Wow, Wow, Wow!

I have to say I was a bit shocked and still am really to receive the news via my answer phone, text, tweet, email and skype yesterday from many people I know. They were all telling me the same thing that I am a finalist in the Learning Without Frontiers Special Achievement Award for 2012. I can’t believe it… somebody sent me the link to the awards page and then I couldn’t believe who else was in my category and you start to think what am I doing there with those amazing people? What am I doing in a category with the likes of Emma Mulqueeny, Ian Livingstone and Tim Rylands? I know I won’t win but to be shortlisted among people like this is amazing!

You can see the full list of winners here for every section:

http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com/lwf12/awards/the-finalists/

It is a real honour, privilege to have been nominated and shortlisted by the judges so thank you to the judges and thank you to those of you who nominated or have supported me over recent years, supported my school but more importantly supported my students.

If you look at the full list of finalists for each individual category every single person is doing fantastic things within education which is just brilliant! They all probably deserve the awards so it will be hard on the public in the voting and the judges but I guess these things always are.

I didn’t really want to single individuals out and say vote for them because I believe that all of them are worthy winners however I did want to talk about 3 people in particular who I was especially chuffed to see on there and finally starting to get some recognition for the fantastic work that they do. I am a huge fan of their work and have been lucky enough to spend long amounts of time in their company discussing education and sharing good practice. They are:

Gareth Ritter @ritzertech who has been doing some amazing work in the last couple of years as a music teacher in Wales, it is great to see he is finally getting the recognition: http://www.agent4change.net/innovation/innovation/1299

Ray Chambers @lanky_boi_ray who has been doing some amazing work with creating kinect apps for teachers, he does all his own coding himself and is doing some brilliant things: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/teachers/archive/2011/12/09/microsoft-partners-in-learning-uk-forum-2011.aspx

Unfortunately Ray and Gareth are in the same category Smile and I have had the pleasure to work alongside them as part of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning network over the last few years.

Finally Pete Yeomans @ethinking a lecturer at Plymouth University who has been doing brilliant work over the last few years creating a new breed of teachers who are really pushing the boundaries with technology within education. I am been fortunate to work with the big yellow cat for the last couple of years as part of the Teachmeet circuit in the South West, The Plymouth Education Society and the last couple of years on the brilliant International Educational conference: http://pelecon.net/

As I said everyone of the list is a winner in my eyes so good luck to them all Smile Special thanks to Graham Brown-Martin for organising what sounds like it will be another awesome event.

How to vote?

Graham Brown-Martin sent me this info:

Voting by the public to determine the winners has now started and closes at midnight (GMT) on Saturday 21st January.

Please feel welcome and encouraged to publicise your achievement via your networks and social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (the hashtag is #lwf12).

Voting is conducted by web or SMS.

The winners will be announced and presented with their award at the LWF Awards event being hosted at Olympia, London on the evening of 25th January.

Finally….

I was extremely lucky to win a secondary innovation award for my project last year at LWF. The project Recharge the Battery http://www.danjjroberts.co.uk/2009/06/07/recharge-the-battery/ was competing with Channel 4 and Sony for the special project award and unbelievably it won! This was great recognition for a project my students created back in 2008 and which so far students all over the world are still using 4 years on in fact it has impacted on now 100,000’s of young peoples lives. Read more here: http://www.danjjroberts.co.uk/2011/01/11/if-carlsberg-made-staff-rooms-they-wouldnt-be-like-this-or-would-they/

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