So to Thursday and back to LWF with the chance to look around and hear some of the speakers in the main event – for me I liked the domes, although at times they did seem small for the number of participants that wanted to listen to the breakouts – having also been to the brewery the same  can be said. The theatre space was large -although my favourite was the round from last year.  At times the noise from outside could be heard but did not detract from the main speakers – it will need time to develop and I look forward to seeing what Graham has in store for us all next year.

So onto the speakers

First up was Mitch Resnick who I absolutely loved and could have listened to all day! He spoke of the discovery of learning that comes in Kindergarten, of Scratch the programme that he came up with and that is used in my school and thousands of others across the world to give children a chance to discover and program for themselves, he then moved onto warrior cats something that was new to me but will investigate and used it as an example of how people where using scratch to take well known literature and changing it for themselves. including a lovely example of mothers day cards – his talk ended with his view of ICT as “Invention and Creativity Technologies” something that will most certainly stay with me.

Next was Mark Surman and Michelle Levesque from Mozilla who carried on the theme of discovering and creation and talked about enabling a generation of web makers through tools such as hackasaurus and open badges – again another great talk about enabling children to discover and create.

I skipped out of the main hall at this point to have a look around the domes – talking in Lego- building a classroom of the future, looking at the computers in the Museum of computing as well as watching young hackers come up new and interesting developments that would be shown later in the main hall. I missed one of my heroes Jesse Schell speaking as I was hosting a session straight after in one of the salon pods that involved myself and 9 teachers all who I have met via twitter and all who agreed to help me – each of them are inspirational with what they do and I am lucky enough to call them friends.

The aim of the session was to show what is happening in Education now – not in the future but wright now in classrooms up and down the country – we took the approach of starting at Year 2 and taking a journey through the life of a child right up to university. This idea and line up was decided before Gove made his announcement at BETT  at the beginning of the year and is an example I feel of what can be achieved in schools with technology – the presentations if you missed them or would like to watch again are embedded below – with a few to follow.

I think we really showcased what is happening in schools as well as the power of Twitter for CPD and forming relationships – it was certainly something special and I know from following tweets those in the audience agreed.

Once it had finished it was time to head back into the main stage after a few conversations – part of these conferences for me is the catching up and the face to face conversations that make these a special occasion.

Back into the main hall for talks from Jim Knight who spoke about the design of spaces to encourage learning and what would schools look like if Steve Jobs had gone into education  and not technology an interesting talk – I also enjoy listening to Lord Knight speak – he regularly talks and listens to teachers and the same was true during one of the breaks – a real pleasure. Then it was on to the Young ReWired State with young people demonstrating what they had been working on – a great demonstration of passion for ICT and coding as well as brilliant presentation skills as things sometimes did not quite go to plan a great way to end the afternoon session.

Then it was time for the closing with Sir Ken Robinson live from LA- one of his quotes that resonated both with myself and many in the audience was that Technology does not remove the need for great teaching and active learning – it enables them.  This was the last talk of the conference and home I headed.

Final thoughts – the domes I liked being able to move in and out of – although would bigger domes next year be possible? The talks prompted my thinking as always and given me things to think about which is always good, the connections made and conversations were fantastic, I was delighted to host a session and thanks go to Graham for inviting me to put something together. I missed some parts of the Brewery – mainly the main stage area but not others and next year LWF will be in the ‘new’ West Hall of Olympia – it will also cross over with BETT which next year moves to EXCEL which could be an issue mainly for those teachers who would like to attend.

Last Wednesday night I left school and headed to Olympia for Learning Without Frontiers 12 this was the first time that it had been held here and from following the tweets that led up to the event I know that organiser Graham Brown Martin was going for a different experience!
This was true on arrival to be meet with a series of domes – these were part of the Free conference and hosted break out sessions as well as Lego, Rewired state, Nintendo, Toucan, Pearson and History of Computing.  It looked very interesting and unlike any conference I had been to before.

I headed to the Pearson Pod as I was taking part in WeTweetED the main points to come out for me were: collaboration will push technology use in school forwards and fear is what often holds us back. That training and research needed to be ongoing, with networks working together having the children at the fore front using their skills.

From here it was on to the LWF Awards and a chance for a nice tweet up as we all headed for a table – for me this has been the fantastic part of twitter – forming friendships face to face as well as the virtual online tweets.  It was great to see David Mitchell win the Primary Innovator award for his continued work with blogging, quadblogging and now his latest project of blogging the leap year.  You can see a full list of the winners here. I was also there to present a Eulogy with Tony Parkin to remember Tom Cooper who sadly passed away at the end of last year, it was a lovely moment and a pleasure to meet both Jenny and Tom’s mum – just a shame it was under the circumstances.

This year the Learning Without Frontiers Conference and Festival will be on Wednesday 25th and Thursday 26th, this year signals a venue change as well – moving to Olympia for the two days.  The conference is the paid for part of the event and features speakers such as  Ray Kurzwell, Ellen MacArthur, Jesse Schell, Keri Facer, Stephen Heppell and Jim Knight to name a few.  There is a cost involved in this – although there are incentives such as education scholarships and an invite to businesses who sign up to take an educator with them.

The festival part is FREE – although you do need to register.  The festival is titled the future of learning and will include experience domes which will cover the following:

• Mobile & Handheld Learning
• Game Based Learning
• Digital Society
• BYOD – Success with Bring Your Own Device schemes
• Global Learning Innovations
• Learning with Apps
• Learning in the Cloud

It’s now the first week of a new year – since I have started blogging I always find it good to reflect on the year that has just gone – and to look ahead to the year ahead!

Once again it was a fun packed year with lots of highs and unexpected events that I did not think would happen back at this time last year.

Highlights:

Teaching – leaving Year 6 was quite hard but Year 5 has been great and am enjoying working and learning with a new set of children

Teachmeet Bett 11 and the understanding of the word Hoar as well as the chance to meet so many great people from my PLN

LWF – presenting in the main room on a round stage in front of too many people to think about! Dressing up for the teach meet and sitting next to katherine Birbalsingh at dinner.

Being told I was complacent and all that was wrong with the education system today at a National Curriculum Review – an entertaining evening all in all!

Working with New Directions within school on an art and environmental project

Hearing Ken Robinson speak

Speaking at a variety of conferences around the country – always an honour and a pleasure having the chance to meet and learn from others

Speaking at my first International conference – Denmark in the company of two Scots – a fantastic time

Being part of the London Educational Games Meetups – a great concept and also great to meet and talk to others

Being a Mentor at EdTech Start up Weekend – an amazing opportunity that still has me buzzing

Tweetups and meet ups including a Christmas one at Google

These were my professional highlights – personally it was a year of travel and it has been fantastic visiting so many places and exploring as a family especially attending our first festival as a family!

So to 2012……

I love  a new year, new term , new day not knowing what lies ahead – there are already some dates and events in the diary and will be blogging about these!

The year ended for me on a sad note – finding out that Tom Cooper had passed away – Tom had become a friend of mine who was also a mentor, always willing to give advice, he was a true giant among men who will be greatly missed but my resolution for the year is to take his words with me throughout the year – those words are to

‘grasp the moment’ something that he always did.

At the end of last term we embarked on our myths and legends topic.  As it is the first time I have taught in year 5 and as the children cover the Greeks and a lot of legends related to mythology in Year 4, I turned as ever to twitter for help and inspiration.

The first site mentioned is the fantastic myths and legends from e2bn – this has a great collection of myths and legends as well as enabling the children to create their own.  This was a site that we had already planned in using in ICT but also wanted to investigate the genre further in writing and speaking and listening through Literacy. Inspiration for our planning came in a tweet from @philstuart, he is the creative director of preloaded, a company which creates games with a purpose and he directed me towards myth storybook a series of stories and games that were made to link to the Merlin series on television and so our Myths and legends planning was formed!

We started the topic by putting the words myth and legend on the board and asking the children to mind shower what they could remember about them – where they were set, characters and min mapping these in groups. We then planed to take them to our wildlife area to read them the legend of King arthur so they would have a ‘sense’ of the settings – unfortunately because of the weather at the end of term this was not possible – however we went ahead with the reading as well as watching two short clips from the BBC site – while the children watched these and while they were listening to the story we asked them to note down any characters/settings that we could use as well as any words that they did not understand. We moved on to give each table a picture (these were taken from the internet and had a different theme/setting for King Arthur and his legends) each table was given five minutes to write describing words around the picture and the pictures were passed around the tables.  The completed pictures then had a whole host of adjectives, adverbs and sentences – we then put these around the classroom so that the children would have a range of vocabulary to use.

We then moved on to watch the animated stories that were first tweeted by Phil and the children watched others and played the games as part of an ICT lesson – the children loved watching and listening to the stories  as well as playing the games – they especially enjoyed the graphics and finding out more about the legend of King Arthur. They went home watched them again as well as playing the games and coming in to tell me how well they had done – certainly their favourite website at the end of term!

We used these to launch the main writing focus of the unit work which was to explain to the children that as the Merlin series was finishing on the BBC – the BBC was looking for ideas for future ideas/stories that they could use in the next series.  This really got the children buzzing and they worked over the next two days on outlines of stories and the a synopsis along with the first three opening paragraphs to send off to the BBC.  The quality of writing was fantastic and the children were completely engaged by the topic – using the animated stories really fired their imagination and once again it was a resource that I would not have been aware of if it had not been for twitter.  it is a resource that I would really recommend for looking at myths and legends from a different viewpoint .

This is one of my favourite books and now that I am working in Year 5 means that I get to work with the children on it.  I have to say that the children absolutely loved the book and worked hard on a range of subject over two weeks.

Primarily our work was Literacy based we covered the following:

Settings, characters, drama and freeze frame, writing a synopsis and review, letter writing, menus, newspaper articles, diary entries and our own short stories.

We also used the text for a range of cross curricular activities:

We used Google Earth to search for a location where a film version of the book could be filmed – the children then used pin drops to say which part of the book was being filmed at each place – an activity that really got them thinking about the story and what for them were the main features of the text.

Following on with the Geography theme we gave the children the piece of text where Hogarth sees the Iron Man and runs home to tell his family – working in pairs they had to highlight the geographical features and then work together to produce a map of the story – thinking about scale and producing a key.  They were then given excerpts from the text to stick on to their map creating a story map.

In ICT we used 2DIY to create games based on the Iron Man – these ranged from catching games where the Iron Man received points for catching the metal to platform games with the iron man chasing after the metal.

In DT our topic was moving toys so the children worked in groups to create cam toys around the Iron Man.

For our ‘know and show’ homework the children created their own Iron Men and wrote stories – a selection of some of this work can be seen below:

Iron Man on PhotoPeach

The children also created short animations which they had to storyboard, create props and scenery for and film themselves

Would love to hear any other ways that schools have used the Iron Man

The Iron Man from oakdalej on Vimeo.

So we are now at Tuesday evening – however the ideas, buzz, sense of community and collaboration that surrounded Start Up Weekend London is still with me!

When I was asked to be a mentor at this event, I really did not have any idea about what the weekend would be ‘like’, it is true to say that it far surpassed anything I thought it would be, hence why I spent most of the weekend there voluntarily working with and helping groups formulating their ideas to move forward.

The winner of the weekend went to Night Zoo Keeper an idea that has the creativity of children at it’s core, it’s team over the weekend was also made up largely of educators with @oliverquinlan being involved for the whole weekend – even though initially he had attended to observe and work with others – the idea grabbed him from the start and he went with it! He has blogged his thoughts here.  The team did a fantastic job all weekend and it was a pleasure to be involved with them and discussing how to move thinking forward.

Congratulations must also go to Edvents and Tiny Ears – who were both runners up with ideas for helping schools organise trips and events to helping children read.  Both fuelled again by passionate people with great ideas – and this was essentially what the weekend was full of.  All the teams/groups that worked together over the weekend also did so with a sense of collaboration, enthusiasm and humour alongside hard work. I was really impressed by  Saku - a 17 year old self-taught female software developer who spent the weekend working on play mail alongside Louis this was the pitch that got my vote during the initial stage on Friday night.

Thanks must also be given to Ed Baker and his team who set up the conditions and the environment, for all this to thrive in.  In the space of a weekend I have taken so much away from this – having the chance to work with a variety of people with vastly different skill sets all working with real life problems within a tight time frame really brought the learning alive for me and I entered the classroom on Monday buzzing with ideas.

The other highlight for me over the weekend on a personal note was finally meeting Jodie Collins someone who I have followed on twitter but had never met – if you do not follow her on twitter – then you should!

For more information on start up weekend London see here.

Here are my nominations for this years 2011 Edublog awards :     

Best Individual Blog: Learning with ‘e’s by Steve Wheeler aka @timbuckteeth  All of his blog posts are both challenging and engaging.

Best Individual Tweeter:   Julian Wood aka @ideasfactory  his tweets are always engaging and point to lots of useful links and thinking.

Best Twitter hashtag: #ukedchat    Thursday nights from 8-9pm, a host of teachers discussing and debating issues that then have a real impact on my own teaching and thinking.

Best educational use of a social network: Well done- Show Mr Mitchell  a great way of highlighting work of children within a school which is them commented on by viewers around the world – adding to the sense of achievement for the children involved.

Best teacher blog:  Simon Haughton this blog is dripping with advice, lesson plans and ideas for all teachers with useful walkthroughs and examples – a must for all teachers.

Lifetime Achievement:  Tim Rylands  This blog has it all – Tim offers tips, finds, must-haves in the classroom plus posts that both entertain and make you think about your own teaching and thinking – it really is a must read.

So there we are – my nominations to start with.

If you fancy making some nominations then visit the Edublogs Award page.

Good luck to all nominated.

YOuny – graduates from LSE – identified problem – of finding knowledge – Youny – offers to connect knowledge – starts presentation with great video.  problem is that can be lack of peer support and collaboration with students at universities today – using new tech you can conquer that problem – Youni is an online platform for sharing information – students at universities across the country have already carried out the studies that a student is currently studied.  On the platform you can ask questions, as well as sharing your own knowledge – that is what Youny does.

Younny is a mix between a social network and something like Moodle – it can be as specific or as general as the student wants it to be.

It is non-profit – used £3,000 grant to develop the product so far – looking for more development to work with and want to launch in January if possible and get feedback. Already have students to trial this and looking to go forward across UCL and other universities in London.

Knowledge Muffin – Learn the world in bite sized treats!

Start of with asking if you want to learn about financial crisis – you would look at wikipedia – this rolls on for a while and probably would not learn a lot – perhaps you want an online course to help you learn about the financial crisis which will also cost a lot.  Think what people are looking for is a structured approach to casual learning – a range of courses that come from well known and established though providers and establishments – read through knowledge and test you as well then re testing you on anything that you did not know.

Currently working on app range moving to desktop version – initial assessment with you as a muffin – with different categories of ‘muffin’ that you work through – the brighter the muffin the better you are at the subject.  Idea is that the quiz is engaging as well – with drag and drop quizzes as well multiple choices.

Targeting anyone who is a casual learner – potentially commuters, stay at home parents, retirees.

Different because  they are cheap – cost of a muffin.  Also on the move

Revenue streams include – pau as you go, subscription, advertising as a few.

Were asked if accreditation is important? – Whole pitch has come from the weekend – however realised that there is awhile area out there that watch programmes like QI that like knowing ‘stuff’ – idea is to capture that market.