On Friday evening Daniel Stucke and I headed over to Nottingham for Teachmeet Midlands organised and hosted by Tom Barrett and held in the very salubrious surroundings of the National College of School Leadership (awesome buffet ;-) ). Despite awful weather and a minor navigational lapse we were only slightly late.
As usual, it was great to meet many Twitter colleagues from my network and find new people to talk to. I demonstrated a couple of tools that I am currently playing with in class: Mapwing is a great virtual tour creator, which with a little imagination can be applied to all kinds of different curriculum areas (here's an example that my year 6 are working on); secondly I (rather badly) demonstrated Prezi, a new presentation tool which is fantastic for non-linear presentations (i.e. a presentation that doesn't go from slide to slide, but can be explored in any order that the presenter fancies). Here is one I am working on presently.
One of the most interesting discussions of the evening was whether Teachmeet was preaching to the converted and how we could reach more sceptical teachers, or even teachers who just don't know about Teachmeet. It's fairly obvious that hosting Teachmeet on a wet Friday evening is only going to entice a fairly engaged and committed audience, but even if held in school time I doubt you'd get the ICT sceptic to come along. Maybe its real strength is the fact that Teachmeet reaffirms the importance of ICT in education amongst those who are trying to advocate its power. At times it can be a pretty thankless and lonely task as an independent ICT consultant and an opportunity like Teachmeet, where I can join like-minded colleagues, provides much needed strength and resolve to carry on preaching/ranting/provoking.
It is about time that the northwest held a Teachmeet and it is something I have been mulling over for a while. there has been some recent Twitter talk about organising one, but seems to have gone quiet. If anyone is interested in helping organise one, I'm all ears.
