Welcome from ECML in Graz

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The final dissemination workshop of the ECML Blogs project is under way! Here are the first photos from the intro.

Inset Kids

Will Richardson has been on the road this year and wonders:

…. why we aren’t inviting kids to these conferences or workshops as a way to keep the presenters (myself included) honest, number one, but also to help teachers understand the realities of their worlds.

I think this is an important issue for conference and training organisers to at least consider. Students and teachers learning together and from each other – there’s a novel idea. Surely, it must be possible to come up with a construction that could work… Communicate06 gave a glimpse of the potential of engaging students at a training event.

Adding a few 7 year-olds to conference proceedings would soon make the presenters engage with reality and the ‘unconference’ format;-)

Creative ICT Spring Innovations Conference

The Creative ICT Spring Innovations Conference took place yesterday at Chorlton Park School in Manchester organised by John Sutton. About thirty teachers sacrificed their Saturday and were rewarded with some engaging presentations, workshops and some very pleasing food. I presented as well. The conference blog gives an insight into what was going on and recording of the sessions will probably follow soon. Bits and pieces from my presentation are here.

The new technique I tried out for my presentation was using a bubbl.us online brainstorm to gather some ideas from the audience during the presentation but I left too little time for it. Before the conference I had used the bubblr.us plugin for WordPress to set up a page on the blog with an embedded version of the bubbl.us brainstorm sheet. This meant that as I updated the sheet on the bubl.us site with the audience’s ideas, it was automatically saving the changes to the blog version. This has superb possibilities when working with students. Any brainstorm you complete in class – automatically saved to a blog and updated when you make changes – ready for further collaboration online. Only a proof of concept but definitely something I will be using again – the version I completed during the session is here and one I made earlier is here.

One who would never try out new ideas ‘on the fly’ during a presentation is Russell Prue. Russell was an entertaining and effective presenter with a strong and inspiring message, calling for a change in strategy at the school level to embrace technologies that are already in the hands of students. I can see why he is gainfully employed at every educational ICT conference over the length and breadth of the country and am going to buy his book ‘The Science of Evangelism‘ to find the secret of his presentation success;-) I’m quite surprised that he doesn’t blog – he seems the type to me.

It was good as well to meet Paul Harrington who travelled all the way from Wales and who is switched on the possibilities of new technologies in the classroom. He could have at least touched up the photos though to take a few kilos off both me and Russell. At least Russell got some exercise which is more than can be said for Peter ’15 slices of quiche and 47 sandwiches’ Ford !

The Real BETT Show Agenda.

BETT is the world’s leading educational information & communications technologies (ICT) event, attracting 600 educational suppliers and over 28000 visitors, and bringing together the global teaching and learning community for four days of innovations and inspirations.

The quest for educational freebies will be in full swing next week when swarms of educators will descend on London’s Olympia for the annual BETT Show. The suppliers’ stands will be stripped bare of all promotional merchandise and only the very best salespeople will be able to break the concentration of those hellbent on filling their promotional carrier-bags with as much promotional tat as can feasibly be transported on the London Underground during the rush hour. This is the hidden agenda of the BETT Show – at least it is was for me;-)

I’ve heard that there are a number of podcasting opportunities happening at the show. I’m going to be producing the Promotional TatCast, that will document the best (and worst) corporate promotional merchandise and investigate its relationship to the quality of any products for sale. Has anyone got any pointers? – or highlighters or USB-memory sticks for that matter?;-)

Photo: www.pie.org.uk

Chocolate

See the face you love light up with chocolate!

melt

delicious

smooth

orgasmic

This was a quick opener at the Derby City ICT conference session that I was doing on blogging and creativity. Imagining a language session opening exploring the language of advertising and slogans, we used the advertising generator to generate a slogan idea with which we were happy.

I had also wanted to show this advert posted on YouTube as a pre-writing/stimulus activity but that option was taken away from me because the site was blocked. As a teacher I found that removal of my own ability to take a responsible decision about a site frustrating and mildly annoying. Not enough though to dampen my enthusiam for the task though

We went on to produce a (small) word-bank of descriptive words that students might think about using in their own writing and/or recording. We had to think about audience when removing one of the participant’s suggestions This activity could be developed or revisited by students at home using the commenting function. Using an audio commenting facility would make this activity particularly valuable. More on this later…

Activity time taken: 3 – 5 mins

Conference Photos

Here are my conference photos from the blog.ac.uk conference.