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After a very successful Teacher Meetup at Magdalen College, we are again organising another meeting in July!

Teacher Meetup @ Winchester College
Time: 5:00 – 7:30pm
Date: Tuesday 5 July 2011
Venue: Winchester College, College Street, Winchester, SO23 9NA
The Cost: FREE

TeacherMeetup’s are the new way of helping share examples of inspirational learning and classroom practice spreading across the country. The aim of the TeacherMeetup events (like a TeachMeet) is to learn through example, provide access to inspirational educators and provide an informal setting to network. By providing a relaxed environment you can discover new technologies without disruption to your school day. Learn something you never knew before, never thought you could do, or never thought possible in your school.

The focus of the TeacherMeetup @ Winchester College will (loosely) be about upper primary school learning, but like all TeacherMeetups there are sure to be usable examples presented on the night that can be used across all age groups and disciplines.

Come along and see how the college works, with examples on the evening from a few college presenters and a selection of other like-minded Teachers from around Hampshire sharing their success stories. No pressurised learning, no pushy sales people. This is an informal gathering of Teaching professionals that have an interest in keeping their classroom activities fresh and innovative.
Would you like to get involved? If you have an example that you want to share on something that works well in your school then we would love to invite you to make a presentation. You don’t have to be an ICT guru to present. Just tell us if you would like a 2 or 7 minute presentation slot and the subject of your presentation/talk/ demonstration and you can share your success story to help fellow teaching professionals.

Please register at: WWW.MEETUP.COM/TEACHER-MEETUP or email us to register or present at the event – allyson@teachable.co.uk.

"Does using Twitter make teachers smarter?

Surely they would not use it so avidly if it made them stupid. I believe it does make them smart, firstly, because it creates smart-sets of passionate people volunteering to join extended networks with socially understood values. Second, its smarter to be in a set – as many eyes see more of the horizon. Thirdly, its life-smart to seek constant feedback and be supportive of others in your set – because it generates more collective knowledge.

Twitter has created is an irrepressible network of smart-teachers.

But being on Twitter isn’t generative unless you actively participate and manage it. So the effect Twitter had, was to create a set of very smart-teachers because in an age of unprecedented social change and technological power – Twitter became the vanguard, essential to learn about complex semantics.

Today it’s the IV-drip of professional development – and the best example of game based learning I can think of.

We often see infographics with mind-blowing statistics about the Internet. Its ignorant to think that smart-teachers on Twitter are not also using this mass-scale effect. Teachers on Twitter spend millions of hours a week collectively solving problems.

The required amount of self-directed learning teachers have to do in NSW (if they started after 2008) is 20 hours a year. Smart-teachers do that a week.

They are learning about subtlety, ambiguity and contradictions in real time, which isn’t something that can be said for those tittering rather than Twittering.

The question to ask is– what do we want? not why we do it. The latter is a stupid question." From Design for Learning.

Follow @un_teachable on Twitter to keep up to date with all the new resources on Teachable, find out first about resources still available for free trial, and to read user reviews and all the latest teaching ideas on our blog.

As I was walking down Brackley High Street yesterday afternoon I passed a couple of empty shops and the following idea struck me…

What if all the schools in the town got together to takeover one of these run down shops for one week. The shop could sell items created by the children. This could include artwork – as prints, or printed onto T-shirts, mugs etc – items created in DT, digital art created in ICT, anthologies of poetry or writing and so on.

I think the idea of having several schools all contributing would enhance the ‘community’ aspect of the project and all profits could go towards a local charity. This charity could then change year after year. With more schools taking part there will be a larger bank of parents who may be able to contrbute in some way – to help cleaning up and decorating the shop or to man the shop for an hour each.

So key benefits of the project…

• Establish strong community links.
• Revamp an old tired, run down shop.
• Raise money for local charity.
• All key stages could contribute, from artwork created in the Early Years through to A Level business studies.

My head is currently buzzing with ideas for this and this post is simply a way opf beginning to get it written down. When I first tweeted the idea several people responded that it was a good idea and that they ould like to do something similar – imagine a network of these school shops across the country. That would be amazing.

Earlier this afternoon @TTNewsReport starting tweeting headlines from Ancient Egypt thanks to @ictast who had used the account with his class. Here are some of their tweets.

2500BC: Sphinx at Giza carved out of local stone. Said to be biggest sculpture in the world!

Nov 4th 1922: Howard Carter stood at the entrance to a great tomb. Who is inside it?

9th March 1660BC: 400 years of peace has ended. Foreigners are taking over Egypt.

It would be fantastic if more schools got involved, so if you teach history and would like your class to contribute please get in touch. I’m @chrisleach78 on Twitter.

A video of my presentation from #FOTE10 is now up on the Future of Technology in Education Website. The title of my presentation was ‘Unlocking Learning – Computer Games in Education’ where I talked about some of the work that we do at Learning and Teaching Scotland in the Consolarium.

During my presentation I covered:

• Why should teachers use games?

• What do we mean by playful learning?

• Why learning should be fun?

• Using contextual hubs to create powerful learning environments

• What can we learn from games to inform pedagogy?

• The importance of getting children to create as well as trying to consume content

• Why it is important to teach about games

You can watch the full video here and I’ll post the slides and a more detailed description of what I covered over on the Consolarium blog soon. You can also watch the videos from the other FOTE presenters.

As always I would welcome any feedback.



I finally got round to reading my August / Sepetember copy of the GTCS Teaching Scotland Magazine today. I was deligted to see a piture of my good friend Mandeep Atwel on the Microsoft feature on page 23 talking about TakingITGlobal (who she now works full time for).

TakingITGlobal.org is a social network that connects people (aged 13 - 30 and their teachers) to the global issues that affect us all. It enables a collaborative learning community which provides young people with access to global opportunities, cross-cultural connections and meaningful participation in decision-making.

If you have not heard of TakingITGlobal.org there website is worth checking out as it offers awide range of opertunities to support Global Citizenship Education.

You can read an online version of the GTCS article here on the Teaching Scotland website.

Last year I ran a history project with a small group of Year 6 children. This project looked at the Gunpowder Plot and specifically the events following Guy Fawkes’ capture. The idea of this project was to explore how web 2:0 tools could be used in history lessons. I wanted the children to be able to research the events and then use the Internet to present their research in a variety of ways.

One of the most successful parts of the project was the Twitter account of Robert Catesby. Catesby was the mastermind of the plot and the children tweeted his story as he fled from London following the plots discovery. The children researched the events and wrote out their tweets before scheduling them for delivery using hootsuite. The tweets ran from the morning of the 5th November until the final standoff at Holbeche House on the 8th.

The project gained many followers and proved very popular. It was very exciting watching the messages arrive especially as I did not know exactly what the children ahd written or when they had scheduled them to be sent.

I’m hoping to re-run the project this year but would like to make it even bigger and involve other schools. I have just spent the morning writing up the events of the Gunpowder Plot from various sources and would really like others to take on the roles of different plotters so that the full story can be told. I imagine several groups all tweeting as different members of the conspiracy all using a common hashtag so that people can follow the project.

Let me know if you would like to join the project – I imagine it would work better with a small group (ICT club) rather than a whole class.

Any suggestions or comments more than welcome.

At my last school I adapted four Shakespeare plays to be performed by Year 6 as their end-of-year assembly. The challenge of these adaptations was to tell the story in a way that could be understood easily whilst keeping to roughly 40 minutes. The plays we performed were Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Each production had to involve over 100 children. To achieve this we gave each of the Narrator’s lines to a different child. We also added songs and dance routines. The children were also responsible for all technical aspects of the performance.

I have just published the Macbeth adaptation through Lulu. com and made it available to download for free. I’m really hoping that someone will take the time to read the script and hopefully decide that they could use it with their class. I’d really appreciate any comments on the Lulu site as well.