Yes, I know. It’s the summer holidays, but still teachers all over the place are still learning, still sharing and still thinking about ways to improve their teaching. Twitter has been buzzing all summer with ideas and yesterday, teachers descended on Pembrokeshire for the latest Teachmeet. I’ve talked about Teachmeet before here and it really is a great way to share with other professionals. TMBev, or Teachmeet Pembrokeshire, began because Bev Evans (@bevevans22) lives miles away from the rest of the people on Twitter and always has to travel for hours to get to Teachmeet events, so it was suggested that she held her own Teachmeet instead. People travelled from Hampshire, Southport, Kent and beyond to attend this event.
This Teachmeet had a mixture of travelling folk and local people from Bev’s school in attendance. It was great to have this mix of people. As always, I was picked randomly to go first and throughout the event I presented on a few different topics.
I talked about Google Squared (evident here and here), Poisson Rouge, and Twitter. Other presentations included blogging, Purple Mash, 2DIY, presenting internet research, using ipod touches, creative homework, forest classrooms and oh yeah…some bloke trying to make us all sing.
It was a great event and people were jotting down lots of ideas. As usual, we streamed the event live with 125 unique visitors to the stream at some point and luckily this time, I remembered to press record! I have provided links below and this is to the unedited stream. If someone would like to go through and edit this into small chunks, please let me know. I’m going on holiday on Friday so I don’t have time to sort it this week! I didn’t realise there was a maximum record time, so part one is 3hrs and part 2 is just under an hour. We still recorded while going to break, that was about 40minutes or so. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed attending.
Well done to Bev and the sponsors for a fantastic event!
Part One:
Part Two:
Other blog posts and resources about tmbev:
http://www.speedtile.net/bevevans22
Archive of tweets from Monday 16th – Thurs 19th Click here
And finally…
<rant> One (possibly) worrying trend and this has been evident at TMEast, TMBev and at a recently announced TMMidlands, is the timing. Why are these events being held at weekends or during holidays? Everyone that has been to a Teachmeet can see the amazing value of attending, so why do we keep organising them in our own time? Maybe they should be held during schooltime and be valued as much as (or more) than ‘traditional’ CPD. I think this might need some thought and discussion at a later date. </rant>
Thanks for blogging about TMBev. We had a great time and you were fabulous!!! I get your point about your rant but, in defence of TMBev, it was deliberately organised in the hols as people said it was in an area they were prepared to travel to for a holiday. I wouldn’t have got the support locally without doing it this way first. The next TeachMeet down here will hopefully be in term time, probably as an INSET, for local schools. Of course it will be great because you showed us how to do it 🙂
Just a thought on your rant at the end. I can’t see anyway that schools would be able to pay to allow staff to go teachmeet. We don’t really have external inset anymore. The advantage with holidays is that you then have time to think about what you have been inspired by and investigate it. Certainly I don’t really have the time to do that in term time and I guess lot of others don’t either. In an ideal world………………….
I did think you and all the other presenters were brilliant.
i agree. I think we need to show how powerful teachmeet can be and then build on it so it can become a school-time thing. I’d love to do it as part of our local pyramid of schools, but we’ll see…
Maybe not travel to Wales or Blackpool or whatever, but why not a county-wide Teachmeet? or even a local run thing? We need to take the idea of Teachmeet and then disperse this to our schools and spread the good word!
We we’re discussing the same thing earlier Ian. I know you’ve used the Saturday and holiday ones as an example but even the Teachmeets that happen in the evenings are ‘in our own time’ as they are not part of school CPD. I think it would be amazing if within a cluster of schools we could have a teachmeet day instead of inset but the word about Teachmeets is not out there strongly enough yet with the general population of teachers – I only found out about Teachmeets when I started using twitter last year and I class myself as fairly able to keep up with all the technological changes that happen on the web; we need a way to get the Teachmeet word out to the masses before it can become part of school-based CPD.
The other thing that holding teachmeets at weekends or during holidays allows if for people to travel around and share. There’s only so much sharing that can go on within our own clusters, and we would miss out on the fantastic things that people like yourself are doing because we’ve no one in our cluster that is doing those things.
I would love to think that one day the whole school population could have one giant UK teachmeet with a mixture of online pre-recorded videos and school/cluster-based presentations happening, perhaps we can even get into the guinness book of records! It’s trying to think of ways to spread the word and get people on board.
completely agree, my mission is to hold a daytime teachmeet. Would it work? Who knows!
Had a ball! What a fantastic opportunity to meet and listen to some inspiring stuff! Great to have such a wide range of people working with all different ages and in different settings. More to the point – CPD delivered by those who are doing the job on a daily basis.
I for one was quite happy to come in the holidays – perfect area for a family holiday (ha ha!) and it has given me time to ponder on what was shared and look at some of the software and resources.
Thanks for doing such a great job on the day!
Lets keep spreading the word! ;0)