foolfillment: the blog

This week saw the Scottish Learning Festival, and of course the 10th edition of TeachMeet. There are plenty of people blogging about it, and my account with Google Reader has gone into overdrive trying to keep up with them all. I had a thoroughly good time but managed to take absolutely no notes whatsoever, unlike last year. The best bit of my day in Glasgow were by far the chats with other people. It was great to meet (among others) Tom Barrett, and Louise Jones, I bumped into my old Technological Studies teacher, arranged a trip to Shetland next weekend (!) and generally had a fantastic time.

The culmination of the day for me was TeachMeet, the last one for Ewan McIntosh for a while at least as he is off to pastures new. The gauntlet has firmly been handed over to the community to arrange the next one. I’m still keen to get something organised in the Borders and have proposed the 20th of February 2009 as a date for the 11th Edition. There is of course a page on the wiki where things are being discussed, but it needs you to get involved so it can really happen, so get over to the wiki and sign up!

This time last year I was getting excited about going to the Scottish Learning Festival, this year I’m not sure yet if I will be going. I had expected not to be but things have changed slightly and I might be heading up for the Thursday at least. It’s still up in the air at the moment but I’ve booked into some seminars just in case I do get to go. In a similar fashion to last year and some other people in the Scottish Edubloggosphere (how I hate that word) are doing tonight, I am going to list my plans below:
Wednesday:
09:30 Making Connections: Taking a Global Approach to Teaching
10:30 Cabinet Secretary’s Address
12:30 Why: Understanding what we need to do differently to motivate students to learn
Thursday:
10:30 Motivating Every Learner
12:00 The shape of things to come: personalisation and collaboration in education
14:00 Opportunities for Embedding Enterprise Skills for Life and Work

And, of course, if I do make it to Glasgow I will definitely be heading to TeachMeet08* on Wednesday evening. If I do make it along I’ll be adding myself to the list of speakers - possibly just the 2 minute nano-presentations - to talk about goodness only knows what

If I do end up going I’ll have to miss a few classes, which I had really hoped not to do so early in to my time at my new school, but at the same time I’m really hoping I’ll get to go.

* Yes, this does mean I’m not putting on a small scale version in the Borders on the same night. BUT, I am still hopeful of getting something sorted out in the not so distant future.

I’ve got a big poster in my room which is almost entirely blank, I’m going to use it with my S3 Craft and Design class on Thursday. The only things on it are big black letters spelling out “Design is…” Onto this sheet I’m going to ask my class to each stick a post-it with a few words, or a picture, explaining what they think design is and why it is important. I am secretly hoping that one of them will write ‘everything’ but I don’t hold out much hope!

Anyway, serendipity struck tonight. Just after looking through “Thirst” on slideshare (via Ollie) one of the recommended shows was called … you guessed it “Design is Everything“. It is perhaps a little above S3 level but it has plenty of talking points and I may try to get a modified version made up - or even better get my class to do one.

I’d like to see what design means to other people too, so on flickr I’ve put a similar image to my poster. I’d like you to add a note to the image and add a few words, just like my pupils will be doing with post-its. Here’s the link.