Sorry!

So I blogged one post and then left it for more than a month… not a good start! I’d like to get into this more, I think it will help me be more reflective in my work and become more involved in the e-learning community that I want to contribute to.

I find it difficult to make the time to do this, there’s always more things that need to be done at work and at home, but I think this is the best way to force myself to spend time thinking about my practice. So I’m going to make a public resolution – one blog a week to start off with, based on my current ideas and issues at work. If you’re reading this and I haven’t blogged by this Friday 6th March then please bug me!

Last week was the annual BETT educational technology exhibition at Kensington Olympia. I was lucky enough to get a day off teaching to visit on the Friday and I also went along Saturday for a few seminars too.

photo credit: cglosli

It’s an overwhelming experience – I managed it better this year than my first visit last year: a list of products I wanted to see, carefully plotted on a floor plan, made for quite an efficient time. The seminars I signed up for ranged from the superb (Stephen Heppell, Terry Freedman, Miles Berry) to the mind-numbing (what I thought was going to be a great practise-based session turned out to be all about policy).

I had my missions from school – netbooks, visualisers, VLE content, dataloggers, student response (links are some that looked good, haven’t had samples through yet) but there was also time to wander and have a good geek. Picked up some great freebies – best was a 2 gig USB drive wristband from Channel 4 education (although USB drives are so 20th century…), but the blag of the week has to go to Joe Rowing, who scored a wireless tablet from e-instruction (WANT one!).

photo credit: Learn4Life

The most excellent-by-far part of this year’s BETT was definitely TeachMeet – labeled as an unconference, participants signed up on the wiki beforehand to present a 7-minute ‘micropresentation’ or a 2-minute ‘nanopresentation’ about anything edu-tech related (as long as you weren’t selling anything). Names were randomly picked and people got up, presented with a minimum of hassle and were generally well received. If you went over time you had a camel thrown in your direction. There were some superb examples of good practice and plenty of ideas I’m going to try out in the next few weeks (will post about them as I go). The sharing, collaborative atmosphere continued well into the evening and was followed by dinner at Pizza Express, paid for entirely by the sponsors of the evening

The presentation that most impressed me was Ian Stuart’s video linkup from Islay – I’ve done small-scale video links before but presenting to a packed hall from 500 miles away impresses me. He and his school are using technology in a very impressive way – individual student laptops, global collaboration… I’m inspired!

photo credit: /Sizemore/

The biggest thing I took away is that there is a large community of educators and technologists who are more than willing to work together to achieve great things. I made some very friendly contacts and have re-discovered Twitter and now have the beginnings of a useful network to make it worthwile. I’m looking forward to the next TeachMeet in north east London, where I may have the balls to get up and present something myself.

photo credit: Dannynic

[That last photo is a fake tilt shift made with tiltshiftmaker.com - love it!]