You know the old joke… I saw a light at the end of the tunnel – but it was just some bastard with a torch, bringing me more work. I feel a bit like that when it comes to trade fairs. You see all these wonderful new ideas, but implementing them is going to cost you time and money. And the most important of those two is not the money, it’s the time.
Either the money is available or it’s not and mostly the question is quickly resolved, but time is often ignored. Just think of this. You see a DVD with interactive animations that could be useful for a subject you teach. It doesn’t cost much so you buy it immediately. And now the clock’s ticking. You have to look through the contents, work out how to integrate it, and then adapt your lesson materials. OK, maybe you will save yourself time later, or maybe it’s a simple improvement in the quality of your teaching, but all of this has taken time. Add in the time that your colleagues use when they decide to adopt your ideas and the end result is a lot of man hours.
And then you go to a trade fair like BETT at Olympia in London and maybe you come away with a dozen ideas. At that point you need to start serious planning about how you are going to introduce all these wonderful new things to your teaching. That’s the guy with the torch at the end of your tunnel! Continue reading »
There are some things that don’t work well on the Internet – having a Grande Quad Americano at Starbucks, buying a ticket on Ryanair… that sort of thing. Until last Thursday, I would have included attending a trade fair, but that all changed with the FETC Virtual Conference. That was a remarkable experience. I took part purely out of curiosity and bringing with me a healthy dose of scepticism – I like trade fairs, I like the buzz and I like the hands-on experience.
So, the first attendance week of the course is over, and now we’ve got about three weeks to do our homework (or “transferwork” as I now call it!). The pace was high, as it should be. When I pay good money for a course, I want to feel as if I’m getting value for money!
The course has a dual focus – obviously “How To” plays a big role as it does in any training programme, but the really useful aspect of this course is the chance to get an overview of what is out there. We all know the saying, “a bad workman always blames his tools,” and it’s possible to teach really effectively using very few resources. It’s possible, sure, but not a lot of fun. I’m not a fan of the Birmingham screwdriver approach and given that there are tons of excellent and free tools out there, why not take advantage of them? This course has given me that chance.
As a trainer, it has been very valuable to experience the feeling of being a learner again and for me the case for compulsory professional development is proven – experiencing the feeling of learning is a hundred times more powerful than simply knowing it.
I loved watching Skippy as a kid. I can’t remember if I was in love with Liza Goddard, and I was young enough not to find it unbelievable how the adults always knew what Skippy was trying to communicate to them, but it was the first time that I came across the idea of distance learning – kids from families who lived out in the bush got their schooling by radio.
OK, so let’s take a Skippy-sized jump forward about 40 years into the future. It’s one thing to teach kids who aren’t in the classroom, but I’ve been thinking for a long time about removing the teacher from the classroom instead. I think I saw somewhere that the Japanese are (surprise, surprise) working on a robot that can replace the teacher, but until they’ve got the fine tuning right how about relocating the teacher to a screen on the wall?
After getting seriously to grips with the SmartBoard over the past couple of weeks, I have to say that my first impression is that it’s a lot of fun. The basic operations are really intuitive and the documentation on the Smarttech website is pretty much idiot-prrof. With just a couple of hours “play-time” (and those couple of hours passed really quickly!) I felt confident enough to use it in a lesson. I wasn’t sure how the kids would react, but most importantly, I didn’t want the board to change my teaching style – I’m more or less happy the way I teach, so I very much wanted this to be an addition to the classroom experience and not a replacement for something else.
I’ve just finished a presentation to a group of publishers in Stuttgart about Moodle. When I was invited to talk to them it was out of the question to refuse – after all, I’m a self-confessed technology freak. So what’s the problem, you might well ask?
What's New In The World?
Who’s been talking…