View from the terrace at the House of Lords, by Terry Freedman
Teacher retention is an issue -- and that's an understatement. This conference will look at issues such as teacher motivation, professional development and education as a self-improving profession, to name just three.
It takes place on 4th May 2017.
Read MoreAn exclusive review of Bett 2017, even before it's taken place!
Read MoreThe annual conference of the Publishers' Associationand the British Educational Suppliers Association took place on November 25th in London, and had the theme of "Shifting Landscapes". Here's an overview of it, and how it related to education technology.
Read MoreNext time you're at an education technology conference, don't ignore the exhibition area.
Read More
ITTE held its annual conference recently, and I bought a ticket and went along. As far as the ITTE conference is concerned, I was a newbie, and so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I do recall dragging my carcass to the local station in sweltering heat, mumbling to myself something along the lines of “Please let the trains be cancelled; I’d rather be in the garden.” Well, that proved too much for Transport for London to arrange, and so I made it to the conference.
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
That well-known expression applies as much to running an ed tech project successfully as to anything else. In other words, for an ed tech project to succeed, you need to think about more than just the technology, or even the pedagogy. You have to think about management as well.
Please note: the Westminster Forum Conference on Preparing for the new Computing Curriculum
listed in the post entitled Some useful-looking conferences takes place on the 26th February, and not the 14th as originally stated. Apologies!
The agenda and other details of the conference may be found here.
Here are a couple of conferences coming up which look pretty good, and which are taking place in England in the near future.
That’s the title of a great-looking conference on 3rd October – which is only next Wednesday. Russell Prue, one of the organisers and speakers, told me about it, so I had a look…
What I like about it is that there are only 4 sessions, and each looks worthwhile attending. The four speakers are at the top of their game. You can see the details on the conference website. There’s a link to the full programme there too.
There are all different ways of running a training day. One approach is to beat delegates into submission by talking at them all day long. Another is to get them to do something. Learning by doing is a well-known approach, having been perfected, I believe, in the Neanderthal era. In short, it has a good track record, and was the method of choice adopted by Load2Learn for their Technologies for Print Disabilities Training Day.
We had a fantastic three hours at Collabor8 4 Change at Havering on the 17th November. Variety is the spice of life, so with 56 topics to choose from in total, everyone was catered for. To give you a flavour of the event, below is a selection of the talks and discussions featured. Now, if you are feeling really devastated that you were not able to be there, we have two bits of good news.
When I was at university I had a fool-proof method for selecting student union representatives when elections were held. I automatically discounted anyone who stood up and announced that what we needed was change. We always need change, although it’s usually quite useful to check what exactly needs changing, and whether right now is the best time to do so. Anyone who announced that we needed change, but without going any deeper into it, was an idiot as far as I was concerned. Either that, or they assumed that I was.
Collabor8 4 Change, a great new-style conference, is running again on 17th November. We've just made available 50 more tickets!(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved
