Category: Twitter

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

This evening I was very excited to be interviewed by David Noble aka @parslad as part of his PhD Edonis project – ‘an interpretivist study of the social web and PLNs’

Along with many others (there’s a list of my illustrious company here), I volunteered a while away to answer questions on my online learning and use of social media to help David with his research.  One of the things we all agreed is that we would be interviewed individually at some point during the two year process, and today it was my go.  I had the added ‘bonus’ of having my conversation broadcast live via iPadio.

I hope I answered David’s questions properly – I certainly talked a lot!  We talked about my online presence in various forms, especially Twitter, MFLResources Yahoo mail group and my blog, ¡Vámonos!, how my PLN was quite varied, and how sometimes it’s easier to ‘get on’ with people online although it’s good to meet face to face at times as well.

You can listen to the interview here

Here is the Slidecast of my second presentation from Brighton.

Apologies for the audio cutting out before the end – no idea what happened there!  Perhaps the iRiver overheated!

Apologies to @wizenedcrone for forgetting her real name – it’s Fiona Joyce!!!

And the German site I mentioned was called GenkiGerman.

Following on from @dajbelshaw‘s #movemeon, Isabelle Jones started a hashtag for language teachers – #mfltips about which she has blogged here.

A while back – actually nearly two years ago – I became aware of a tool called Seesmic on which you could record video clips and others could respond by recording their own short clip. At the time, I used it to join in a few conversations and also to practice speaking Catalan / Mallorquin after a looong break. It was easy to do and fun as well.

When I checked my counter this morning, it read 29,927. That set me wondering if I could possibly reach 30,000 by midnight to end the year off on a ’round number’!

and then again (after prompting for a URL!) at 2 o’clock by which time I’d had another 30 hits!

I then went out to play in the park with my kids – resulting in ‘más morados en el culo’ – and was alerted by @wizenedcrone to my achievement :

But joking aside, as the year draws to a close, I want to thank you for travelling with me through 2009 which has been quite a year – exciting, scary, inspiring, stressful, successful and unforgettable.

If you missed last night’s Teachmeet EdTechRoundup, never fear! You can catch up by watching the archived stream.

I’m currently watching a live Twittercam stream from Saltash School.

Further to my previous post about the wonderful STORYBIRD site, I’ve got good news and bad news!

I had a visit today from Bren Taylor (AKA @edugame), Education consultant at Link2ICT, who wanted to have a look at how I used technology and especially social networking tools in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning.

He’d done his homework as he’d already seen my blog and the WCPS wikispace that I created as the next step for pupils to have their own area to showcase their work with me. We talked for a bit about previous projects and activities including replying to Ewan McIntosh’s tweet, and using Twitter to ask questions in RE before he saw a Spanish lesson with year 5.

Today we were starting a new topic – Yo soy músico. The first lesson involves learning a song based on I am the musicman, taking about instruments that you can play and also beginning to give opinions about music. So, rather than stick to asking the kids, I decided to use my Twitter mates to help me.

I sent out a warning tweet last night (before the football overtook me!)

so people knew to be watching out for my request today – and I actually got several answers last night at people would be busy this morning.

In the lesson, we talked about Twitter and how we might use it, and the kids were fascinated by looking at my page, and seeing how many followers I had – they were particularly impressed by my being ‘followed by’ Robert Llewellyn from Scrap Heap Challenge!

I showed them the answers we had received already and we were able to look at them and discuss different types of music – a good debate about how to define ‘alternative’ music – and also instruments like bodhran and the harp. Highlight of this section was a demonstration of masterful ocarina playing on the iPhone by Bren!!

There was a response in Spanish and I was able to read this with the class and, even before I asked them, they were decoding the meaning using all their LLS and KAL skills. Proud teacher :o)

We then posted our tweet and refreshed my replies after a minute to see that we’d already had one response, soon to be followed by another 7 or 8 over the next few minutes.



We used the responses later in the lesson when we were forming sentences in Spanish. Again,we used a tweet in Spanish already as a starting point, pickd out key words and then used the tweets in English to give us ideas of how we might respond to the question ¿Tocas algún instrumento musical? Pupils then worked in pairs to form their sentences; these were shared and the class commented on what was good about each example and ideas for improvement , e.g. word order; use of connectives; varying the instruments from ‘el piano’; using past vocabulary etc.

When asked if they’d enjoyed the lesson, many pupils said yes. And I could tell from their behaviour that the class were engaged. Definitely a thumbs up from class and teacher!

So, in case you missed it earlier –