Tag: edutalk

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Sugata Mitra Slf10

Just back from this years SLF which proved to be a interesting couple of days.

Arriving on Wednesday, I spent the morning taking a turn round the hall and the serendipitous catching up with various folk to swap information. This is one of the best parts of a large meeting although there were several regular attendees who did not show up and were missed. There was also the usual failures to see folk I was looking for or passing them with a ‘see you shortly’ which was not achieved.

I did get my usual wake up call from Nick Hood (always taking an interesting angle), and Joe Dale put up with my ‘ipod touchs are the best thing since sliced bread’ speech with patience.

I met up with David Noble for a wee bit of last minute planning of our EDUtalk presentation. This was titled:

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project was a look at the EDUtalk mobile podcasting project that David and I have been running after last years successful SLFtalk. We are both pleased with the way I went. As part of the presentation we asked the audience to record and post some audio, as we did this I suddenly became rather nervous in case the audience balked, luckily they did not. A fair bit of credit should go to Doug Belshaw who immediately, in a clear voice, started interviewing his neighbours. Hopefully we got across how easy and powerful mo-blogging is and the potential it has for CPD and classroom use.

Hardware & Software

I didn’t see a lot of exciting new things but met with a few of my favourite things and folk on the floor:

  • TTS continue to supply inexpensive and simple to use hardware, TTS: Easi-Speak MP3 Mics look a wee bit plastic, but are being used very effectively in a lot of classrooms. I saw a nice wireless Easi-Scope Microscope and was told a mac driver was in the works for their inexpensive visualiser.
  • I had a brief chat to Alan Yeoman of 2 simple, purple mash is a great addition to glow and I liked the look of a beta of a simple 3d game creator.
  • In innovation alley I had a chat with video conference guru Tom Kane and brief look of some of his recent projects. Tom is an inspiring guy and I think full video conferencing can be a powerful tool in the classroom, Tom helped me have a lot of fun at Sandaig.

Keynote fatigue and its cure

I went to a few of the keynote speeches, I find with successive SLFs I am less and less impressed with most of these, often seem to be about buzzwords wrapped in anecdotal stories and entertaining jokes. Luckily this year I went to the last one, featuring Sugata Mitra talking about his “Hole in the wall” experiments and more. I tweeted:

Http://sugatam.wikispaces.com faith in keynotes restored #slf10 #slf2010

but islayian said it best:

Sorry no tweets I just can’t do this keynote justice #slf10

amd David Muir live blogged it: The Hole In The Wall: Self Organising Systems in Education. I left keynote with lots of interesting questions running round my head. I’ve not watched Sugata Mitra on TED.com but will soon and would recommend anyone who didn’t see the SLF presentation to follow the many links to Sugata Mitra and his work.

I’ve not mentioned TeachMeetSLF2010, again David Muir has blogged it, I will leave it for the next post. It was outstanding in many ways. I’ve started posting audio to EDUtalk tagged tmslf2010.

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Edutalk

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project

A bit of a mouthful, but this is the title of our Scottish Learning Festival Seminar.

David Noble and myself will be running a seminar: Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project to talk about Edutalk on Wednesday 22 September at 12:30

We will be explaining how the EduTalk project kicked off at the Scottish Learning festival last year with SLFtalk which recorded the voices of educators attending the Scottish Learning Festival 2009. and grew from there.

We will hopefully give practical demonstrations of how the technology works and explain the thinking behind it. It should be fun.

SLFtalk 2010

As part of EDUtalk we hope that folk will be creating short reports and thoughts about SLF on EDUtalk, in the same way as last year but using the tag edutalk on audioboo and iPadio. Participants can also email audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com or phone Gabcast (033 0808 0214 channel 30938 and # password 1234 and # when asked
record your audio and press # when finished)

Full details of how to send audio to EduTalk are on the How to EDUtalk page. Further help from twitter: @johnjohnston or @parslad

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  • I listened to EDUtalkr online panel discussions about Scottish education: #1 Glow the day after the live discussion, it really deserves a blog entry to itself, but I don’t have the time. The audio is not great but the discussion is interesting, lots of agreement and shared ground from folk I didn’t necessarily expect to agree. If you are a scottish educator, interested in glow, and have not listened to it I suggest you do.
  • I’ve started collecting html5 links on delicious, troutcolor’s html5 Bookmark, some very interesting stuff going on that suggests that long term lack of flash might not hold apple back.
  • At work I’ve been updating the webpages that support Apple RTC courses.
  • Heard my first cuckoo here
  • Yesterday I went for a wee walk in Glen Douglas, not good weather for photos but I’ve mapped some: Glen Douglas 24.04.10

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On Thursday I went over to the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick for TeachMeet 10 East Lothian. The Sea Bird Centre was a great venue and what I cold see of North Berwick made me think it might be nice to visit in the day time.

The event went very smoothly indeed, Fearghal Kelly and David Gilmour kept things running very smoothly indeed.

Puffin

I arrived a little late so didn’t reall pick up Martyn Pegg on Taking Curriculum for Excellence in the right direction.Outdoor Education, orienteering and the energetic classroom. It looked pretty exciting with members of the audience running all over the shop. The EL East Lothian Outdoor Education Service blog looks interesting. I managed to grab a sandwich an a seat thanks to the helpful centre staff and settled down to watch. There were a lot of new faces to me, I guess a big local turnout with perhaps a good few new to teachmeet, the evaluation was very positive.

I didn’t take any notes during the presentations but enjoyed them all, I loved the mix of tech & tech in Rowena Blair & Krysia Smyth talking about E-scape but failed to get my hands on the fizz-book. Don Ledingham gave a quick and impassioned defence of Curriculum for Excellence and blogged about this: Curriculum for Excellence: Stand up and speak up : Don Ledingham’s Learning Log on Wednesday. Neil Winton presented via Skype and I was surprised how good the video was.

I am going to be revisiting all of the presentations over the next week or so as I post the audio to EDUtalk.cc my own presentation was about EDUtalk and I recorded the other speakers. I would recommend listening to them all.

There is a lot more info on the TeachMeet 10 EastLothian wiki page and:

After the meet I had a quick pint with Robert Jones fresh from his parent’s night, Rowena, Krysia (Who kindly gave me a lift back to Glasgow, thanks Krysia), Fearghal and David. As you would expect an interesting chat and ScotEduBlogs, google docs and delicious links in RSS feeds, the last has led me to remove mine as it seemed to annoy most folk. If you are disappointed you can always Add me to your network.

Now I am looking forward toTeachMeet Perth which also has the CfE badge.

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A couple of days ago I had to cancel my intended trip to BETT. I’ve not been since the famous Glasgow Jumbo junket, as the papers called it, when to celebrate the new city wide network glasgow flew (not in jumbos as it happens) its ICT coordinators down to BETT. Needless to say I do not regard BETT as a junket, but an cpd opportunity. The CPD quotient of conferences and trade shows, has to my mind, increase a lot over the last few years, mainly due to TeachMeet and other self organised meetings of partitioners. I think you gain more for a coffee with an enthusiastic teacher than many a seminar.

I had hoped to do a little bit of evangelising for EDUtalk at BETT and join in TeachMeet Takeover to do so. Unfortunately I can’t do that.

I mailed Tom Barret to let him know that I would not be speaking and he offered me the opportunity to gust blog on his site. This is a really generous offer give the size of Tom’s network and following. In the unlikely event that you have not read Tom’s blog I suggest that you head over there as soon as possible. Tom produces a stream of detailed posts of how he introduces new tech and ideas to his primary classroom.

Anyway I blogged EDUtalk at BETT 2010 on Tom’s blog on Monday and put out an EDUtalk phlog today EDUtalk365 #13 – EDUtalk @BETT calling for contributions to our ‘open mic‘ podcast over the next couple of days. I look forward to hearing some interesting audio. If your are going to BETT please pick up your phone.