Yesterday I visited London in my role as a British Council Schools Ambassador to meet up with other ambassadors, reflect on last year and look to the future.

Throughout the day I sketchnoted the sessions, a variety of presentations giving information and sharing of international projects carried out in schools, clusters and organisations. Below are the results; I did tweet as I went along, but decided to retake the photos as they had shadows on them!

It was an interesting and inspiring day, and I hope that the notes give you a taste of the day, and what a wonderful thing international work is!

I spent this past weekend in Nottingham at the 12^th eTwinning UK National Conference held at The DeVere Jubilee Conference Centre – always the NCSL to me though! The name of the venue might have changed but the sense of community, fun and learning never varies, and once more I came away inspired, energised and still laughing at onions, pants and Bollywood Maori dance moves.

The theme this year was inclusion and below are my sketchnotes from the sessions I attended. Lots to reflect on and many ideas forming already.

If you want to find out more about eTwinning or any of the other British Council programmes including the International School Award or ISA, feel free to ask questions using the comments below or the contact form. I am a British Council Ambassador and would love to help!

Professor Sonia Blandford – Achievement for All

An interesting session on Lyfta, a Finnish designed VR and AR resource to facilitate global awareness and empathy.

Manju Patel-Nair – Diversity in the global classroom; beyond the single story

Andy Cope – The Art of Being Briliiant
Amazingly motivating session – being a #2%er in my special pants.

Jo Speak talks passionately about Inclusive Pedagogies

Paddy Carroll shares about The F word – failure, and how his project worked on developing resilience through learning from failure.

Joe Dale shares how to use Clips by Apple as well as Autodraw (a web tool) and a number of other apps.

British Council Ambassadors from across the UK assembled in Manchester this weekend to meet one another and find out more about British Council projects, strategies and plans. Starting on Friday lunchtime and finishing today at midday, the conference was ‘all go’ with early starts (first session at 8.30am on a Saturday?) and a timetable that was stretched as time passed all too fast.

I decided to continue my sketch note journey and bought a new notebook on the way to the station, one that stays open on its own (spiral bound) and is slightly larger – and square which seemed to help!

Below are my sketchnotes and links to important /useful sites from the conference. I’m sorry that I had to leave early and missed the final sessions. I’ll catch up when the final presentations are shared!

Opening session (Emma Chaplin) plus quotations from the conference.

Dr Mark Potts – Living out our values

Update on SchoolsOnline: how it works (John McMurtrie) and what it offers and will offer – exciting stuff! (Vicky Gough)

British Council Strategy presented by Stephen Hull

Connecting Classrooms Professional Development offerings shared by Katherine Walakira

International School Award – Ludmila Vávrová (and John Rolfe!)

Funding for three more years of Connecting Classrooms; Stephen Hull shares plans to spend it!

Gary Shiells and Ana Paula Booth talk eTwinning as it celebrates its 10th birthday!

Dorota Drajewicz and Bethan Dinning – Erasmus+ opportunities for schools

SchoolsOnline

Global Learning Programme

Barefoot Billion

I’ve Storify-ed the tweets with the conference hashtag #BCAmb15 too.

And finally, as part of the programme I delivered a workshop on Twitter. You can access the presentation here –  twitter manchester

And here’s the eTwinning guide I mentioned 

As regular readers will know, I am an eTwinning Ambassador (that is a very old picture!).  I say ‘I am’ as, whilst I’m no longer in the UK, I am hoping to continue to help promote and encourage involvement in eTwinning now I’m in Switzerland. Why? Because I’ve seen the difference it’s made to my school in terms of teaching and learning, the experiences that it’s brought and the new openess to ‘otherness’ that’s it’s brought. I see a school that looks outwards, celebrates the heritage of its pupils and understands more about UK traditions through looking at others. I see a school that is proud of differences and actively looks to make contact with people with different life experiences. And I see pupils who have grown in confidence through seeing that speaking a language other than English, or having a different religion to most others is actually a brilliant thing, not something to hide as well as experiencing the joy of talking to their peers across the world.

There is currently an Impact Study being carried out by Education for Change into eTwinning – see below. Evidence is being collected in a numbeer of ways but one is via a survey. I’d encourage you to fill it in as I suspect that the future of eTwinning with depend on this study!

If you want to find out more, please feel free to contact me and ask questions!

EfC has been has been commissioned for a 21 month study of the impact of eTwinning on pupils, teachers and schools.  The study will also be an analysis of the factors which contribute to, or hinder, successful participation in eTwinning.

eTwinning Partnerships is an activity under the Comenius sub-programme of the EU Lifelong Learning Programme. It was launched in 2005 with the objective of enabling school twinning as an opportunity for all young people to learn and practice information and communication technology (ICT) skills, as well as promoting awareness of the multicultural European model of society. The European Commission foresaw that eTwinning could be a major catalyst in intensifying the sorts of cooperation already underway among schools. Since the launch of the new platform in 2008-09 visits to the eTwinning portal have increased by over 300%, indicating a steep rise in interest among teachers. Registration continues to rise, and there are currently almost 100,000 registered eTwinners in 73500 schools.

The impact study will look at participation in eTwinning and what hinders or helps it success, specifically:

•    the networking of schools and teachers across Europe and their capacity to build social capital, and the way in which eTwinning is managed and promoted

•    the perspective of participating teachers

•    the impact of eTwinning on pupils, teachers and others at school level

•   the overall impact of eTwinning within the context of the Comenius Programme
The main activities will include:

•    Desk research and consultation with Central and National Support Services and others

•    A general survey of all eTwinning teachers, in 23 languages

•    Case studies research on impact in at least 20 schools in 10 countries, using country-based researchers

•    In the light of findings, will make recommendations on possible improvements to the eTwinning action, its design and management.

I’m at NCSL in Nottingham at the UK National eTwinning Conference.

This afternoon we’re having a Teachmeet and I’ve decided to share about one idea that has come from our Comenius Regio project and specifically a visit to the zoo.

Here’s the presentation (lots of pics!) and the link to my blogpost that expands on my idea.

Whilst I was in Nottingham, I met many lovely people frm across Europe.
One such ‘lovely person’ was Lidija from Croatia who, as well as a teacher, is a writer and had asked if she might interview some people for an article.
Guess who got volunteered?

You can watch my interview below, and also others on Lidija’s Youtube channel Pogled kroz prozor including one with @niiloa. Lidija’s article will be published soon – I’ll let you know when!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspVv6GKe6k

* Pogled kroz prozor means Look through the window

Thanks to Lidija from Croatia, here are some brief highlights of the ‘TeachMeet styley thingy’ at #etwpdw, showing some of the people about whom I blogged earlier this week.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41T8Df33OnY

Thanks to eagle eyed @joedale for spotting it!