Category: Teachmeet

@simonehaughey

On May 6th I made the trip across Birmingham in rush hour traffic to attend TeachMeetWM organised by the irrepressible and absolutely bonkers Simone Haughey at her school Robin Hood Primary. I sadly missed the choir singing and the start of proceedings thanks to a staff meeting and the traffic, but I arrived in the end to be greeted by delicious Chinese food saved for me by Sim and lots of friendly faces including John Rolfe and AnaPaula Booth from the British Council, and the staff of Robin Hood who are obviously well used to Simone as they didn’t bat an eyelid when I asked if they had a couple of hula hoops I could borrow!

There were many great presentations on the night including a couple via video, and you can see what you missed by looking at the Storify of the tweets at the end of the post. However, my presentation is below as promised for those who were there. How I managed to explain it all in 7 minutes I do not know but I avoided being attacked with a cuddly toy! Do leave a comment if you have questions!

Last Friday (21st) saw me charging from Stafford to Marston Green, and then running at high speed (wearing inappropriate shoes obviously!) from the carpark to Hall3 for TeachMeetEdShow.

Fortified by hugs from various people including Simone (who is as bonkers as me which helps) and Buncey (who is exceedingly clever but also daft as a brush) as well as a bottle of beer, I soon recovered and managed to speak (sort of) coherently for 2 minutes and then 7 minutes.

My slides are shared above – I’ll summarise what I said as the slides alone don’t really speak for themselves (especially the first part)

Keeping in touch

In my two minute presentation I shared the importance of staying in touch at a time when teachers feel very ‘got at’ and need all the support they can get. I shared how social media was wonderful when I was in Switzerland as distance didn’t matter; I knew what was going on, and felt included despite my physical distance. I talked about the support and advice offered, and the care given by people who you’ve never met but feel know and understand you, who notice when you’re a bit quiet or disappear for a while and send a quick “you OK?” message to check. As a community was laugh together, rant together and we cry together. And in the week that we lost Bev Evans, the most selfless caring generous positive star, I encouraged others to join in the community of support, on Twitter (or anywhere else actually) and look out for each other. I’m @lisibo if you fancy following! (Seems very appropriate that I post this on the day that we say #goodbyetoBev)

Felt a bit shaken after that and the discovery of a half eaten dark chocolate Bounty didn’t help. However, I blew my nose and the evening continued with great presentations about exciting science, reuseable QR codes and Whipsnade Zoo. And a real hedgehog.

Using the right tool for the job

My seven minute presentation was about choosing the right tool for the job. I shared the series of lessons with Year 3 Spanish on the theme of Mythical Monsters. We began with learning parts of the face with a song – and I made everyone sing which was amusing! I explained how song is a great tool for learning as, combined with gestures, all the learners could recall the words simply by singing in their heads and gesturing to bring the word to mind before sharing the book that inspired the next part of the sequence. Based on Go away Big Green Monster, I wrote  a simple story called Señor Cabeza Naranja using auto shapes on Smartboard which repeated greetings, parts of the face and adjectives. From this learners used 2D shapes to make their own Señor and Señora Cabeza (insert colour) on large paper, photographing each step with an iPad and annotating the picture as they went along. We then used BookCreator app to create eBooks; we imported the photos, added the text that learners had rehearsed on the large paper, and then added sound as the pupils told their stories. The result wasn’t perfect but that wasn’t the point. It was a journey that continues using the right tool for the job to move forward.

I also managed to win the raffle (a Hue webcam) which was nice with my Twitter comment about the event 

Last night I braved the cross city traffic and went to King Edwards Five Ways (nowhere near the Five Ways I know!) for TeachmeetBrum. Organised by @frogphilp aka Steve Philp of Paganel Primary, it was an intimate affair (but that’s not a bad thing!) but that’s a good thing as we all talked to one another!

I admit to spending longer on cupcake production than on my presentations, but I often do my best work when hoofing it and speaking from my heart.

I talked about using apps like PicCombo, 4Pictures 1Word and Icomania (iOS and Android) to inspire learners at the start of lessons as well as increasing vocabulary. I used them when teaching English last year; M+M loved the puzzle of working out how the picture were linked and then discussing what a duster and a red and white flag had to do with one another (answer – polish/Polish) There is a French, German and Spanish version of 4pictures 1word available in the Swiss (Fr/Ger) and Spanish (Sp) iTunes stores – you can download them if you have an account with that store. Alternatively, you can do as Dannielle Morgan did and create your own! She has made some for Year 7 French ,  Year 8 French and Year 9 French that she kindly shared on TES Resources
I didn’t make a new presentation but recycled part of an old one – see below!

My second presentation was also recycled from MFL Show and Tell in Coventry – and I make no apologies for it as I think it was a really successful unit of work that both the kids and I enjoyed. Inspired by Go away Big Green Monster in Spanish, and the learning journey topic of Mythical Monsters, Year 3 and I embarked on a mission to write books in Spanish. See how we did it below, using non-technological means as well as iPads!

The PPT of Señor Cabeza Naranja is all over the place for downloading (some with my name removed which bugs me no end!) – just Google it. However, the updated version is below!

Hopefully I managed to inspire someone, and failing that, hope someone enjoyed my cupcakes 😉

As I now live in Switzerland I can’t be at TeachMeet Brum tonight. To assuage my disappointment, I thought I might appear virtually and therefore prepared a little video presentation on Memrise.com, a really great site that I’m using to learn some German, revise the Catalan I learned at university and to play around in Spanish, a language that I speak and teach. It’s not just for learning languages though – you can learn about animals, famous people, general knowledge and, as I show in the video, apples! So, in a nutshell, helps you memorise things! You can add your own lists of words so you can customise it to the needs of your classroom for example and you can access other people’s lists too (could save lots of time!)

I did forget to mention that there is an iPod app being developed – I’m currently one of the people beta testing it as they look to improve it. They are planning an Android app too.

[vimeo 42614325 w=500 h=313]

I couldn’t be at BETT this year which made me sad. I can do without the exhibition in itself; what I missed was the interaction with others and particularly the TeachMeet and TeachMeetTakeovers from which I have learned so much.

Not to be beaten, I recorded a 2 minute nano-presentation in case my name came up on the ‘MagicFruitMachine‘. It didn’t, but all is not lost as a)a list of URLs and links to presentations and blogs was given to every attendee and b)I’ve recorded it so you get it anyway!

Here it is – entitled Be patient – it’ll happen, it’s my encouragement to those who feel that their “drop in the ocean” won’t make a difference.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34787586 w=400&h=300]

Flickr CC by jurvetson

Supporting the ‘less confident‘ is the theme of my 7 minute presentation.

Some ideas I may or may not throw out there!

1. embed sound in presentations

eg El granjero tiene una granja

El pequeño petirrojo final

2. make sound files – and encourage their use

eg BGFL website

3.have ‘expert’ pupils who you train to support

4.point out ways of teaching languages that are less stressful

eg Ideas for support and embedding of language learning by class teachers

calendar

5.use  websites to ‘present’ things

eg Babelzone; LanguageNut; BBC Primary Languages site; Lingo Show; favourite games

As I’m full of cold I may be more random than normal so this is just a guide ;o)

My two minute presentation is about Postcrossing. I have mentioned it before but it’s worth mentioning again as it’s always so popular when I do!

In its simplest terms, you “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!”

Really easy! Writing a postcard is a short focussed activity that can be done anytime there’s a spare five minutes – even the most reluctant writer can manage a few lines. Pop it in the postbox and off it goes. Then you wait – and you receive a postcard from somewhere in the world! It’s a surprise!

We made an actual display of all the postcards with pins on a world map – but as we have 3 buildings at our school this was a bit ‘exclusive’ so we made a virtual map too on Google Maps.

And the postcards themselves are artefacts that we have used for all sorts of activities to enhance international awareness and ICU. One example is year 6 making fact files based on the cards with famous people from tht country, language, music and so on, plus an impression.

And I LOVE the motto!

Below is my seven minute micropresentation from Teachmeet styley thingy (I think that name could stick!) at the eTwinning Ambassadors meeting #etwpdw.

In my seven minutes (I think the lovely @digitalmaverick gave me a little longer….) I talked about

1. using Wallwisher to collect ideas, have asynchronus discussions and review learning / progress.  I set up an example Wallwisher just prior to my presentation and asked my Twitter pals to contribute.  Thank you!

2.using Google Maps to keep an online track of postcards being exchanged in our eTwinning project Greetings across the miles, as well as cards from Postcrossing.  The actual postcards are displayed on the school wall, but by plotting them on a Google Map pupils get an idea of how far the cards have travelled, the position of countries and much more that enhances and extends the experience beyond a piece of paper arriving in the post.

3.using Storybird to write collaborative stories.  I ran out of time at this point and had to be very brief but my idea was to use Storybird to write stories across countries as follows –

• agree on a set of visuals.
• each group writes the story in their own language -or in a common one.
• stories are shared.

I bet no two stories would be the same!

As soon as I liberate it from @digitalmaverick, i’ll upload the video of my presentation.  But until then, if you have any questions, please contact me.

Yesterday, as the European eTwinning Ambassadors PDW at National college of School Leadership in Nottingham drew to a close, I took part in what Drew Buddie aka @digitalmaverick entitled ‘a Teachmeet style-y thingy’.

Drew introduced the idea of an ‘unconference’ explaining both TedX and Teachmeet before opening the floor to others to share their 7 minute micro or 2 minute nano presentations.

I was first up – see the next post for my presentation – and later for a video of it (if it’s not too hideous!)

Other presenters were-

Lieven from Flanders who shared his magnificent projects, all documented on his blog. These included repurposing old computer mice, decorating them and then using TuxPaint to animate them (MouseArt), using Pivot to make animations of bubbles (B@llobees) and also to make animated characters @ni & M@te who travelled to other schools and found out about them.

Two things that particularly struck me were firstly when Lieven said he liked ‘making the unexpected valuable’ which struck a chord, and also the use of technology to back up and enhance more traditional methods eg the Kindergarten pupils made bubble pictures with paint and straws, and those pieces of art were used as the background for the Bubble animations.

Next up was Paddy who talked about his eTwinning project Wii will rock you which used the Nintendo Wii as a stimulus.  I enjoyed this presentation as Paddy underlined that it was not all about playing games, but that the games were the starting point for other activities – writing letters, designing CD covers, planning tours with travel plans and money considerations, cooperation with other children, publicity and negotiation.  They also worked on a joint sports day with a school in ireland with some ‘traditional’ sports day activities as well as Wii based ones.

Then Susi Arnott shared about using comic strips and Comic Life, and how the process of looking at comics enhanced the understanding of texts and enhanced literacy skills.  She mentioned Bitstrips which I will be investigating!

Drew used Twitter to ask why people went to Teachmeets- responses included:

‘the range of ideas’

‘a cross subject sharing of ideas’

‘non threatening’ collaborative spirit’

‘celebrating work done in my classroom’

‘meeting like minded colleagues leads to great PLNs’

‘at least 20 ideas for use tomorrow’

‘widens my ideas’

Nick Falk finished up the meet with a nano-presentation on the use of QR codes and QR readers in mobile phones.  Very interesting, and something I need to investigate!

No camel, no fruit machine and no alcohol; but otherwise pretty like a normal TeachMeet! Oh, and no cupcakes.  Sorry @niiloa

BETT seems ages ago – but it’s only a month.