Tuesday, April 27, 2010

TeachMeet SE 2010 - First thoughts

Compared to last year's TeachMeet, this year's was a much quieter, smaller TeachMeet Student Edition. In retrospect, it was not a good time of the year for many secondary teachers and coming straight after the school's Easter holidays meant we lost a couple of weeks where we could have built up some advertising momentum.


112/365: The Panic Puppy
Originally uploaded by DavidDMuir
However, a positive aspect was the number of presentations from students; four presented this year. I think it was a good night and I hope it was useful for those who did attend. If we can get that level of commitment to presenting from students next year but with more people in attendance, we will have a belter of an evening.

This year saw the introduction of the Panic Puppy or the Dalmatian of Doom! (Stand-in for Hurl the Camel.) However, otherwise we pretty much stuck to the standard pattern.

Once again, I found chairing the TeachMeet and odd experience. I wasn't able to concentrate properly on what people were talking about, didn't get to chat to people as much as I would have liked and felt that despite my best efforts to keep everything spinning, I still managed to drop some of the plates. In particular, although Smart Technologies (one of our sponsors) was featured at the start of the meeting, I forgot to thank them again at the end... and I should have mentioned CPD Scotland too. {Note to self - write that sort of stuff down in future so you don't forget!}

I'll try to pull everything that was presented together in a future post but until then, you can watch the flashmeeting and have a look at the stuff I talked about:
  • MP For A Week: This will feature in a future post but in the meantime, here's my Prezi.
  • Poll Everywhere: The free account lets you collect up to 30 votes - perfect for a class.
  • Screenr: A free, online screencast recorder that's linked to Twitter. See the demonstration I recorded to get an idea of what it does.
  • Bollywood Subtitles: Didn't have time to show this but, given the number of subtitled spoofs of Curriculum for Excellence rants there are, I thought people might want to have a go themselves. Here's one I prepared earlier.

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