As an eTwinning Ambassador, I was delighted to be able to attend this year's eTwinning Conference at the NCTL in Nottingham at the weekend, after having missed last year due to work commitments. As ever, the whole event filled me with enthusiasm and inspired me to get going with more eTwinning projects in the coming academic year.I think, it's fair to say that, in a time when the teaching profession is criticised daily in the media for being "enemies of promise" and failing pupils no matter what it does, it's not easy to remain positive about a job that I love. This is why an event such as the UK eTwinning Conference is so fantastic, as you never meet a negative eTwinner. They are always so full of energy and new ideas that you cannot fail to be uplifted. This was certainly true of this weekend. Not only were the workshops (which I'll come to later) inspirational but also the opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet new ones to share ideas and experience is invaluable.
The British Council and eTwinning always manage to put together a programme for these events that gives opportunity for collective reflection and also for personal (professional) growth and this weekend was no different. The conference was started with a Key Note speech from Aileen Monaghan, and HMI for Education Scotland. She spoke about "Transformative change in learning and links with international education". It was truly awesome to hear an HMI praise teachers and talk about how our work is crucial in moving pupils forward. She also highlighted a project from a workshop that I attended, showcasing how eTwinning had worked together with HMIs to move a school from a very difficult place where staff were unhappy and children weren't getting the most out of their education to transforming the learning and the school. I have to say that I ended up wishing that I worked in Scotland, where people seem very sensible indeed!
My first workshop was run by David Mitchell and was on the theme of Quadblogging. This is something that I have been interested in for a while and have often thought about getting involved. David spoke about how blogging had increased pupil achievement with his Year 6 class over the course of a year and also about how he came up with the idea of Quadblogging. The idea is fantastic. 4 classes with 4 different blogs who visit and comment on those blogs in a cycle each month. That is way too simplistic a description of it and would suggest that if you don't yet know about Quadblogging, you can read about it at Quadblogging.net. I have signed up and hope to get my new Tutor Group Quadblogging in September.
Saturday afternoon saw me going to Bob Harrison's workshop on Education's Digital Future. It was mind blowing to think about where technology can take our pupils and how little (some) schools have prepared for this. I was particularly interested in a quiz that Bob did with us about new technologies and to find out where pupils often sit with this in comparison to their teachers. We need to make sure that we keep up with them otherwise schools will be left behind.
The eTwinning Awards, as ever were full of inspirational teachers being rewarded for their outstanding projects, giving me lots of food for thought in terms of projects for next year.
Sunday saw us in more workshops. In the one I went to run by John Warwick and Lesley Atkins I found more about the school and project that I mentioned earlier. It was really fascinating to see how international education can transform a school and the learning within that school. What a shame more people can't see the possibilities. It is essential that for international education within schools to be successful, it needs to be embedded in the curriculum otherwise when staff change, it dies. eTwinning is so easy to do and to embed into the curriculum!
As the conference drew to a close, we were reminded of how important it is to make sure that our pupils are digitally educated by Connor Galvin of University College, Dublin and discussed the topic of who is responsible for our children's digital safety. There is no easy answer to this but we did decided (on our table) that digital safety was essential and should be a partnership between school and parents - however all too often parents don't know what "digital safety" means.
The conference closed and we all bid our sad farewells to one another, happy in the knowledge that we had not given up our weekends for nothing and fully enthused for the end of term!
Watch out for new eTwinning projects from me coming your way in 2013-14...including something involving Scratch (I hope)
You can find out more about eTwinning at http://etwinning.net and at eTwinning UK's blog.
