Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Naace 3rd millennium hothouse

I'm yet to blog properly about #rethinkingICT  (partly because of its timing) so thought I should blog about the 'hothouse' as soon as possible. This will be a very potted version - my highlights.

The reasons I was happy to give up a couple of days of my holiday (again) was because I know how inspired by other's achievements I am. They make me want to become a better person and to carry on learning. Discussions throughout the two days have challenged my views, changed some of my opinions and  given me a lot of food for thought. It was great to catch up again with awesome twitter 'giants' Jan, Tim, Dughall and Drew and to meet twitter friends like Emma, Nic, Ant, RobertCherise (who I feel I have known forever!) and Chris (the funniest and most intelligent/inspirational 'youngster' I have ever met!). I include their names here as great people to have in your PLN, if you do not already have them. They have all certainly inspired me over the past couple of days.

I thought @ohlottie's idea of using linoit to take notes at #gtauk was a great idea, so I used it initially as a reminder for me, then decided I wanted others to add to it as I couldn't be in two places at once. There are hopefully lots of useful links on it for others to learn from. Thanks to everyone who contributed.



The thing that will have the biggest (immediate) impact on my teaching
came from the appshed masterclass from . I intend to use this with my digital leaders and show our key stage 2 teachers too. Other notable learning aspects for me were @dajbelshaw's Mozilla gems - popcorn and thimble- which I will play with during this coming week. He also reminded me of hackasaurus, which I had learned about at #gtauk. Don't get me wrong, there was lots of amazing stuff going on throughout the two days, but it would appear that I am quite 'up' on the ICT front. It's always good to know that you are keeping up/ahead of the game. There were some great scratch workshops including an
impromptu one from @dughall and @digitalmaverick, which resulted in standing room only! @largerama showed us robomind - an alternative to scratch and a resource which I will definitely use in school. There was also a workshop showing how effectively ipads can be used to create multi-media presentations to promote your school. Programming seemed to be one of the key aspects of the hothouse and of course the raspberrypi was shown - and its value explored. I'm pleased that I have purchased and played with one and will blog about that at another point.

The speedshare (teachmeet) was a great way of hearing snippets of good practice from other schools - and a lot of great practice was showcased.


Naace's curriculum framework will no doubt prove to be a valuable resource that I can use to develop our school's ICT curriculum. The more I think of it, the more I believe that ICT is so fluid, that spending hours writing detailed plans is not the way forward. Having a bank of quality resources and sharing ideas for embedding their use is a more profitable way to continue to develop ICT in our school. This could be done through 'learning community' style staff meetings whereby staff are expected to take 1 minute to share an example of how they have embedded ICT. This could be done every other week, setting a standard and ensuring good practice is shared. In our school that would only take 10 minutes out of each staff meeting. A worthy investment of time. It was great that a headteacher from my cluster - Carol Green - was at the hothouse, because we had discussions about holding cluster teachmeets, which she can promote at head's meetings.  

I hope you find the links on the linoit useful - I know I will keep referring back to them! Please add to it if you have any links that I missed.  I will write a separate post about the digital leader network presentation, because I think it deserves it!

3 comments:

  1. Sheli, I loved meeting you and so many other inspirational tweeps that have helped me on the amazing journey I have been on over the past 2 years. The learning and innovation that was shared over the past couple of days, has helped invigorate my thinking and make me even more determined than ever to continue (no increase) my efforts to ensure that ICT is truly embedded into our school curriculum for both teachers and learners.

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  2. Definitely write a separate post about the digital leader network - I didn't see that one! Had a fab time, thanks again!

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  3. It was fab to meet so many inspiring educators.
    I totally agree with you, Cherise, about the need to move what goes on into all classrooms in the school.
    I like the idea of having a bit of share time in each staff meeting, as a way to embed ideas across all classes. I love the linoit - thank you for organising that. I wonder if our staff room wall could use a Linoit 0.1 version with post-it notes and pens to help share ideas.
    I've created a simple website for our school for use to share resources on which has worked well with some staff.
    It was a fab couple of days and it was great to meet you.
    Robert

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