foolfillment: the blog

Teachmeet last night was great! Around 30 people made the journey down to Galashiels in the Borders last night for the 11th (well 12th really, but hang the details) edition of TeachMeet.

David Muir did a sterling job and wrote up two posts live on the night, and no doubt others will follow shortly. I am not going to do the same, to be honest I didn’t take most of it in as I was riding along on a wave of excitement. I have however put together a quick post about what I talked about in my 7 minutes.
John Johnston, Scotland’s premier edu-aggregator, has already set up a page that will collate all tweets, flickr posts, delicious links, and blog posts. This depends on you tagging all your stuff with tmxi, so please add that to anything you post about last night.

It was awesome to see so many people come from so far away, as I say about 30 people were there in person, with notable mentions for distance travelled going to Theo Kuechel, Andy McSwan, and Louise Jones. It was great that everyone came along and made it such a good night by contributing and by pitching in. As ever it was the people who made the night, and it was really nice to put some faces to names I’ve been in touch with for ages online but not in person.

As well as the people there in person, an amazing number of people watched the event live through the flashmeeting, when I looked in there were 17 people there and I know more people popped in and out throughout the evening. You can go and watch the flashmeeting again, and at the time of writing it has already been watched an incredible 56 times!

I’m sorry to both Andrew Brown and Iain Hallahan who missed out on presenting, maybe next time?!

Again, a huge thanks to everyone who came along and made the night what it was, I really enjoyed myself and am so glad I stepped up in September and decided that we’d have a teachmeet down in the Scottish Borders. I have to make special mention to Liz Marroni for arranging the venue for us and for getting the unfiltered internet access.

I am now looking forward to the next edition – maybe it will be TeachMeet Extreme-North edition? I think Louise Jones volunteered to sort out our trip to Aviemore, but maybe we should make the journey that bit further and go and visit Sinclair in Thurso?

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’ve been toying with this idea for a few weeks, but I’d not done anything about it while I was offline. Now I am finally getting into gear.

I would like there to be a TeachMeet in the Scottish Borders sometime, mainly for selfish reasons as I do not think I’ll be able to make it to the Scottish Learning Festival this year. I realised that unless I (un)organise it then it is unlikely to happen so here I am asking you for your help.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a fair few people in the Borders and surrounding areas who will also not be able to make it to SLF this year, but I don’t know how many though, and crucially I do not know how many people there are who would consider getting involved as well as just turning up.

If I go ahead and try to sort something out I will need help – I don’t know where I would find a suitable venue, I don’t know my way around well enough yet! I was thinking somewhere in Galashiels.

I also have a few questions, I’ve put together a short Google form which you can answer, or of course you can leave comments here on the blog.

My big question though is this – one option is to have it running on the same night as the event in Glasgow, with a possible link up. How do people feel about this? My own personal feeling is that it would be great for the people who wanted to get to Glasgow but can’t, I also think that it might be good to encourage new people along if it were mostly ‘locals’ – but the risk is nobody comes… What do you think?

I’ve been thinking a bit more about where I’ll be teaching next year. As there is nothing I can do to influence the decision I can only guess about where I’ll be living, but I wanted a better idea of the possibilities so I had a little play with Google’s new service My Maps. It took a lot of copying and pasting but I eventually got all of the secondary schools from my selected areas stuck onto a custom map. After a little more playing I’ve added it to my Google Earth places and arranged them into subfolders, and uploaded an image of the aerial view.

Looking at them this way was a bit of an eye opener. I knew that my choices meant I could be placed pretty much anywhere but seeing them all mapped really shows how remote some of the Highland ones are. I’ve not used Google Earth much but I did wonder (after finishing this) that there must already be a layer that has all of the Scottish schools? I wouldn’t know where to look, but surely I can’t be the only git sad enough to do this?!