foolfillment: the blog

On Wednesday I was fortunate to get the chance to go to the Scottish Learning Festival, in the evening I also managed to get along to TeachMeet07 in the Science Centre. As you would expect there has been a flurry of posts already by people giving their take, I’m going to try to summarise my thoughts, one thing that has been said already that I will repeat without any shame is how good an event it was and say thanks to everyone who made it possible - Ewan for organising it, the sponsors, and of course the people who came and gave such wonderful presentations.

First up was John Johnston on ScotEduBlogs - a great aggregation of blogs that I use everyday. It was a perfect way to start the evening.

The stand out 7 minutes for me was Iain Stanger’s piece on Dartfish, a video editing software that allows for easy annotation and lots of other useful features - there are so many possibilities throughout education. I really enjoyed talking with Iain afterwards about what the software can do.

David Gilmour also gave some time to using blogs for school websites and the importance of parental involvement - a group who’s involvement all too often get missed.

David Noble, reflective podcaster extrodinaire, talked about Flashmeetings, his point about teachers who aren’t particularly tesh-savvy fighting for their right to ‘attend’ these online meetings from within school networks. “We’re professionals, let us use this service to share our practice and improve what we do - don’t block it”.

Like the last teachmeet in Edinburgh, it was good to put faces to names. Jim McDougall and Lee Carson fell firmly into that category, I was sorry not to get chance to speak to either of them. Lee had set up a class blog in his school in South (?) Queensferry only to find the pupils didn’t really care for it - that was until something magical happenned and someone left a comment! We have a moral obligation to leave comments.

I have very few notes for Neil Winton’s presentation - because it was so good - some of my scribbles include ‘I love salling clicker’; pupils are ‘autonomously reflecting on work and experiences’ and ‘Bona fide evidence of confident individuals, effective communicators, successful learners, and responsible citizens - now where have I heard that before?’ Neil was of course talking about Bebo and why teachers should be aware of what goes on there

Nick Hood spent a few minutes explaining why he’d set up his online classroom - to allow his pupils to learn without risking a battering. Having used Moodle he now is working with wikis and finding it much better. ‘What will Glow’s VLE be like?’ was a pertinent question, I don’t know the answer. I’d first met Nick by chance in the Ministerial keynote earlier in the day.

One other person who stood out was Andy Black from BECTA. I really enjoyed his presentation ‘It’s not about the device, stupid’ - so much energy!

I’ve not really done any of this justice, it and the meal at Kublai Khan’s afterwards was a great way to end the day, and it was good to see so many teachers coming along to share good practice. The next teachmeet is at BETT in London after Christmas, somehow I don’t think I’ll get along to it but no doubt it will be recorded one way or another by some of the great teachers who’ll be there.

Tags: teachmeet07

This entry was posted at 2:48 pm on the 22nd of September, 2007 and is filed under general. 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.