Learning Festival

I’ve been meaning to get along to a TeachMeet for some time so with the  Scottish Learning Festival being near to home I managed to go and lurk. Listening to the seven and 2 minute presentations sparked lots of ideas which I hope to follow up.

It struck me that the way I carry out my own learning and development has changed hugely over the past few years. We’ve had lots of discussions recently in the authority where I work, about the need for fewer short courses and more over a few days where deep learning can take place. To an extent I think this is a good idea. Having spent a week in the summer at a summer school on leadership – the time to reflect and discuss keynotes in process groups was invaluable and has helped me to re-evaluate my ideas.

But short snacking is something we also need to encourage amongst teachers – I wish I’d been able to hear Ewan MacIntosh speaking about how young people snack on media. I found the TeachMeet a real life representation of the learning snacking that I do daily online – finding short snippets of info that might or might not spark more investigation. When they do spark something then that learning can take me down routes and to places which I would never have imagined, where deep learning and collaboration occurs.

The thing that preys on my mind is that as a profession I see a divide opening between teachers who naturally do this kind of investigation and learning and those that don’t. What I can’t see yet is whether this divide and ability to snack but also learn deeply is about digital natives and immigrants or whether it is more than that.

Sitting at the TeachMeet with a teacher from the school I work in you could see the people there just got it, they’d embrace change, go for it with ACfE, develop collaborative online communities with colleagues and had a hunger to learn, they were trying new innovative and creative teaching with ICT tools to help them.

Things are certainly looking better than when I used to teach ICT to teachers with a new fangled mouse attached. After giving what I thought was a clear instruction to use the mouse to move the pointer on the screen, I found people holding their mouse onto the screen and moving it around the surface. And I’m guessing the TeachMeet evaluations would have been more encouraging than one we got after one of our computer courses.

Question – What do you intend to do as a result of this course?

Answer- Go for a curry and a pint!