The Big Question

Today I was lucky enough to attend a “Kids Congress” hosted by the Diocese of Broken Bay

From their introduction

‘The Diocese will be facilitating an inaugural ‘Kids Congress 2006’ for Year 5 students to
come together, to consider and debate real world issues and to present their learnings, all within a 21st
century learning environment.

‘Kids Congress 2006’ will be a unique event for approximately one hundred (100) of our Year 5 students (two students per Year 5 class).

This learning event will be “designed for kids and organised by kids”. “

Sounds simple right?? Imagine 116 year 5 students from 50 odd schools coming together to learn from each other. Almost 12 months in the planning, both by adult and student organising committees.

Kids Congress clearly demonstrates the potential of ICLT’s and myclasses to enable and encourage collaboration across schools. At one point there were 15000 planning emails from year 5 students, multiple forums and discussion rooms.

At the links below you can find student blogs, podcasts, Kids Congress information and photos.

Kids Congress DBB 2006

Kids Congress Podcasts

Kids Congress Blogs

Kids Congress Flickr Photos

From talking to the students it was clear that this was a valuable experience, students learning from each other about issues that are of concern to them. Time well invested in creating the leaders of the future.

I interviewed a number of students about their experiences, unfortunately the wind made the audio quite ordinary. However Andrew, one of the great technical support students shared this with me. audio

Personally I am sold on the idea, but what do you think? Would it be valuable for the students of Wollogong Diocese??

Technorati Tags: Kids Congress, Education, Learning

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Conference Presentations, In Our Classrooms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.