UK Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference 2009

Yesterday along with Con Morris (National CPD Team) and Joe Wilson  (SQA) I traveled down to Birmingham for the Microsoft UK Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference.

This is the first time that Partners in Learning have run a conference like this as part of the UK forum and it was a really good event. It was also free for anyone to attend and a great day of quality professional development with a bunch of very enthusiastic teachers.

The event was opened by Steve Bewsick, Microsoft UK. I met Steve last year in Reading and it was nice to meet him again and listen to him open the conference.

The morning keynote was given by John Davitt who did a really great job of getting the day off to a positive start. I’ve seen John present before and really enjoy his style and humor. Amongst other things he demonstrated the Learning Score and of course his Learning Event Generator (LEG) and the iPhone version the Random Activity Generator (RAG).

If you have not seen or heard of the LEG or the RAG before have a read of this post from Stuart Ball and if you want to find out more about John here is a really nice article about some of his work that was published recently over on Merlin John’s site as part of the Innovators series.

After the keynote I had a chance to look around some of the Innovative Teacher projects that were on display. All of the work was very impressive and it was nice to chat to such dedicated and enthusiastic teachers who were all very obviously passionate about learning.

I had a second dose of John Davitt for my morning workshop where we were challenged to complete one of the random activities generated from the LEG. My group had to produce ‘knitting as a role play’.  We had great fun collaborating, gathering props, filming our role play and of course learning how to knit (thank goodness for YouTube!)

After lunch I went to a workshop that was run by Shirelands Learning. Shirelands are doing some interesting work with their first year curriculum (it is now completely thematic). They have also invested heavily in technology. Some of the students from Shirelands showed us some of the work that they have been doing using Microsoft Surface and also Little Big Planet for the PS3.

I particularly liked one of the ideas for Little Big Planet – where Shirlands have re-created their school in Little Big Planet. First year students play to the game to get to know their new school and to learning about their new surroundings. We have a number of Little Big Planet projects starting from the Consolarium in the new year and this might be one of the ideas that we follow up on.

The final part of the day was the UK Innovative Teacher Awards. All of the projects were great but the four projects that will be representing the UK in Berlin will be:

• Dave Rogers (Priory School Specialist Sports College) Pirates and social networking
• Simon Horleston (Howe Dell Primary School) EcoVids    
• Amy Lewis (saltash.net community school) Heroes    
• Jan Webb (Weston Village Primary School) A classroom without walls    

I was particularly delighted to see my good friend David Rogers pick up an award – which was very well deserved. I was also really pleased to see Dave Garland from Saltash.net get a special achievement award for all of the hard work that he has done to promote ICT in Schools.

So, overall a great event and one that I hope to have an opportunity to attend in the future…

Comments

[David Rogers]

Thanks for the mention Ollie. It was a great day and now I'm back at school, my tutor group and first Year 10 class are buzzing. I'm looking forward to seeing the Year 8s that were involved with the project later.

You forgot to mention your nice speech ;-)

Best wishes

David

[Alan Parkinson]

Thanks for the report Ollie. A pity I couldn't be there: sounds great - particularly intrigued by Little Big Planet project you mentioned...

Great news that geography progressed through to Berlin...