Microsoft Innovative Teacher’s Summer Camp #mscamp

Before I even get into this you really need to also check out Graeme Eyre’s blog post on this @gceyre here: http://graemeeyre.info/?p=366 as there is probably quite a bit of overlap. If someone was to say to you that 22 teachers headed to Reading in their summer holidays to ‘work’ and not get paid for it you probably wouldn’t believe me but that is what happened. Admittedly some of us worked much harder than others (no names) but some of us yes I am talking about myself found it a little hard to go from living in a feral chicken like state for the last few weeks to actually having to think. It didn’t take long though before we all started firing off great ideas about ways to use some really useful and FREE Microsoft products to really engage our learners (teachers and students)

We got to hear more about all the lastest things from Microsoft that are completely free and have excellent potential for you to use in the classroom. I don’t want to just post them all here as there is a list on the innovative teachers blog or just click on Graeme’s post as he has put all the links together for you!

The main focus for the summer camp was to create these little quite sexy things called innovids – basically short nuggets (not chicken) of video tutorials that teachers and students can watch and then try out some of the ideas in their classrooms.

You can see the current crop of excellent innovids here from last year’s campers and also some case studies that may be useful! http://www.youtube.com/user/innovativeteach

Here is my first innovid – it may not be the final version and is yet to get approval from those that matter but here is a sneak preview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jz2CB7ijl0  

A few final recommendations if you are working within education and are interested in using technology & ICT:

• Sign up or regularly visit the Innovative teachers youtube channel – there are already lots of really good videos on there especially the innovids and over the next few months there could be up to 80 more or so appearing which is a fantastic resource for you. http://www.youtube.com/user/innovativeteach
• If you are on twitter then look at the feed from the 2 days by searching for #mscamp – yes there are alot of strange and slightly silly tweets on there but also lots of good comments & ideas – in fact you could as @daviderogers suggested use blastfollow http://www.blastfollow.com/ and automatically follow all of the brilliant innovative teachers that were at the summer camp and you can start connecting with them on twitter.
• If you are still not signed up to the Innovative Teachers Network then please do as you are missing out as currently there are 1,594,392 Educators
  59 Countries sharing resources and ideas http://uk.partnersinlearningnetwork.com/Pages/default.aspx
• Also sign up and read regular updates at the Microsoft Innovative Teachers blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/teachers/

 The best thing about the camp apart from visiting the Microsoft campus which is an incredible environment to work in was meeting and spending time with such a fantastic bunch of teachers and other people who work with education. It has really inspired me and energised (recharged my batteries) and I now feel ready to hit the new school year at full speed!