Teachmeet North East 2012

Last Thursday night I attended the long awaited Teachmeet North East.

It took place in the pleasant surroundings of the Town Wall pub in Newcastle and was very well attended.

As with previous teachmeets there were an awful lot of keen teachers lurking and presenting and it was great to catch up with some old friends and some new ones.

The list of attendees and presenters can be found here.

We learned all about birds and bikes, why ICT isn't evil, lots of collaborative projects between departments,  lots of techy stuff eg. ClassDojo, a report on project based learning from High Tech High in San Diego, and all about the Northern Learning Festival, too.

I presented for 2 minutes on how I use Game Show ideas to try to improve students' thinking skills.

My presentation was a synthesis of ideas mentioned in previous blog posts and rather than regurgitate them all here I'll just post links to each one.

My first idea was to use Dave Reed's random letter generator to try to get students to find key words as in Countdown and Catchword.

Next I talked about how Clare Seccombe had blogged about the BBC television programme "Pointless" and its potential use in the classroom.

Then I talked about how I had used another BBC programme "Only Connect" after a discussion with @bonjour_miss on Twitter. I blogged about how it could be used here and my students have really enjoyed the activities we have done based on this.

I finished with links to 2 websites with brilliant sound effects to liven up these types of activity.

Firstly, the drama button and secondly, sad trombone.

These sites are really great because students don't mind giving wrong answers if they are followed by a comedy sound effect.

So, that's it.

There will be another Teachmeet in Newcastle in May and I can't wait.