Learning, Teaching and ICT

It’s now 2 months since I wrote a post about how I was ‘toying’ with the idea of arranging a TeachMeet event here in Falkirk – and a lot has happened in that short time. In a couple of weeks, almost 60 people will come along to Carronvale House to take part, and many teachers from Falkirk will have their first experience of this new style of CPD (some of them have also volunteered to share teaching experiences with others in a 7 minute presentation).

I’ve been reading on twitter that others have also been contemplating organising a local TeachMeet, and some have asked me about the practicalities of planning such an event.  This post is a summary of how the initial idea developed.

When I mentioned the possibility of having a TeachMeet in Falkirk, Cassie Law was very keen. She’d already attended the TM Student edition (where she gave a 7 minute talk) and was sold on the whole idea. Later, we mentioned it to another Falkirk teacher, Richard Olyott - so then there were three

Soon after that, a colleague at work suggested that the idea might be of interest to the primary ICT co-ordinators. We meet with the representatives from each primary school here three times a year. Initially, I was a bit concerened that they’d think that the notion was a bit bizarre … teachers giving up their own free time to attend a CPD event that had been organised by other classroom teachers. I came up with the idea, however, of introducing them to two great free online tools that I suspected they would find useful in their classroom practice at the same time – that way, if TeachMeet wasn’t for them, they’d have gotten something out of the short presentation. The two tools were Prezi.com and the great random name picker tool (traditionally used at all TeachMeets) – both did in fact prove to be a success as they went down a treat

The Prezi I made to introduce the TM concept is included below:

 At that time, there was no date set for a TeachMeet event in Falkirk. At the Scottish Learning Festival TM in September the three Falkirk ‘pioneers’ met Nick Tait and Peter Graham, two other interested Falkirk teachers. During an interval the participants were asked to make a promise to do something as a result of having attended that TM. We publically announced on twitter  that the Falkirk event would go ahead on the evening of one of our November in-service days. The following day, Nick Tait posted the details on the TeachMeet wiki and the challenge was issued – there was no going back!

After that, we spent a couple of evenings discussing things on Twitter and decided that the best thing would be to meet up again in person. One of the items on the agenda was a possible venue -and finding the ideal place was proving to be the biggest challenge. Just before our October break, however, I telephoned Carronvale House in Larbert, a venue that Falkirk Council have used in the past for their annual ICT Fair. On paper, it appeared to ‘tick all the boxes’. It’s about a 10 minute walk from a train station where trains arrive directly from Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh (some people from Glasgow had already signed up on the wiki and had requested that the venue be close to a train station), is minutes drive from the motorway, has wireless and wired internet connection, charges half price for evening hire, provides food, has a ‘bring your own bottle’ policy (and even supplies the glasses).

One of their rooms was available for hire that evening, so after consulting the others via email, we decided to just go for it and book it there and then ….  and worry about paying for it afterwards

During the October break, I emailed Anne from Steljes and asked if there was any chance of sponsorship, and on the same day that she got back to me, Con Morris from the National CPD Team got in touch via twitter to say that they were also going to provide sponsorship. Ross, Louise and John have agreed to support the event as well.

Ben was  interested in attending a TeachMeet event after hearing about the notion via a conversation with Tom Barrett . I discovered this after reading this twitter post by David Noble:

David’s reference to the fact that some of the people originally involved in getting TeachMeets going would be attending the Falkirk event motivated me to ask  John Johnston to chair the Falkirk TM and I’m ‘mega pleased’ that he has agreed to do this. It’s also great that my line manager supports the event and gave permission for me to contact all Falkirk schools via email.

It’s been quite a journey organising the first Falkirk TeachMeet and this post has only told half the story -  I’ll publish now and save the rest for Falkirk TeachMeet Update – take two

A month or so ago, I wrote a post entitled ePortfolios in the Upper Primary Classroom? I’m now  investigating using the concept with upper primary stage children in Carronshore Primary School.  The children are Primary 6 stage and last session they were given their own wiki space which they used to record some things they’d been learning in class. I want to carry out a wee bit of research to see if it’s possible to use the same type of wiki to create an ePortfilio.

Before I meet with the children, I need to decide on the purpose for the ePortfolios, and what sort of template design would be appropriate. I’ve already decided to use the basic PBworks academic workspace with the children because they are familiar with the layout so don’t need instruction on how to use it. The children are also familiar with a number of free online tools and how to embed these in to a wiki. As I’m not based in the school at the moment, I think it’s important that a teacher there is involved in the project. The class teacher isn’t familiar with using any type of online spaces, but Evelyn W, who is currently teaching art in the school has just begun to look after the Carronshore Blog, and is keen to be part of the ‘experiment’.

Before deciding on the structure of the ePortfolios, I’ve done a bit of background reading (again) and come up with some ground rules for myself. These ideas are taken from a variety of sources and are not listed in order of importance:

• The first page should contain an overview of the eportfolio and provide an explanation of the overall goals.
• Reflection should be the ‘heart and soul’ of the ePortfolio
• Be wary of  learners focussing to much on technology skills, thereby puting less emphasis on the content
• Guidelines as to what is to be included shouldn’t be too prescriptive
• The children should feel they have ownership of the ePortfolio
• There should be a structure in place, but this should allow freedom for creativity
• The learning takes place in the constructing of the ePortfolio, rather than in the end product
• Children need to be introduced to the concept and given clear reasons for constructing an ePortfolio
• Children should be given regular and useful feedback on their reflections

I also think it would be beneficial for me to revisit my own experience of using online spaces with upper primary stage children. These spaces were not ePortfolios – but I think that parallels can be drawn.  At the time, background reading helped me to gain a clearer insight and the thoughts that follow have been influenced by; Buckingham, Stern, Lafferty, Green and Hannon – and others………….. that’s the disclaimer bit (I’ll not refer to them individually here).

Every primary 7 pupil was given the opportunity to personalise their individual blogs. The children chose their own theme and created avatars. This helped them to gain a sense of ownership of their on-line spaces - they were allowed to play and experiment with them.  They were, in fact, testing out different versions of current and possible identities Up until then, the main audience for their online spaces was themselves, but they were also eager for peer approval during that stage.

So - when setting up the ePortfolios for the primary 6 children, Time will need to be given so that the children can customise their wikis. There won’t be as many themes to choose from, but they will be able to use various online tools to help them establish ‘ownership’. For example, activities such as making vokis and designing weemee characters might be useful here.

 Once their new online spaces were ‘designed and furnished’, the children were free to choose the content of their blog posts and wiki writing. The informal learning that took place happened primarily by means of experimentation rather than by following external instructions and directions.

Although, the ePortfolios will be more structured than the blogs and wikis were, the children will be involved in the planning stage so that they can have a say as to what that structure should look like, and as to what sort of content should be included. 

  Guidance was given by providing a sense of online audience by submitting comments on the children’s posts regularly. Offline, new interesting posts were shared with the children. This had the effect of influencing the others to add to their own blogs – often on a similar subject. They acted as role-models for each other. The children were asked if sharing their online writing in this way helped them to get to know each other better:

• “In our blogs, we’re allowed to write about what we  want to write about, so we’ve got to know each other better”
• “Some people in class don’t talk very much, but I can read their blogs and find out more”
• “I feel as though I know my friends even more now because of what they write on their blogs”
• “I like when we read the stories that people in our class have written on their wikis, and how good they are”
• You get to know what peoples thoughts and dreams are through their stories on their wikis”

By adopting a similar approach, I hope that it will provide opportunities for reflection and self-assessment …  key ingredients for building successful ePortfolios. I also hope that this sense of audience will increase motivation.

I suppose that an important difference between the blogs and wikis that I’ve used with children in the past and the ePortfolios that we’ll set up soon, is the clearer motive for creating them. This  will be discussed at the outset. Goals will be set initially to help establish a sense of purpose.

I hope to have my first meeting with the children next week and when I get the ePortfolios up and running, I’ll give a wee update as to how things are going at the TeachMeet Falkirk event next month!

I was asked casually recently if I would consider organising a teachmeet event here in Falkirk. I’ve attended four different teachmeet type events – the first one was in 2007 . I must have heard about it via someone’s blog at the time. When I signed up to go along and be part of the event, I recognised 3 or 4 names on the list   .. but when I look at that same list now, at least 40 of the names are known to me – how my learning network has grown!! Since then, I’ve attended TeachMeet08 SLF2008, TeachMeetSE09 and LeadMeet09 ….. and I’ve also signed up for TeachmeetSLF09. It’s evident from the wiki activity that the TeachMeet concept is extremely popular in the UK, and further afield  but I wasn’t sure where TeachMeet originated from.

Organising one here in Falkirk seemed very daunting but it soon became clear that at least a few others might be willing to become ‘co-organisers’. Cassie, Rich and Scott seem ‘up for it’, but how do we spread the message to others in the authority? Over the next two weeks, however, I’ll be in contact with the ICT co-ordinators from each primary school and it seems like a good opportunity to introduce them to the idea. Teachers from schools in each cluster come along for a half day to hear about ‘what’s new in ICT in our authority’ and I have a short slot to talk about a possible Falkirk TeachMeet and get some feedback from them – but where to begin? It seems to me that I need to tell them the whole story in order to ‘sell the idea’. I considered sharing the rules, etc. but the gaps in my knowledge about about the origin of how TeachMeet started led me to ask my twitter network and, as usual, helpful replies began flooding in. Thanks to Nick, Ian, Rob, Ewan, David, another David and Andy ( apologies if I’ve forgotten to mention anyone who replied)

So here’s the story …. as I understand it.

The story of TeachMeet begins in May 2006. Ian S wrote a blog post about how much he regretted not having been there. He said  …

 ”In 2006 I missed an opportunity. Its not often I look back and ‘I wish I had done that’ but this was definitely one of them.”

I can understand why Ian was sorry that he didn’t accept the invitation to attend. According to the ScotEduBlogMeetup wiki it was a great success. This is a quote from the wiki:

 ”What a night!   We had a great and productive night and the wifi worked! “

Andrew Brown also mentioned the impact that ‘meetup’ had on him in this blog post. 

He wrote:

“Last year I went through for both eLive06 and TeachMeet06, which were brilliant. It was a great opportunity to meet up with people that I had been reading online for some time, and put faces, personalities and perhaps most importantly contacts to the words and pictures streaming in to my aggregator. About a dozen people, some of whom I had met before, but a great opportunity. I came home on the train the next day very positive and enthusiastic about the future of developing community around the country/world in using technology in education.”

    David Muir provided a link on twitter to a photograph taken on the evening in the Jolly Judge in Edinburgh. He mentioned that it was taken  …… “before we invented the name“.

So when did the term ‘TeachMeet’ first appear? How did it evolve from the May 2006 ScotEduBlogMeetup …… to newtechmeet…. to the TeachMeet name (and home) we know today?

Well ……  I’ve found this great discussion of how the name TeachMeet was coined and I think I can trace the ‘invention’ of the name back to David Muir’s contribution to the wiki. David wrote an entry on the discussion area.

He had this to say:

“ I posted a whole pile of suggestions – mostly for my own amusement rather than as serious suggestions. I like the sound of ScotEduSlam but I think it falls down on the “does what it says on the tin” criteria. The other one I like is TeachMeet. I saw that Ewan called this page “newtechmeet” and remembered that a wise man once said, “It’s not the tech, it’s the teach!”  So I came up with TeachMeet… which almost rhymes.”

So there it is -  the name ‘TeachMeet‘ was ‘born’ …. but I still need to find the answer to another twitter question I posed:

“How did [TeachMeet] grow so big so quickly?”

The twitter responses all point to one source:

• “How did [TeachMeet] grow so big so quickly?” My guess would be that it was thanks to @ewanmcintosh
• @ewanmcintosh was the real driving force behind teachmeet but it was also an idea whose time had come!
• @ewanmcintosh For which we are eternally grateful!
• TeachMeet came out of many conversations and frustration with establishment. Sleepless nights & £s from me

The last entry here came from Ewan McIntosh and I’m pleased that he worked so hard to help TeachMeet grow ‘so big so quickly’  ……… and there might even be one in Falkirk  at some point to add to the ‘TeachMeet portfolio’