Last night I had a huge privilege to speak at the Teachmeet in Plymouth aimed at inspiring and giving professional development to people aspiring to be teachers and newly qualified teachers. The event was organised by the Plymouth Educational Society at the University of Plymouth so special thanks must go to them and thank you to Vital for supporting the Teachmeet and helping organise it – special thanks to Clare Fenwick the Regional Manager for the South West – you can follow her tweets @csf0961.
Last night I had a huge privilege to speak at the Teachmeet in Plymouth aimed at inspiring and giving professional development to people aspiring to be teachers and newly qualified teachers. The event was organised by the Plymouth Educational Society at the University of Plymouth so special thanks must go to them and thank you to Vital for supporting the Teachmeet and helping organise it – special thanks to Clare Fenwick the Regional Manager for the South West – you can follow her tweets @csf0961.
I am so impressed with the Plymouth Education Society and all the members who are playing an active role in making it a success. It was brilliant to meet some of the main organisers such as Alex & Terri you can follow them on twitter @alexgingell & @terr1_leigh they are both BEd Primary students in their fourth year. I think it is fantastic to have set up such a society whilst at University and I just kept thinking I wish there had been something like this set up while I was at University, I think that the society is incredibly lucky to have a network of support like this and I came away from the event thinking that if this is what our future teachers will be like then the next few years are going to be an amazing time.
So there was around 160 ‘future or actual teachers’ in the audience which is a fantastic turn out for a Teachmeet and during the evening we heard from Steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth who held it together extremely well considering he had just finished something like a 40 hour plane journey. Steve will be posting his presentation in the next day or two so I will link up to it later. You can follow the twitter feed about it though using #tmpitte. We then also heard from Stephen Farmer @stephenfarmer from St James school in Exeter although this was virtually as his gear box had fallen out of his gar, hopefully it wasn’t while he was driving. The best bits though for me was hearing the extremely brave and innovative work that the students had been doing in school @alexgingell has been using twitter in a primary school to help with literacy in boys and Gareth @garethjxl spoke about some of the projects he has been involved with using Nintendo Wii’s with students with profound and multiple learning disabilities . I have to say both talks really were inspiring stuff – I was so impressed with all the people I met during the evening, I would have loved to have met more of the audience there as they had some excellent questions and extremely profound viewpoints if only we had more time to discuss them.
Of course I was also there to do a presentation in fact it was a bogof as I did two presentations, the first was to talk about the ethos and approach to learning at Saltash.net Community School as a viewpoint from a local secondary school. You can see the presentation on slide share here: http://slidesha.re/bSKigb The second presentation was a technology survival kit for new teachers – you can also see this presentation on slide share http://slidesha.re/a4SuJB or a more detailed account of it can be seen on the following blog post: http://bit.ly/cT0Kba
The title of this post sums it up to me – ‘The future of education is in safe hands’ when I was at university we joined the coc-soc a society that provided you with a good time and lots of cocktails whereas here you have a group that also has lots of fun but already takes pride in their future profession and is already focusing on the importance of their own professional development and I think that in a depressing time economically and the cuts coming to education that this is something that makes me smile. What do you think? What do you think of the presentations?