I hope to post a bit more as I digest the last couple of days.

First the linkage:
Blog postings about SETT – The Scottish Learning Festival, collected by technorrati:
http://www.technorati.com/search/sett06

Flickr: Photos tagged with sett06

Blog posts about TeachMeet (bloggers, and others get together at the festival):http://www.technorati.com/search/teachmeet06

Flickr: Photos tagged with teachmeet06

Flickr Creative commons search sett06

Official SETT Weblog

I am posting the links to the technorati search page rather than the tag pages, technorati seems to have missed quite a few posts tagged with teachmeet06, this means that my teachmeet aggregator and more professional tools like Hitchhikr don’t pick up all the posts, Hickhiker get more with the [Conduct String Search — may return some irrelevant Blog Entries]. I wonder if it worth a trip to Technorati API: Search. Probably not, but might would be a nice distraction from implementing all the good teaching ideas I saw at sett.

I seem to be the only person so far tagging my comments, but not too much commenting has gone on as far as I can make out.

I’ve been thinking a bit about live blogging events, it seems a great idea, but I am not sure I am the person to do it, I don’t type fast enough and I really need times to think about things. I was at Peter Peacock address, trying to blogs the important points and chatting to Ewan on Skype. After a while I realised I’d just typed a collection of buzzwords, Ewan had written a coherent post, fast fingers. I didn’t post my list.
Most of my SETT posts will be useful to me as a reminder and link list, I am not sure if they will be useful to anyone else.
The other problem about live blogging is that it should lead to a blossoming of comments and I’d guess most folk are too tired after two days under the weird light and too much technology, even the folk blogging didn’t seem to post many comments on the day, too much to blog too little time. Anyway, I’ll probably blog my next sett/conference and hope the Scot’s Edu blogsphere reached a tipping point.

More important than a bunch of teachers blogging is, in my opinion, a bunch of children blogging. Unlike Andrew who wrote:

Instead of my usual forray into techy stuff at SETT, this year I thought I?d try and take in something that wouldn?t usually have jumped off the page at me.

I went to quite a few thing that are along my line, including Building primary communities, Infants Can Communicate! and To Blog or Not to Blog. I really enjoyed them all, and picked up a pile of great ideas. the last two listed were reports on blogging projects that really impressed me. My foray into classroom blogging has been bluesky, these project really pointed up good practice and linked it to learning and the curriculum in a very coherent way.
A middle aged blogging dog was taught a lot of new tricks which will hopefully end up improving the learning in my classroom.

Finally(for now, it has taken me best part of two hours to get this far, due to browser meanderings) I met a ton of old and new friends, many of whom on Thursday I asked to chat to (ie steal ideas from) on the Friday, they successfully avoided me and I still have a pile of things I’d like to know, and requests to make. I actually think I needed a longer sett, maybe with a few breaks

teachmeet06 sett06 blogging

I am excited about this one, Morag and Marylyn’s blog the Interactive Talking Teddies is one of the best examples of good practice I have seen.
Subtitle: A Tale of Two Bears and Two Classes, the room is full and they have sent for extra seats. David has been dispatched to get a cable. Spencer and Campbell are in place.

Project took place between to Argyll Primaries.
Started two years ago, adapting ideas for younger children,
Bears posted to respective schools.
Children discussed what to do with the bears, some wanted them to go on the bus.
Nice audio-slides of the children talking. Recorded delivery, track bear’s progress.
Children assumed bear would hibernate during journey.
Children talk for bears, videoed with iSight. Bear taken on board as real person, video and photos taken by primary two children.
Bears went home, over 2000 digital photos came into school.

Kidspiration to write and tell children in partner school.
Children’s work added to scrapbook which returned to original school.
Campbell went to Isaly to do an island tour, vib on Logan Air flight.

Interactive whiteboards, Morag started posting on a blog about there ict activities.
After a hibernation, Spencer and Campbell wanted a blog!

Spensers and Campbell’s activities provided a inspiration for children’s writing, from getting a uniform knitted to going on a boat trip.
Primary 3’s wrote article for calmac magazine, great real audience.
Children made ‘contraption’ technology for transporting the bears, the children wrote at length.
Children took Bears home; on condition they did something interesting and they wrote about it in the bear’s diary.
Comic Life
Flappy le Crow, a french crow from Tobermory visited and only spoke french.
Home School links, holiday activity, bears passed from child to child, lots of parent involvement.

Children created holiday projects, there are so many great ideas attached to this project, too many to type.

Motivation, Approbation, independence, Confidence, Communication, Collaboration

Best thing I’ve seen at Sett

sett06 scottishlearningfestivalblogging teaching bloggingbestpractice

The real reason why no one reads your blog. Via J Walk Blog (gone so archive or to the rescue)

Well it amused me.

I was talking to a colleague in another primary school recently. They mentioned that a cpd opportunity in blogging had been offered round in their staff-room, the reaction from the staff was along the lines of that is all very well but we have real work like spelling to get through.
I am a wee bit worried about this, and unfortunately I doubt the message is going to get through very quickly via cpd. A/the problem is that folk seem to think blogging is out with the normal day to day curriculum when it could be an enhancement to it.

A less than best practice example: this week I did a couple of sessions of McRone cover in our two primary seven classes. As it was only the second week of term, I just did my own thing rather than follow the class routine. I decided to do a wee poetry lesson using a basic template to get the class started blogging. The lesson turned out to be about a lot more than blogging. We started by reviewing nouns, verbs and adjectives and introduced antonyms, we discussed powerful vs weak words, the importance of audience and getting our spelling right.
The children wrote poems and blogged some of them on Sandaig Poets, things got a bit frantic and some spelling mistakes were made, eek! Poems were blogged, and over the next couple of days, thanks to Ewan‘s linkage, and comments from Bob, Andy, Neil and Steve, the children’s interest was maintained.

I popped back into one of the classes later in the week (my own macrone) for a follow up. We discussed spelling mistakes, slang, text messaging, audience and the ideas given by the comments, some of which served to increase the class vocabulary. We went on to cover internet safety, audience again and a few other things.

The time spent by pupils on the computers was about 10 minutes each. Most of the work involved, discussion and writing, the odd picture was drawn, nothing out of the ordinary.
Blogging provided some extras (audience,context and purpose) for real work.

After reading Gordon’s post Too much hassle I think the problem is that some teacher do not realise that it is not really much hassle to dip a toe in the web 2.0, but we need to give enough time, training and practice to let them know that. Same as any other aspect of teaching and learning really.

Magic H²O II Originally uploaded by Noë.

I was working/ playing with primary seven today ( a wee bit of Macrone cover) blogging some poems on the Sandaig Poets blog.

The new posts knocked one of my all time favourite entries bio poem by Kimberley off the front page.

Kimberley’s poem started a great conversation between Kimberley and Carol Fuller (Our The Dream Dragon collaborator and fairy blogmother).

It generated two new poems, one a collaboration between Carol, Kimberley and Kimberley’s Gran! 15 comments in total a great read.

Kimberley’s comments were made from home and her writing was really impressive, at parents night I thanked her Mum for supporting her spelling only to find out that she did not see the comments until after Kimberley had posted them.

I am posting here to keep the poem in mind, but also to solicit comments on the new post over at Sandaig Poets, first blogs for some of our new pupils, leave them a comment and perhaps you could start some magic.

If you do and you’d like me to comment on your classes blog leave me a comment here or add yourself to CommentsForKidz on the scotedublogs.

glow doesn’t seem to be a good technorati tag.

Andrew’s post about glow has a nice image at the top, generated by msig.info having spent some time figuring out how to do this in fireworks, I wish I’d seen this earlier. A pity the page has a wee bit of text that is not suitable for the classroom, if we got round to individual blogs it would have been a useful tool for generating header images.

TeachMeet organisation is moving on a pace, wine and dinner seem to be organised, but we need a wifi sponsor.

technorati tags glow ssdn teachmeet06

I always wondered about these, mostly because I’ve never had a result that pleased me when doing the test. An interesting wee bit in the http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/ Wrongly labelled by Frank Coffield who say:

Next time you see a learning styles questionnaire, burn it

and goes on to report on some research on learning styles:

Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?

and

Students need knowledgeable, vocationally qualified and caring teachers, who can enter into a dialogue with them about how to become better learners, as well as what it means to be a painter or nursery nurse.

My own view of learning styles has alway been, some sorts of learning needs a particular learning style so we better have more that one we can use. And if we label a child a this learner or that learner is that any better than any other sort of labeling? Technorati Tags: education, learning styles

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Tomorrow, Wednesday 12th July, a group of students from Grange Academy in Kilmarnock will set off on a journey of a lifetime. Their destination? Kunming in China, where they’ll be learning Mandarin Chinese and taking part in a range of cultural and educational activities which will allow them to experience China first hand.

One to watch: the Grange in China blog

Technorati Tags: scot-edu-blog education

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