It has been too long since I have blogged! The use of quick and easy social media through twitter and more recently through Google+ has meant that short frequent publishing has overtaken deeper reflections. So, dear Blog, I promise not to leave you for so long and to rekindle my love of writing in depth and sharing more than 140 characters!
Ironically, the text in this post is going to be short, but the time put into the video is great! An hour long conversation sharing thoughts on Google Apps for Education, assessment of learning, assessment for learning, critique and communities was a blast to have and is a pleasure to share!
Here is my presentation from Teachmeet Melbourne talking about the NBN Virtual School of Emerging Sciences - go to www.nvses.edu.au for more info and to get involved! The awesome orgaisers of #TMMelb did a Google Hangout on Air to record the presentations which was great! Here is mine...
There is a certain kind of magic that happens when you put highly motivated, reflective, caring. passionate, envelope pushing teachers in one space. If you multiply that magic by making that space the Sydney headquarters of a small company called Google (keep an eye out for them as they grow), it becomes really special.
I am proud to be able to call myself a Google Certified Teacher after having spent 2 days at the Sydney Google Teacher Academy. I thought I knew a lot of stuff but wow was I wrong!
The day started off with a great breakfast and welcome from Danny, Becky, Allison and Suan our hosts quickly followed by our lead learners showing their skills in a demo slam.
My personal hero and all round clever chap Tom Barrett showed us a great chrome extension which sucks all of your open tabs into one tab to declutter that browser but also allows you to create groups of tabs and export tabs as a list; great way to share a bunch of websites with kids! Check out OneTab here.
Following on from this, the Google scripts Guru that is Jay Atwood, shared LinkClump Chrome extension, a neat tool which allows you to open multiple links from one webpage in a single action; this marries really nicely with Tom's OneTab extension. Jay then went on to show us Timeline JS a site which allows you to pull data in from a Google spreadsheet and create a timeline with it.
Next up was my team leader, the wonderful Chris Bethcher who showed us the YouTube update which allows you to right hand click the videoslider and select "Copy video URL at current time" so you can direct learners to the part of the clip you want them to start watching from. Nice.
Next up the delightful Dorothy Burt showed us how she uses Gmail to post to Blogger - quick and easy! Check out the instructions here.
The wonderful Wendy Gorton then brought us voice comments in Google docs (see a short tutorial here) and the amazing videonot.es which has massive potential and I really like the idea of using it in language learning.
The fantastic Fiona Grant then went on to SLAM us with teacher dashboard for Google apps which looks to have a lot of potential and I need to explore this further (more info here).
The inimitable Jim Sill showed his passion for art, sharing the Google art project full of glorious art and then the eye dropper Chrome extension which allows you to find the colour code for any colour on your screen. Jim then took us to the Colour Scheme Designer which allows you to build colour schemes around a colour of your choice. Jim exemplified this by creating a blog colour scheme based on Starry Night by Van Gogh.
Finally Google's own Sally-Ann Williams presented the fantastic opportunities around the Computer Science for High Schools project and the need to develop more computational thinking in schools.
All of this learining in 10 miutes was mind blowing!
Now part of my inspiration from GTA Sydney was to share what I learn more regularly through this blog so I will leave this post here and put up a new post for each of the sessions I attended over the next few weeks.
So I was successful in getting into the Google Teacher Academy in Sydney next week (yay!) and in a week's time I will have been totally Googlified :) I am looking forward to sharing what I learn but thought I would start of with a short video I made around using Google apps and G+ Communities and how I use these to encourage critique in my Y12 French class. Enjoy!
Once again, I am overwhelmed to be part of something amazing. I have, in the past, spent hundreds of pounds going to a conference and walked away poorer both in cash as well as in ideas. Somehow, some (not all!) professionally oprganised conferences actually mangage to suck ideas out of me rather than filling me with inspiration This was not the case with the second North East of England teachmeet this year! In fact...
So that just about says it all!
The evening started with one of the most intensive apple/idea swopping presentations I have ever listened to/watched/experienced - Gwyn ap Harri; the man (dare I say genius?) behind Smart Assess talked through his model of pedagogy in 7 minutes. Gwyn has kindly shared his presentation and notes below.
After Gwyn, Alasdair @hairysporan then took us through a 2 minute whistle-stop tour of etherpad - a great collaborative tool.
I was next up talking about international collaboration between students and teachers - the prezi is below and links to Achievers International, e-twinning and the Tate Modern's turbinegeneration project. All of this work can then lead to the International Schools Award, something I would highly recommend - click here to find out more information. We were then joined by @emmarisby from Australia via Skype -she had been up since 4:30am her time to tell us her current favourite teachnology - quizlet.
We were then followed by an excellent presentation from Lisa Keenlyside on her use of stopmotion animation in the science classroom.
Our final presentation of the first half was from Helena Butterfield - fabulous ideas for use of sound recording in the classroom. You can see the prezi and links on Helena's blog here.
The next part of the evening was broken down into learning conversations. I attended one in the "headspace" room where we discussed the role of the teacher as an expert and learner - great ideas and some really deep thinking.
After the learning conversations, we headed back for a nano presentation from Ben Barton @bartoneducation, a teachmeet virgin, who came all of the way up from the big smoke to join us. He demoed great use of video in the classroom to promote deep thinking.
After Ben came the greatest pedagogical thinker to ever come out of Gateshead; Darren Mead. Darren went on to use the three little pigs story as an analogy for the SOLO (structure of observed learning outcomes) taxonomy. Read more about the SOLO taxonomy at Darren's blog here. The real mind blower was the video below that Darren showed of New Zealand primary students talking us through their understanding of the SOLO taxonomy:
Following Darren came an inspiring 2 minuter from Archie Cameron (@hjava) about his fear of blackboards. I have never been more humbled by such an honest approach to the fact that being an outstanding teacher is not all about the gadgets and gizmos although they can be awesome tools and indeed that pedagogy is about learning and moving children on in life not just having whizzing powerpoints. It was doubly emotional for me as the teacher he was talking about who stood with a novel in hand and engrossed his class was my A-level English Literature teacher who gave me a passion for Shakespeare and Tennesee Williams! Glad he is still doing it!
The ever entertaining, pertinent and pragmatic Dominic McGladdery did a two minute presentation on alternative to tick and flick marking- some excellent ideas cunningly disguised as a wordle even though they were on a powerpoint. Check out Dominic's post and his ideas at his blog here.
To round up the evening, we took a simple practical jigsaw activity and turned it into a drunken scramble on the floor...No really, the singular Fergus Hegarty showed us how to use what looks like a simple match up activity on a much deeper level, including the use of shape and task to differentiate outcomes. In order to truly appreciate this activity, best watch it back on the flashmeeting.
Anyway, another Teachmeet down, plans afoot for more, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and learned a great deal. I would like to put out a massive thanks to Simon, Darren, Fergus, Scott and Fabienne for their organisational prowess. Our sponsors; the British Council, SSAT, BartonEducation, and Smart Assess. The Tyneside Cinema staff (specially Ents Queen Jen!) the wonderful presenters and of course the fantastic audience.
See you again soon and until then sit back and enjoy "TeachmeetNE09-2 the festive edition -the movie" at
It is back, it is bigger, better and has festive bells dangling from it... TeachmeetNE was a great success in June of this year so we have decided to do it again!
Where -The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
When? - Wednesday December 2nd from 6:30pm onwards
Year 13 and I are busy translating a James Lovelock article on climate change from English to French. We have worked hard on some French texts and used every trick in the book to find neologisms like carbon offsetting (we did this by looking at Air Canada's site in English and then switching to the French version - la compensation de carbone) It is hard. The translation has to be in by Wednesday so yesterday, we decided it would be really useful to pool our vocabulary on an etherpad (www.etherpad.com/y13clam). Etherpads are really simple web pages which allow up to 8 users to type concurrently. To create one you simply open a web browser and type in www.etherpad.com and follow it with /whateverIwanttocallmypad - we had been talking about clams (great pollution detectors) and decided to call our pad/y13clam but you could call it a class name or whatever. The website then tells you that this etherpad does not exist and would you like to create it. Once you create it, students can go to your etherpad and they are assigned a different colour so you can see who is typing what.
It was great to watch the vocabulary list grow and grow but better still was to watch the students correct other students' mistakes and or suggest different translations. I can also access the etherpad and make sure that any typos or mistranslations are corrected. Hopefully (if the little blighters are doing their homework...) the list should grow over the weekend and end up being a great resource for all of the students when translating the article. Once done, I will cut and paste the etherpad and print it out so the students can also have a hard copy. Etherpad is really simple and can be done on the fly but beware - it does not require a log in or password so the students can overwrite each others' work and you cannot recover changes, so it does require a certain level of responsibility from the students.
