Without doubt, for me, the best thing about travelling all the way down to BETT on Friday was to attend TeachMeet’08. As I said in my earlier post, BETT itself was a tad disappointing, however, meeting fellow teachers and educators later on that evening was the highlight of the year so far for me.
The event was organised by Ewan McIntosh of Teaching and Learning Scotland and blogger extraordinaire, so my thanks go to him for his efforts and to the sponsors who paid for the drinks and the food later on at Pizza Express.
Ewan McIntosh presents TeachMeet’08
I felt a little bit star struck meeting all these people whose blog I have been following and a bit of a fraud, given the wealth of knowledge of which they were so obviously in possession. I was really looking forward to listening to the 7 minute presentations and the 2 minute nano-presentations, but was a little bit disappointed that quite a few of the people I was really interested in listening to, did not get a chance to speak… oh well, next year perhaps.
Secondlifers and Flashmeeters
There were presentations on The Wikifly Effect, by Drew Buddie, on how students using wikis at school started to spread like the eponymous butterfly and changed the way the school operated as a whole; using Moodle in Buckinghamshire LEA, by Ian Usher (who looked very, very familiar but whom I had never met before!); Yaca Paca, a free web-based assessment platform, by Ian Grove-Stephensen (I am now helping Ian translate the website into Spanish); Theo Kuechel talked about easy and free stuff you can find on the Internet (I’m into this a lot!); Andy Black talked about gizmos and gadgets and Doug Belshaw spoke about educational stuff, which was rather interesting. I did not know Doug before TeachMeet and I think his musings on the matter are well worth following.
The above is just a selection of the people who did get the opportunity to speak. Amongst the ones who didn’t get the chance was Joe Dale, whom I was really looking forward to meet, as I have assiduously followed his excellent blog on using ICT in Modern Foreign Languages for the last year or so. My thanks go to him for taking the time to look at my AsiSeHace.net Spanish revision website and for being such a nice bloke!
Teachers queueing at the bar, no surprise there…
During the bar breaks (and the not so interesting presentations) I had the fortune of sitting next to Karyn Romeis and Linda Hartley (and Doug Belshaw, later on at Pizza express) who patiently introduced me to the benefits and possibilities of using Twitter, which I will try and explain later on, in its own blog entry, once I feel a little bit more acquainted with it! Many thanks to them for their patience and for making me feel like I belonged (see the bit about feeling like a fraud earlier!). There where other bits and bobs I picked up that looked quite interesting and that shall, no doubt, be studied in later blog entries.
The evening was rounded off nicely at Pizza Express, with around 30 of us being able to make it there with food and drink paid for by generous sponsors! As I said earlier, TeachMeet’08 was, for me, the highlight of a very lacklustre BETT exhibition.
This post is tagged assessment, Conferences & Shows, modern languages, TeachMeet
