Each meeting and conference I attend, I take my notebook and pens, and attempt to sketchnote proceedings. It helps me listen carefully (and sit still!), enables me to recall what was said after the event in a way that taking notes doesn’t, and also enables me to share with those who weren’t there.

I do my notes live and therefore tweeted them as soon as the sessions were over – you may have seen them on Twitter/X over the weekend, but I like to publish them as a collection after the event. It also enables me to make sure I haven’t missed anything and check I haven’t made glaring errors – like adding an s to the ALL Twitter handle @ALL4Language Oops!

Here they are, in order that they happened!

Wednesday morning saw me gazing at the sea, then moving swiftly past Butlins to speak at University of Chichester MFL Conference. I had a lovely day attending sessions in the morning and sharing some ideas about using technology and stories in the languages classroom.

Below are my sketchnotes of the sessions I attended, starting with Elaine Minett’s upbeat introduction to the conference, talking about challenges being seen as opportunities, followed by an idea packed session about using poetry by Concha Julian of the Consejería de Educación and finishing with Lynne Brackley’s session on using drama based activities in languages. I enjoyed using my dramatic skills in both of the latter sessions!

If you get the opportunity next year, I can thoroughly recommend attending as the conference was varied with sessions for primary, secondary as well as cross phase sessions, and they were delivered by a variety of people including PGCE students, teachers and representatives of organisations like the British Council, the Consejería de Educación and Language Angels. I enjoyed seeing Catherine on the Little Linguist stand once more (and buying a new book!) as well as visiting other stands including Institut Français and European Schoolbooks.

A post about my sessions will follow later!

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.

Last Thursday I headed to Newcastle for ALL Connected, the title of this year’s Language World conference taking place on 20-21st March at Newcastle University. I look forward to LW each year as it’s a conference that offers lots of ideas but also lots to challenge my “little grey cells” and make me think.

This year I decided to replace my normal note taking with Sketchnoting as started at #ililc5. I’d tried using Paper app on my iPad there and found it quite tricky to use to the extent that it was distracting me from the session content. I’ll persevere and practice further but for Language World I choose a different tool – the notebook and pen! Actually, notebook, pens and pencils! I’m a strong believer in choosing the correct tool for the job, be that an iPad, a pencil and pen or a slate and chalk, and this combination allowed me to write more easily, select colour at will and, most importantly, focus on what was being said rather than worrying about zooming in and out or accidentally drawing whilst trying to make the toolbar reappear!

Below are my sketch notes created over the two days. I did them all ‘live’ – no retouching afterwards apart from one on which I’d made a mistake with someone’s name and felt I really should correct it as she’d won an award and deserved it!

Bertram Richter and Rebecca Bolland – Planning for Progress @KS2

Vicky Cooke – Teaching reading in KS2: leading learners towards independence

Jackie Rayment – Primary Languages Quality Mark

Bernadette Holmes – Interculturalism: The Power of 3

Clare Seccombe – Be a crafty languages teacher

Greg Horton – Talking the talk in the MFL Classroom

Rachel Hawkes – ALL for all and all for ALL: ALL CONNECT

René Koglbauer – ALL Connected: a celebration of language learning & teaching and volunteers.

Nadine Chadier – It’s all about the code

Wendy Adeniji – How can your teaching be consistently good or outstanding?

Roma Franziska Schultz and Emma Whittle – Ideas for using literature and developing literacy in the Primary Classroom

Rachel Hawkes – Memory and thought: why we can’t have one without the other.

Steven Fawkes – Now we are 25

Looking back on them, it’s amazing how much more I can recall about the sessions than I would following my more traditional note taking; my page was smaller than A5 so I had to carefully consider each word/phrase I wrote or picture I drew. I successfully kept to one page per session (45-50minutes) apart from two sessions where there was just too much to fit onto one page.

I’m still learning and developing my own style and I certainly need to work on my drawings (there’s a tortoise on one that looks like a sheep!) but I’m pleased with the way it’s going. I intend to keep working on it, and I’ll persevere with my iPad but I’ll save that for times when there’s no ‘time pressure.’

If you want to see someone else’s take on many of the same sessions as sketch notes, have a look at Clare Seccombe’s post that includes hers. And you can see many of the actual presentations by clicking on Friday programme or Saturday programme.