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The final highlight of BETT was the TeachMeet on the Friday night. In Scotland we have hosted a number of these un-conferences. These were ably coordinated by Ewan McIntosh. The idea is that anyone can share cool ideas they have or great ideas they’ve trialled in their classrooms. All they needed to do was to sign up on the wiki. The event was held in Olympia’s Apex Room (Seminar A)

The rules for TeachMeet are as follows:

• Micro-presentations are strictly seven minutes long, nano-presentations two minutes long.
• No PowerPoint allowed… unless… you’re doing 20 slides for 20 seconds each (pecha kucha style - pecha kucha article).
• Make sure that what you’re showing has actually been done in your classroom or a classroom of a colleague - this isn’t blue skies, this is right here, right now stuff.

The order in which people spoke was determined by a random selecter (I am hoping that Ewan can provide the link for this as it is a really useful classroom tool).

During the evening, I jotted down a few notes on some of the things that interested me.

National College for School Leadership- Stuart Sutherland‘Learn, develop, discover and be inspired with the support of the Leadership Library - a unique free online resource bringing together the best leadership and management thinking in the world, from Ashridge and Harvard Business Schools and 50 Lessons. - Lots of resources for leaders here.

RM- The Asus Minibook -See my earlier post.

Ian Usher- Buckinghamshire- showed us his use of DylanMessaging.com. He also talked about the use of Moodle in his authourity.

Honeycomb- Vivien Bailey from Warwickshire, talked about blogging using Honeycomb. It initially looked similar to our EduBuzz platform. This is something I intend to investigate further. It would be fantastic to set up some links.

Yacapaca-Ian Grove-Stephenson- Creating, sharing, marking and analysing assessments for free online. I have had a looked at the site and there are quite a lot of Scottish materials there to be used for free. I think it has potential.

Ictopus- Doug Dickinson- “Ictopus (ICT online primary user support) is a free support service for primary education which was launched on 1st September 2007. Each week registered members of the service have access to a six page printable magazine (Sharing Good Practice) and a set of activity suggestions (lessons2go)”

EdTech podcast-Doug Bellshaw- ‘ EdTechRoundUp is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don’t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people’s throats’
You can find you more about this podcast on Doug’s site. This is certainly something that I would like to get involved with in the future if time allows.

Theo Kuchel Talked about Free and Easy and somecool stuff for Macs 

Drew Buddie - Talked about lots of Web 2.0 Educational stuff… Without Powerpoint!

Consolarium- Derek Robertson- Talked about the use of the Nintendo DS in the class room and how it can be used to motivate and stimulate writing. The game that he talked about was called Phoenix Wrights (another game on my wish list- though I might try and twist Derek’s arm for a loan!)

 There were many more who I haven’t mentioned!

Thank you again to RM who very generously sponsored the event. There was a complimentary glass of wine or two for all attendees.

Thank you  to Radiolingua and Ode for sponsoring our meal at Pizza Express in the evening.

Thanks to Emap for supporting us in these areas:
The Venue
Free Wifi
Signage

Thanks to Learning and Teaching Scotland for supporting us:
Administration and development time

Thanks to edutxt for supporting us:
Audio-Visual support
Text-to-stage messaging
Free trial accounts with free messages
 http://www.edutxt.co.uk for more information

Thanks to Futurelab for supporting us:
Security

Thanks to Amazing Interactives ltd for sorting out the stream and meet in Second Life

Thanks to Martin Jack at Think Different Events for helping with the events management.

This event couldn’t exist in the (really fun) way it does without the support of our sponsors.

My final thanks must go to the ever lively Ewan McIntosh for organising another successful TeachMeet, but this time south of the border!

The next TeachMeet is scheduled for the 19th of February in Perth, Scotland.  It is currently being organised by Neil Winton (MrW). If you would like to come along or just find out more please visit the wiki.

May we spread the word about TeachMeets!

I am now ‘BETT-ed’ out, ‘web-logged’ out… Over and out!