Tag: teachmeet

Posted on
by
Four men sitting in a pub, smiling and talking, with pints of dark beer on two small tables. Bob, Ewan, Me & Will at the Jolly Judge.

I was tagged by Mags Amond for

tagging you next for a #TeachMeet20 looking back / looking forward post @johnjohnston

TeachMeet, a meet up for teachers, self organised and designed to keep it grassroots. The Wikipedia page is not too far from the mark. Started 20 years ago!

So I looked back. I’ve 38 posts tagged teachmeet here. But if I search for TeachMeet I find 124 posts. Searching my Twitter export finds over 300 matches. So TeachMeet has been on my mind over the years.

What I was thinking about 10 years ago: TeachMeet10: time for a TM-Reboot in Scotland?

For me TeachMeet is part of one of the most exciting periods in my teaching life. My already well developed obsession with using technology in teaching had exploded with the internet, blogging, podcasting & RSS. Twitter was on the horizon. As a class teacher I was getting to go to conferences!

Ewan MacIntosh was the main instigator of the 2006 ScotEduBlogger meet-up. After the second day of e-live conference we were all heading off to the Jolly Judge, a pub with WiFi! So excited.

The development of TeachMeet has been well covered. Mags has done an amazing job, for example.

Looking Back

I started writing some notes about TeachMeet’s past, but didn’t get past some bullet points, I am going to post them otherwise this post will take the rest of the year. Views very much IMO.

  • I remember preparing like crazy for the first ‘real’ teachmeet. My name didn’t come out of the hat1. I did speak at the second SLF one. On first and speeding through my presentation in jig time.
  • I recall another SLF one when Ewan stopped a speaker for being commercial.
  • I loved the random picker idea and the no PowerPoint rule.
  • I remember a blog post or comment by Robert Jones to the effect that the main beneficiaries was on the speakers. I certainly learnt a lot by presenting, but also in helping organise TMs.
  • I remember not liking the idea of keynote speakers, when I read of the BETT events.
  • I never really liked the freebies from sponsors. I did enjoy the free beer and snacks.
  • In retrospect I think the TM I regret missing most was an outdoor one somewhere in central Scotland with, as I dimly recall, tents & camping.
  • I met so many good people. The initial jolly judgers, the second round, small TeachMeets that spread over Scotland, and the online folk. All were full of positivity, generosity & kindness. Some passed by, some I’ve followed for years.
  • The positivity. This may have been the main benefit to me. It felt like it was from the infantry not the officers.
  • Recently I read of the Twinkl TeachMeet: hated it, asked them to change the name, got nowhere.

Looking forward

TeachMeet withered somewhat in Scotland, I am not sure why. Maybe things bubble up for a while, serve their purpose and then don’t anymore. Different times might need different solutions. Pedagoo felt to me like an evolution of TeachMeet to some extent. Its domain has gone now. My fingers are far from the pulse of Scottish education.

I am probably not the best person to ask. When the name was being discussed I held fast to Scots EduBloggers Meetup. That lacked a bit of inclusivity and was somewhat shortsighted 😃.

To me TeachMeet felt as if it was in the same category as Blogging, Creative Commons, RSS, Open Source and other things that promoted freedom and sharing. Online interactions seem a lot less innocent now than they did then. I still believe these things are important.

Lots of educational CPD now seems to be in Teams or Zoom, this misses the serendipity involved in a face to face meeting and the built in talk to your neighbour TM principle.

Other, to me, important aspects of TeachMeet which should be carried forward include: a relaxed social feeling; the flattening of hierarchy; the centrality of classroom practice and fun. We could do without freebies; involvement of leaders in setting the agenda, although they are more than welcome to share their classroom experience and technology and services without classroom practice.

The most important for me would be the selection of speakers at random, hopefully with more speakers than spaces. TeachMeeters should be willing to go along to listen to others and open the opportunity to share if it arises. Not being guaranteed a spot might lead to more spontaneous presentations, serendipity and perhaps a reason to organise the next one.

Given I’ve now retired from teaching, I do not suppose I’ll be at another TeachMeet I will alway be interested in seeing how it goes.

Postscript teachmeet.scot

I have the teachmeet.scot domain. I don’t want to keep paying for it or hosting the inactive site2. I’d love to give it to someone else who would care for it in the right way.

  1. Probably just as well I was going to talk about RSS, possible not the most interesting subject to class teachers. ↩︎
  2. The site was set up to allow folk to ask for an account and then post events. At one point I hoped that folk could be encouraged to post reports or link to reports of events to create a resource of sorts. ↩︎

Posted on
by

My class joined in the ‘ AI Wonderland: Unleash Creativity with Make it hAPPen (P4-P7)’ webinar on Monday. It was a useful introduction for their age group on a topic we had not explored in class. In Teams I noticed this TeachMeet1 too. I finally signed up for it on Wednesday.

Given it started at 3:30 on Thursday and school finished for the easter holidays at 2:30, it was a bit of a rush.

I had planned, the night before, to talk a bit about using ChatGPT for creating H5P content in Glow Blogs. I knocked up a quick keynote of screenshots to avoid the danger of live.

ChatGPT can quickly produce information which, once checked, can be used to create H5P content. What is especially useful is that it can format the information to work with HP5 textual inputs. I’ve put some instructions on the Glow Blogs H5P examples site.

The TeachMeet was quite quiet, 3:30 on the last day of term was probably tricky for most folk. I enjoyed the other things shared, although I didn’t grab any links, except for Diffit. I hope to get the rest when the recording is released.

Most of the sharing mirrored mine in that they involved creating resources, quizzes and the like. One idea that stood out, and one I intend to use, was taking an interesting phrase from pupils’ writing and using it as an image prompt in Bing (I believe). This was demonstrated to the whole class and sounds like it would generate interesting discussions.

I’ve used some of the free AI tools, mostly ChatGPT, for a while now. Mostly for simple text generation and some JavaScript or AppleScript help. I don’t doubt that, despite some glitches, that it is potential useful and interesting.

Is that an Elephant?

There are a lot of difficult and awkward questions around the use of GPT in teaching & learning. I’ve read a fair bit of discussion around the ethics at both ends of the process, but not much discussing the primary school level.

Things that worry me, beyond my knowledge, time, brain power or pay grade2:

  • The obvious, ethics around where the data comes from, scraping possible copyrighted works.
  • The bias of the data, racial bias is the one I’ve read about most, but I imagine there are many others.
  • Possible breaches of pupil/student data, safeguarding issues.
  • The commercial nature of the tools. A lot of these services seem to be freemium, with either a limited or time limited resource set.

I’ll keep using AI in a casual way with minimum risk (I hope), but it feels like education is stepping into a can of worms in the same sort of way we have adopted most technology, in a rather haphazard way.

Feature image is an old gif I made from a public domain photo a few years ago.

  1. I’ve not been to a TeachMeet for a while so this intrigued me as much as AI ↩︎
  2. Over the time it has taken me to type this post I see this: Women’s faces stolen for AI ads selling ED pills and praising Putin – The Washington Post, this AI – two reports reveal a massive enterprise pause over security and ethics. I also asked ChatGPT to give me 400 words on the pros and cons of using AI in education. I’d say there is a lot of confusion about. ↩︎
Posted on
by
Replied to https://twitter.com/magsamond/status/1330456416121987074?s=20 by masked-abhaile (Twitter)

Thanks for the affirmation, Ian, currently swimming thru tons of #TeachMeet research data (yep, same dna as Pedagoo, BrewEd, CampEd). Key features: non-hierarchical, open, peer-to-peer. So far, *sharing* is the definitive value emerging from this global appreciative inquiry; tbc.

Along with avoiding @ewanmcintosh’s “keynote-speaker-sponsor-driven” & keeping to
@magsamond’s “non-hierarchical, open, peer-to-peer” I think early #teachmeet principals of everyone being willing to participate & serendipity of random were interesting ways to change dynamics.

Posted on
by
Bookmarked Are tiny conferences and meetups better than big ones? (Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel)
Over a decade ago, a few Scottish educators got together in a pub for a meetup. This spawned something that is still going to this day: the TeachMeet. I’ve been to a fair few in my time and, particularly in the early days, found them the perfect mix of camaraderie and professional learning.

Doug quotes How to Host or Attend a “Tiny” Conference

eight pointers for running a successful ‘Tiny Conf’:

  1. Keep it ‘tiny’
  2. Make it application and invite-only

I think I agree totally about the value of small. Not so sure about invite-only might miss some serendipity…

There have only been a few TeachMeets in scotland recently, I wonder if it is worth keeping TeachMeet.scot going?

Posted on
by
Replied to tweet by @athole (Twitter)
“Always felt TeachMeet movement was about reimagining a world without keynotes and guest speakers. They’ve a place at the table but dominate professional learning dialogue to an unhealthy degree, I worry. Too often about platitudes and polemics than practice & messy imperfections”

@athole nails the feeling that TeachMeet started with. A move away from professional development being done to us to being done by us. It is clear teachers need help from experts, research and leaders from both inside and outside the classroom but TeachMeet was started to provide a different sort of space. It is worth trying to keep it that way.

Posted on
by

Over the years I’ve enjoyed being part of Teach Meet. This new site aims to help promote TeachMeets in Scotland TeachMeet.scot.

From pretty much the start TeachMeets have been organised on the TeachMeet wiki. This can at times get a little messy. There has been various attempts to tidy it up, some breakaway sites. I even worked on an attempt inspired by Ewan to make an alternative international site. That last came to naught.

Very much in my opinion the wiki site does not function well: the front page was huge, with large graphics, spam was getting out of hand too. A couple of years ago I’d spent some time deleting spam comment, and suggested a reduction in logo size on the front page. This didn’t have any impact and I am sure that many folk are quite happy with the wiki.

The new teachmeet.scot site was inspired when talking to Feargual, Susan and Athole last year.

They had set up tmscot.wordpress.com in an attempt to reboot TeachMeet and Scotland and make organising & publicising TeachMeets a little simpler in Scotland. I was interesting in making something a little bit more usable than the pbwiki site.

TeachMeet.scot is the result. It was ‘soft’ launched last year and has been used to organise a few TeachMeets.

It is a work in progress, the aim to be a simple, easy to navigate site. It is open to anyone to use. Currently you can add a TeachMeet in a couple of ways: you can fill in a form and someone will add it for you or you can request an account and add as many as you like. How you organise a meet is up to you, you could use a contact form on the post, an embedded google form, link to eventbright or whatever you like to get folk to sign up1.

It could be used instead of or as well as the TeachMeet Wiki site. We are hoping it will be useful rather than exclusive. There is no axes being ground, no profits being made. I organise the hosting and own the domain, but I consider it held in trust for TeachMeet rather than owned.

If you are organising a TeachMeet in Scotland please have a look and consider using the site. There are plenty of folk who will help you get started if you need a hand. How to use this site – TeachMeet.scot

1. Longer term it is hope to have a booking system built into the sire as another alternative. ↩

Posted on
by

These are some note from/for the Pedagoo Muckle event. I’ll update this with a few more details over the next few days.

Supported by SCEL and with a slightly different format, #PedagooMuckle aims to support, challenge and encourage participants to go forth and organise their own Pedagoo events, TeachMeets and other collaborative, sharing opportunities for educators.

I was asked to talk about how to broadcast and share your event. I am very much an enthusiastic amateur in this field. This is a quick romp through some of the available tools from a quick and dirty point of view.

The premise is that these events are worth sharing and folk can get value from attending virtually or catching up later.

Distributed in Space & Time, live or archive

Is is possible to either record for posterity, broadcast live or both.

Both give different affordances, recording shares across space and time, live broadcast may allow distant listeners to participate via twitter.

Short snippets may provide more value than recording whole events. Instead of recording a whole presentation or workshop 3-5 minutes with the presenter can be useful, or record a conversation between two or more presenters or attendees.

Before you start

What have you got in the way of equipment and more importantly space? How much effort will it be for what sort of size of audience? What you equipment will the results be watchable or audible?

Who is going to do the broadcast. Have they any other jobs.

Audio vs Video

Personally I prefer audio, less to go wrong or get right. Audio can also be listened to while the audience are washing the dishes or driving.

Don’t forget text might be better, can be easier to give multiple viewpoints. Twitter is the easiest currently for live text.

Some Tools

These are towards the quick and dirty end of spectrum.

Sound is the most important ###

 

Mic types (Mostly I am just glad to have a mic)

  • omnidirectional pattern – all directions are equally sensitive to sound.
  • figure-8 pattern – the front and back are sensitive, while the sides are ignored.
  • cardioid pattern – meaning the area in front of the mic is most sensitive, the sides are less sensitive, and the rear is ignored.

Video Recording

Smart Phone/ video camera for watching later. Simple. Audio is important so consider adding a mic to the camera or your phone.

Use a stand.

Try to test the light, field of view and sound before the event starts.

Live Video

YouTube, the set up has recently changes, see When it’s Your Googopoly Game, You Can Flip the Board in the Air Anytime for details.

TL:DR Youtube streaming has got a little more complex. Best to go for the simplest options:

Go to YouTube and log in

  1. On your profile icon at the top left click on your icon
  2. Choose Creator Studio
  3. Click Live Streaming on the left had nav
  4. Ignore all the choices and click events below the Live Streaming option
  5. Schedule a new event
  6. Create a new event and Go Live Now (avoid Advance Settings)
  7. The Hangout will open, use the link button to copy the link and send it out on twitter.

Or schedule an event and share the link to the watch page ahead of time.

Periscope iOS and android app, integrated with twitter. Works really well. Can save to camera roll.

Ustream apps for live streaming with chat.

Audio Recording

All smart phones have some sort of recorder built in. This will work fine for archiving. Get the phone as near to the speaker as possible if you do not have an external mic.

There are a host of better audio recorders, you can borrow some from Edutalk, including a Zoom H4n which is a nice piece of kit.

Audacity or GarageBand, again an external mic is a good idea.

AudioBoom is very useful for recording and sharing short pieces of audio, conversations etc. Add the hashtag #edutalk to auto post to http://edutalk.info

#EDUtalk

Audio Streaming

Edutalk, we use a icecast server and are happy to share the account. There are apps to stream to icecast servers on all platforms. A bit more of a learning curve but we are happy to share.

Mixlr – Broadcast Live Audio

Archiving Recordings

You want it to be as easy as possible for as many people as possible to view or listen to the recordings.

Edit or Not?

The Levelator® from The Conversations Network

Storify

Other Things

Bonus sign up forms’ e.g. google forms eventbrite etc?

http://activitywalls.com or other tweet displays if you have a second monitor

Posted on
by

TeachMeet Connect

This move from Susan Ward looks like continuing the re-boot of TeachMeet in Scotland.

On Wednesday 21st September, we are launching TeachMeet Connect, a series of TeachMeets happening across Scotland on the same day, where teachers will get together and share what they do. Coinciding with the Scottish Learning Festival, this will be a celebration of all the good things happening in classrooms across Scotland and a chance to explore how TeachMeets can support professional development.

Whether you’ve been to loads of TeachMeets before or this will be your first, this is your chance to get connected to other teachers in Scotland who want to share too. We’d love you to get involved and hold a TeachMeet Connect of your own. There’s loads of info here about how to set up and run a TeachMeet and it’s entirely up to you how fancy you go- you could promote your event and have people sign up to come along and share, or you could just arrange a coffee with half a dozen colleagues where everyone talks about something that’s worked for them.

from: TeachMeet Connect – TeachMeet Scotland

On the TeachMeet front it was good to read David, for a bit of nostalgia: EdCompBlog: TeachMeet – What’s in a name?, I got the name wrong the first time round, but I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that this new blossoming of TeachMeet in Scotland is going to be great.

The featured image a the top of this post Great Gallery of Evolution a public domain photo from Joe deSousa on flickr.