1.  Choose your travel company carefully

The travel company that you choose to travel with can make or break a travel experience.  For my first trip, my priorities were to manage the cost for students and have plenty of room to customize the trip. Other things I should have considered more carefully are student safety, travel insurance, size and history of the company, and whether or not a guide is present at the destination.  Not that cost and customization are not good priorities, just that there are many factors to consider.  Some companies use Night Guards at the hotel to manage student safety concerns, and others will provide additional guides in problematic destinations.  Almost all companies provide travel insurance (usually for an additional fee) but ask about liability insurance for your school or division as well.  Finally, in addition to your own research, ask around your division to see which companies are being used by your colleagues and why.  This is valuable information and often includes stories about “trying a few companies before finding the right one”.  Once all of the other factors are taken care of, most companies allow some degree of customization.

2.  Be sure to get your final itinerary as early as possible and review it carefully.

Although last minute changes are sometimes necessary, a final itinerary with all of the specific destination details should be available 30-90 days prior to take –off.  This will allow you to catch and change problematic time crunches or inappropriate bookings.  In other words, 30 minutes between arrival and departure for a connecting flight is possible in some situations but not in others.  Consider carefully the number of students you are travelling with and use this information to assess everything from dinner reservations to layover time.  While you are reviewing the itinerary for its ability to accommodate the number of travelers, also review the booking times very carefully.  On our trip, our tour company had scheduled us to be picked up from the hotel 30 minutes prior to our flight.  The drive from the hotel to the airport alone took 45 minutes in light traffic.  Thankfully I managed to catch the glitch the night before, and in spite of a very angry dispatcher, had it cleared up by morning.  Had I not managed to catch the error, or if the bus company had been fully booked, we would have missed both our first and our connecting flights.

3.  Manage passports and ID of your travellers very carefully

I must confess that this was a tip given to me before my first travel experience and it served me well.  From start to finish, you must monitor student passports.  In the planning stages of your trip, know the application deadlines for student passports.  While they may be available within only a few weeks, applications during peak times can take months.  Know which students on the list have passports and do not be afraid to send out continuous reminders to those who do not.  Once your travellers have their passports, ask parents for a copy of the passport (including all pages with relevant information).  You will need to travel with these copies, and it wouldn’t hurt to leave a set in the school safe either.  This, unfortunately, is not the end of passport management.  As a matter of fact how you monitor passports during travel could be your most important decision of the whole trip.  I highly recommend having a “passport check” strategy for your travel time.  You can make a game of this or keep it very serious, you can check once or twice during a leg of travel or at every opportunity, the decision is yours make.  After hearing various horror stories about students leaving passports on planes or having them fall out of bags as they ran through the airport, I developed my own 3 step strategy.  1)Students must have a hidden passport/money holder that they could wear under their clothes during travel.  2)We did “passport checks” (during which students must actually put both hands and eyes on the passport) before and after each passport event.  These include boarding and customs checkpoints as well getting on and off the plane.  This may seem excessive, especially if you are travelling with high school students as I was, but we travelled without a passport incident because of this.  3)Finally, while you are enjoying a particular destination, no matter how long you are there, collect all of the passports and store them in a safe and secure place.  This is most likely going to be the hotel safe, but even if you are not staying the night, I would recommend collecting them before you leave the airport to go anywhere.  This way you minimize the impact of both carelessness as well as pickpockets and other nefarious persons on your continued travel.

4.  Know and follow the customs regulations for each border you will be crossing-and share that information with the students.

This is unfortunately, one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way.  Although signs are posted at various places throughout the airports about crossing international borders with food, I assumed the targets of this advertising to be something distinctly larger than our travel snacks.  So after watching a student be escorted off into the “Suspicious Substances” room I vowed never again to underestimate the seriousness of customs personnel, or for that matter, their advertising.  Fortunately, staff in customs recognized the benign nature of the student’s orange immediately and we were happily and humbly once again on our way.  Finally and edtravel specific, are the regulations for travelling with minors that are not your own.  While most customs agents will recognize a school trip when they see it, there are some precautions you can take.  First, have parents complete a permission slip that identifies your destination and travel dates.  Second, and negotiable, have each of the permission slips professionally notarized.  This should alleviate any issues with customs agents.  Finally here are a few rules of thumb when approaching customs; remain calm – if you are not doing anything wrong you will be fine, follow all cautions and directions to the letter, have your belongings prepped for search before you get to the front of the line, and above all – know what to expect and empower students with the information as well.

5.  Involve the students in as much of the planning as is humanly possible.

Students invest a lot in a travel experience, whether it be money, time, or dreams.  It is our duty as travel mentors to make this experience as meaningful and powerful as possible.  It is not always possible to allow student input into every travel decision, but find those areas where students can have input and allow them to do so.  My recommendation at this point would be decision making by consensus rather than a vote.  In consensus decision making students are forced to talk through their choices while hearing the reasoning behind the decisions of others.  This allows all students to come to an informed decision while practising group behaviour that will be necessary on the trip. In our division, student travel is often reserved for the final year of high school and may be the only opportunity for travel in their lifetime.  It is for this reason alone that I take as much care as possible in designing an experience that is awesome for all travellers, not just the majority of travellers.

Unfortunately these lessons are not the only lessons that I had to learn the hard way, but these are the top 5. Feel free to share your own “hard lessons”.

Tracy

If I were one of my students (or my extremely neglected dogs) I would tell me to pick one or two and work with them until I get to a place where I am comfortable using them. So I have chosen 5 (kind of an overachiever, and who really listens to advice anyways?). check them out and feel free to comment with pitfalls and/or advice.

Blogging- I have had this WordPress site for at least a year now and have never actually blogged. So after checking out a few how to’s, I am up and running. The two most important reasons for choosing blogging as my first edtech experiment; reflection is the key to learning, and the truth is out there somewhere (I am convinced someone will help me find it). 

Twitter- As a professional development tool, twitter appears to have no parallel.  Real people, in real time tweeting tips, ideas, websites, opinions and just about everything else.  For those of you involved already, i probably don’t need to say anymore.  For those of you “not in” please just try it and if you hate it I will personally help you commit twittercide.  Between the ongoing professional conversations and the personal connections to friends through tweets, I cannot believe that everyone doesn’t do it.  If you are on or coming on, check me out @tracylaverty

Wallwisher or Wifitti- Both of these sound great, but not sure which works best in Canada.  I hope to use these programs to both brainstorm and allow backchannel conversations during select classes.  So far wallwisher looks to be the easiest to use, but love the look of Wiffiti.  A great deal more research needs to be done on both so I would love to hear what is working and what is not for you!

Diigo- After a session in #rscon10 I dropped everything and converted all of my favorites to Diigo.  I cannot believe the potential of this amazing tool.  I have set up a few groups and invited colleagues; I have highlighted text in certain web sites; today I even discovered that you can bookmark images.  I am beginning to see possibilities for research using diigo, but if you have some concrete tips or websites please send them on.

Livebinders- this is the only one that I have not fully embraced yet.  However, given the amazing features and opportunities, I will master this soon.  A paperless classroom is my dream, and livebinders will bring me one step closer.  Just as a side note, when I tweeted a little frustration about livebinders last night, livebinders themselves tweeted back offering their help with whatever issues I might be having.  I know, they probably do that for everyone, but that’s my point.  No downside in trying out livebinders with that kind of support!

Ok wish me luck!

To begin with I should introduce myself as a teacher.  I have been teaching for 6 years in our beautiful city at the high school level.  From the begining I have had the joy of working with highly intelligent and driven collegues who, for reasons beyond my comprehension, have patiently answered my questions and allowed me access to both their knowledge and their practise.  I majored in Native Studies at university but have since honed my talents in various Social Sciences.  A couple of years ago I had the unique and amazing opportunity of writing curriculum in an area I have developed a deep passion for.  Not only did I have an opportunity to write curriculum, but I was also awarded the opportunity of collaborating with Mark Wildermann, and May Cummings, two of the most gifted educators I know.  My most recent blessing, came as an appointment to the ranks of “Learning Leader” within my division.  My struggle in teaching is to be relevant and effective.  One of my goals this year is to master one or two technologies and bring them to my classroom. Last week I joined twitter. Please feel free to check on me at @tracylaverty

With all of this going on its hard to believe that my attention could be divided, but if passion can be divided, then travel definately shares the stage with teaching.  Although I have travelled a little for conferences before teaching, teaching is what really opened up the world for me.  In the beginning of my teacher education, I was given the opportunity to travel with my classmates to various First Nation sites in the United States.  An amazing and eye opening education.  However, it wasn’t until I truly began to understand societies and social interactions that I was “bitten” by the travel bug for real.  And then, a few years ago, I attended a week long conference on the topic of Genocide with General Romeo Dallaire as the keynote.  After that point, travel took on new meaning for me.  From within this new perspective and with a group of like minded colleagues,  I travelled to Rwanda in the summer of 2009 where we studied the genocide and the painful movement forward.  The most important thing that I learned is that travel has amazing potential in education.  In the case of Rwanda, it was teacher education, but I knew it didn’t end there. If we use it properly travel can create compassionate global citizens and break the bonds of ethnocentricity for good.  My struggle this year is to create an authentic learning experience within our EFTours trip to Italy and Greece without taking the fun out of their first travel experience.

Finally, and probably most importantly, comes treasuring all that we have been given.  Life is the most precious of gifts.  I am truly blessed.  Friends, family, career, all gifts I sometimes take for granted.  If you are still reading, then thank you for the gift of your time and attention.  I struggle the most in this area.  I struggle for balance.  I struggle for patience. I struggle to let go of the little things.  And I even struggle to treasure the differnet paths that we have all chosen.  If you choose to occasionaly follow or share my path then I hope that you will always feel free to bring me back to a place of balance where gifts can be treasured.

Check out this Daniel Pink Video

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Archives are beautiful things.  At the end of each session we were promised that each session would be archived for replay at our leisure.  Since I missed so many (both sleep and work interfered) I will be making extensive use of the archives.  As a matter of fact i will include a link to the symposium for everyone at the end of this post. 

I wish I could summarize for you the many programs and links that were mentioned and explained.  Unfortunately I am convinced that my brain has taken a vacation due to overload.  Please watch just one session from archive and you will be convinced.

Of the few I attended “Playing To Learn”, “HOTT”, “Creative Text response”, “Not Your Mother’s Classroom”, and “Backchanneling”, I think I learned the most at “Backchannelling”.  Not because it had the most to offer, but because it was at my level.  Rest assured though, I will be watching each and every session that I missed.

But don’t take my word for it!

http://reformsymposium.com/