TeachMeet The Abbey
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012It was great to be back at The Abbey, Reading, for another Teachmeet. Over 18 months of organising Teachmeet events, i’m really pleased that the format has developed with someone for everyone – from the biggest technophobe to the cutting-edge ICT teacher.
Here follows a quick summary of the evening for those that missed out and some further links where possible.
Edward Upton (me) – Teachable
A quick reminder that we are still looking for contributors of excellent resources – you can find out more here.
If you missed the discount voucher code we gave out, send me an email or add a comment below and we can forward that on.
Heike Bruton – University of Reading
Heike talked to us about her work organising Professional Development Consortium in Modern Foreign Languages: http://prezi.com/gtwvaherjlkn/pdc-in-mfl/. The Professional Development Consortium is offering FREE workshops to language teachers. The project is run by secondary MFL teachers and researchers from Oxford and Reading Universities. It uses teaching and learning principles based on research evidence to bring about effective language learning in lessons, and thus raise attainment.
You can download and pass on the flyer about this CPD scheme to your MFL department or see more on their website.
Ros Johnson – Head of Science, The Abbey school
Ros showed us how she is building a facts collection about medical school admission on a wiki, updated by the sixth formers as they came back from interview. This means important details, like UCAS cut-off scores and interview procedure, can be passed on to the next year’s entries.
Peter Forest-Biggs, Farnborough Hill
Peter has run the Think Tank programme for Farnborough Hill, aimed at getting interesting speakers and events for G&T pupils. You can see some of the speakers they secured for almost no fees, especially with the House of Lords Peers in Schools scheme and an EU debate with speakers and good EU teaching resources provided by Civitas
Breakout – demonstration of Texas Instruments’ 3D visualisation trial at the Abbey
Impossible to describe unless you’ve seen it, but there’s a few pictures of the action!
Mark Ives – St. Gabriel’s
Classics that works!
Mark introduced himself as a low-tech teacher with a Year 9 classical civilisation set, struggling to keep their interest. Some of these students who got 11% in their year 8 exams – they are the real strugglers! There are two simple lesson ideas to inspire:
Ancient communications – how did a message from Troy reach the Greek mainland that the city had fallen, with no mobiles and no internet? Answer: beacons. Students discover how an equivalent message can be passed by hand signals all around the school in only 6 seconds, and challenges their view of the role of modern communications.
‘Modern Pentathlon’ – paper plane throwing, long-reach (how far can you reach across the floor using only one hand to support), coin flicking, arm wrestling. Teach about the Olympic discipline without it feeling like a chore!
Nisha Kaura, The Abbey
Nisha took us through a range of strategies to faciliate 21st century learning at The Abbey, including theme days, wikis and podcasting.
The full presentation is available to download here.
Katja Sass, Head of RE, Heathfield School
Katja gets her students to live their life by Kant’s philosophy for a week. Real experiential learning for Religious Education ethics module and getting away from the myth that RE is all about colouring and bible verses!
Hopefully we’ll have this guide up on Teachable soon.
Gideon Williams, Perrin’s School
Gideon took us on a whistle-stop tour of fun educational widgets and software:
Class Dojo – rewards based learning, Piktochart – infographics, ScreencastOMatic – create free screen graphs, Quipper – make money from making educational apps, Socrative – revision tool, Three Ring – allows teachers to capture student’s work in an app, Planner Live – free homework tool
You can see it all in more detail on Gideon’s Scoopit page
Angela Long, The Abbey
Last but not least, Angela explained how the highly successful ‘speed dating’ concept was extended to running a fun, fast INSET day.
The full presentation is available to download here.
