foolfillment: the blog

The fantastic news today was that a venue has been secured for TeachMeetBorders!

In just 10 days time the 11th 12th edition of TeachMeet will be happening in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. The venue is the Langlee Centre in Galashiels, provided by Scottish Borders Council with – and here’s the great bit – unfiltered wifi access! Things will kick off at about 6pm and will run till about 8.30. We need to be out of the building by 9. Of course after that we can still carry on – we can go for a meal and then on to a local watering hole to continue the sharing of ideas and enthusiasm right into the wee small hours.

If you’ve never heard of TeachMeet before it is a must-attend event. “The best CPD in the world!” Please head over to the wiki and sign up now, or get in touch with me.

I’ve tidied up the wiki a little, and added in the big missing element – TeachMeetEat, if you fancy continuing the discussion after 9 and having a few drinks to get to know everyone a bit better then sign up now. At the moment I think we’ll be heading to an Indian restaurant in Gala, the more names the better.

Even if you can’t make it to Gala in person we’ll be running a flashmeeting so you can watch from afar.

How can you help?

There are a few things still up in the air, and you can help out:

1. The first way to help is to spread the word – blog it, tweet it, email it, tell people. Tag it using teachmeetborders that way we can see who’s buzzing.
2. The second way you can help is to find a way to get some refreshments for everyone at Langlee. Any suggestions are welcome – should be go BYOB? Can we find a kindly sponsor or six to fund a small amount of drinks for everyone?
3. The third way to help is maybe to bring along some kit – we’ll be pretty well set up for projectors I think, but we’ll need a few machines to run the presentations and to host the flashmeeting.
4. The fourth way os to sign up to the meal if you fancy it, once I have enough names I’ll look into making a booking

I’m sitting here listening to a podcast of a radio show that was broadcast yesterday in Manitoba, Canada. Not what I would normally do, certainly. However this is a bit different., this three hour show (podcast cut down to 1hr 40 when you take out the news and adverts) was all about teaching. Darren Kuropatwa is a mathematics teacher who was the main interviewee, along with other teachers from North America. They are covering a massive amount of really interesting topics – maths, teaching approaches, online safety, using technology in the classroom and why we have to change the current model of education. Can you imagine teachers being let loose on the airwaves in Scotland or the UK for three hours? And to talk about these (controversial?) topics

I can’t write a better summary than Neil Winton has so I would urge you to go and read his post from yesterday, thanks for bringing this to my attention Neil!

Of course I should also point you towards the podcast.

There was also a lively Chatterous back channel, which I haven’t read through yet, you can find that here.

I will mention this part though, one caller brings up the point: ‘When a teacher changes his teaching by using new methods and new technologies that most other teachers are not using, then how do we make sure that the tax payer getting a good return for their money?’ This point ties in very nicely with a recent series of posts by Don Ledingham.

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.

Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything – and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry – whichever industry that may be at the time.

I also hope deep down that design will feature heavily in a way that will embed design into everything that we as technology teachers do, and also into what every other teacher does.

Awkwardly that date coincides with something else which you may, or may not hear more about later – although that may actually save my skin a little (anyone worked out what I’m on about?)

Image credit: Red Bridge – Originally uploaded by El Fotopakismo

Historically when a new technology comes along the trend is to initially use new medium in the same way, with the same content as what already exists, in education the example is to use the internet to post papers, or to make lectures available outside of the lecture theatre. This is fine, but it doesn’t aid learning, in a lot of cases it can have a negative affect. Making available a set of lectures that were recorded one year isn’t a replacement for giving the lectures again the next year. The challenge is to use the new technology in a new way that makes use of its potential, a good analogy might be using teletext just to present a newspaper review of a football match; later it was used to present real time scores and match summaries.

One thing the internet is very capable of is storing information and making it available to you. It is very easy to make your own information available to everyone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by putting information on the net you are helping people to learn about whatever topic it is. Sharing information isn’t the same as sharing knowledge.

For a learner what is important is finding the right information and then constructing some sort of understanding of it. This understanding can come out of discourse the learner engages in – with their peers, their lecturer/teacher, themselves. This is what needs to happen with the internet, it is what is happening in the places where it is being used well. Face to face discourse shouldn’t be disregarded though – very little comes close to that – but it can be complemented with blogs/wikis/podcasts/VoIP…

This is a post that I’ve had in draft for a while, then over the last few days there has been discussion about Blended Learning with a comment on why there will probably never be such a thing as a ‘Glow lesson’, and a presentation from BarCampScotland has been made available to listen to on why lecturers shouldn’t record their lectures. All this has prompted me into finishing this post off.

So what is it that I actually have to say? Well, my main point I suppose is that it is going to be interesting to see how Glow develops and what use teachers make of it, I personally don’t know enough about what is going to be possible for me to do (I don’t know what school I’ll be in, what subjects I’ll be teaching, what access I’ll have to computers; I also don’t know enough about how Glow will actually operate) but I will have to keep in mind that what I am doing with Glow has to be something worth doing with Glow, if it can be done as effectively without it then I need to change what I’m doing, or do it another way.

Another point I wanted to make is the importance of teaching not just certain subjects from the curriculum, but also teaching people how to make use of the information available to them and how to select the useful bits from the useless bits. With such a wealth of information available we need to know how to cherry pick the good bits – this is a more important skill than ever before.

And one final thing was the importance of making the most of new technology and not just using it in the same old ways, and also making other people realise this too. It is all to easy to just share resources that enable pupils to complete course related work (don’t get me wrong this is enormously useful – you shouldn’t expect every teacher to create a great resource for every topic, and often it is good to see things from another person’s perspective), but the best part comes when you can take the resources and create new activities around them that maybe weren’t possible before.

[tags]learning, glow, web2.0, education, collaboration[/tags]

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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I’m listening to a skypecast (my first) that Ewan McIntosh took part in about web2.0 in the classroom. Over the next few weeks we have a series of lectures and presentations about final year projects.

I wonder, yet again, about how much scope there is for me to do one that would investigate different uses of the internet in the classroom, for instance blogging, but also podcasting or conference calls through skype. I know how much discussion helps my own learning (beit in aiding my understanding or engaging me more in the topic through encountering those who already are engaged) and I want to investigate the affect these new technologies have in the classroom.

With the new Scottish Schools Digital Network due to go live in 2007 – my graduation year – I feel it is really important that as a new teacher I am able to bring the skills and knowledge to whatever school I end up in, and my fourth year investigation could help me with this.

[tags]web 2.0, education, skypecasting, SSDN[/tags]