foolfillment: the blog

Last night was the very first TeachMeet for student teachers and probationers. I was a bit sceptical when David Muir suggested that we could arrange it in just 6 weeks, but I supported it and signed up to attend and even to present if I was wanted.

Then the most amazing things happened.

Everyone pitched in to make last night an amazing success. I think last night was truly crowdsourced, the event organised itself with people from across Scotland helping to sort it all out.

John Daly, Iain Hallahan, and of course David Muir all deserve special mentions, but there was one time in particular that stood out.
Iain was trying to find a way to get in touch with all the NQT co-ordinators in the 32 Local Authorities. Over the course of a night a plan was formed, a collaborative spreadsheet on Google was set up, and a gang of teachers organised themselves to send a letter that had been written collaboratively onto the LAs they had contact with. Within about and hour we had people signed up to speak to over half of the LAs.

And how did we do it? With the power of Twitter and Google Docs. Wonderful stuff because not only did we get this sorted out but a lot of us learned a lot more about how we could use Google Docs to do some really cool stuff that would be useful for teaching.

Following on from last night’s post about google docs, I’ve just discovered I can publish individual charts from a google docs spreadsheet, so below are the live charts for the three measurements I’ve asked for. It’s been interesting to see the charts change in the short time the form has been live.

If you haven’t yet then please take 2 minutes to do this wee favour for me (and my 2nd years) and fill in this form. And if you have filled it in once then why not go ask all of your friends to, or get your classes to do it?

As you can see they are not quite bell curves yet but already they are tending that way. So far there have been 35 sets of data put in and while there have been a few rogue results that I’ve had to tweak a little, in the main what you see is the raw data that has been inputed by you, the user. Thank you!

Hand length:

Hand Breadth:

Length of first finger: