An Unforgettable Week with SMART Technologies in Calgary, Canada

After having returned back to Finland the other day from one of the most amazing weeks in my life as a teacher, I am slowly adjusting myself to my Finnish everyday life again. The name of this awesome week is 2016 Global SMART Exemplary Educators Summit, hosted in Calgary, Canada, July 17-22 by SMART Technologies.

I feel so grateful for having had this opportunity to participate for the second time in my life in the Global SEE Summit. It was incredible to meet some of the SMART Exemplary Educators from last year, but also to learn to know new ones. I feel like being part of one big amazing family called SMART!

We were treated as super heroes the whole week! The theme of the summit this year was "Teachers are super heroes and technology is their super power!" I have never before been so honoured as a teacher. It was very fun to engage and interact with the other super heroes. On one of the evenings we had a masquerade dinner at Calgary Zoo. I went there as Super Minnie the Mouse. We had such a fun evening there. I don't know if the people from SMART have had dinner before with Super Minnie, Santa Claus, Superwoman, Superman, Batman or Pippi Longstocking to name but a few!

It was interesting to learn about the roadmaps of SMART Education software and hardware. SMART is developing their great products to become even greater and the amazing thing is that they really want our feedback, opinions and ideas!

Since I have attended the summit once before, I was especially looking forward to the hackathon. We were divided into small groups with a number of SMART developers and we engaged in collaborative programming. This was fun and exciting. Everybody also got a monster, a cuddly toy, the same ones that you can find in the Monster Quiz in LAB in the SMART Notebook software. Who knows, the ideas that we came up with might become real in future updates from SMART!

Other highlights from this week are definitely the collaboration activities we had at beautiful Heritage Park, the Fireside Chat with SMART Executives Warren Barkley, Greg Estell and Tim Toyoshima (I was selected to ask them one of my questions!) and of course the White Hat Ceremony when we became honorary Calgarians!

During the week I was surrounded by 56 other EdTech passionate teachers from different parts of the world plus all the great people from SMART. An extra big Thank You goes to Ainhoa Marcos and Kelly Miksch for taking such good care of us!

This excellent week of professional development was well planned. I liked the fact that a lot of the activities took place at the SMART Technologies Headquarters. The hotel we stayed at, Aloft Calgary University, was very good and so was all the food that was served for us!

One more really great thing that saw daylight during this week is a new global collaboration project called Bridging Cultures that I and five other SEEs are going to have during next school year. I can't wait to go back to school and tell my students about it!

During the summit we all shared experiences and knowledge with each other. We really enjoyed ourselves and laughed a lot together. We had many interesting discussions about lots of things and, above all, we learned new things about the innovative use of SMART products that will inspire my teaching during school years to come.

THANK YOU SMART FOR THIS AMAZING WEEK!