1. There were teachers there from both primary & secondary education.
2. There were new presenters
3. It reinforced a lot of common ground that we all have.
Oh, the presentations were pretty good too.
Ben Gristlewood @mr_g_ict kicked off proceedings talking about how he uses Twitter to engage his Year 12 pupils. It was a real insight into tackling the misnomer of social media in secondary schools and it'll be interesting to see how it develops over the next few months too. His blog is http://mrgristwood.edublogs.org/
Next up we had Jasmine Renold @JRenold who talked about how using Google Docs - specifically Google Forms had eased workload at her school tremendously and how it had helped to develop better relationships with parents.
After that, David Mitchell @deputymitchell took to the stage to talk about his favourite two web tools. 1 was an app that lets him post work quickly to the Well Done Blog, the other was AudioBoo. Both were really useful and you could see the furtive scribbling across the room.
Then came me. I waffled on for a bit about how the cultural shift at a school is important when creating and updating a curriculum. The talk involved harnessing the skills of the pupils and using their enthusiasm to drive the curriculum.
I then did a quick talk on using storybird.com and how fantastic it is at developing writers and sharing good work.
After that, John Sutton @hgjohn spoke about some of the fabulous things that blogging can do to impact on children's learning. He spoke about projects he's been involved in and intimated that there are more in the pipeline - watch this space or simply check it out here: creativeblogs.net. He even roped @cherise_duxbury to talk about the Live Writers blog - well done Cherise, for standing up without preparing!
After that we had an off the cuff presentation by Chris Cox on Symbaloo.com a web curation tool. It looks seriously cool so am going to be giving that a go for sure!
Thank you to everyone who attended and presented at this TeachMeet. I'm looking forward to seeing you all again in April at TeachMeet Bolton!
A big thank you to Nigel Kirkham @nigelkirkham and his team for the use of Woodlands Conference Centre & BrainPOP UK, Vital & Espresso for sponsoring.
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