith