EDITED 12.30pm to add more links
One more quick post before I try and get some sleep – because if I don’t get this written now I suspect it will join that great other pile of half written blog posts floating around various sticky notes and rattling around bits of my brain.
TMClevedon was all I was expecting and more. Professionally run (the idea of having the presentations preloaded worked really well) and with a great variety of speakers, there’s a good reason this event always draws a crowd.
I missed the very well recieved keynote from Vic Goddard, but will catch it again on the YouTube channel for the event.
Then there were a series of Seminars. I went to the one led by Mr John Wells, the Head at Clevedon who gave a whistle-stop, but very interesting potted history of the changes that have taken place in Clevedon over the last few years. A few things stood out for me including:
- The importance of this being ‘our’ school, and a sense that everything came from an agreed (rather than imposed) set of values.
- The idea of ‘lessson DNA’ which allows teachers to take the ingrediants in a traditional four part lesson, and arrange them in a way that works best for them, that lesson.
- The idea of ‘Live Observations’ was another interesting one to me – the idea that the dialouge between observer and teacher takes place during the lesson, rather than after it makes a lot of sense. I also loved the set of questions that observers would often use to help guide the feedback session.
Then it was back into the hall for the presentations.
Several ideas came through, including the importance of making the learing as ‘real’ as possible, including the idea of getting students tocreate a museum as a PBL outcome (this appeared twice – here and here), the value and power of Twitter and some really interesting stuss about technology being used to redefine learning, rather than simply do the same old thing again. I also loved this idea about using Google Drive as a means to tracking and sharing feedback with students. Some real food for thought there for the ‘elearning’ CPD sessions I’ve got running on Monday night
There were several mentions of getting students to create apps and a demo of a great Prezi which had been used to create an animated solar system
I’ll add more links as more videos appear online, and potentially some more detail when I get a minute to go through my notes, but for now, I think it’s time for bed!