Oct 28 2009
Highland Learning Festival 09
Education staff in the Highlands have just participated in a mammoth CPD event called the Highland Learning Festival. Hosted by Dingwall Academy, the event was billed as a Highland Curriculum for Excellence Showcase.
Sessions on the first day were booked up well in advance, with 1000 teachers and auxiliaries spending Tuesday at the festival. I had planned to go along on the second day as the programme had more ICT and secondary sessions of interest to me. However, that changed when I became a late addition to Wednesday’s schedule with a double slot to speak about the work I have been doing with blogging and iTunes in my classroom.
The numbers for my sessions were low on paper but two or three times as many people turned up each time. I spoke briefly about running a blog before explaining how SMART Notebook software can be used to produce a videos that can be downloaded as podcasts with iTunes. Then we looked at the ways in which everyday handheld devices such as mobile phones and iPods can be used for mobile learning. I was genuinely surprised by the level of interest shown and the number of questions I was asked during and after each session.
I was delighted when I managed to squeeze into Ollie Bray & Derek Robertson‘s games-based learning session at 12.30 in between my own slots. I’d met Derek before, he was one of the tutors from my PGCE course, but I had never met Ollie despite having exchanged tweets and interviewed him on Skype for a podcast.
The single disappointment for me was the way that the event finished so quickly in the afternoon. My last slot was over by 2.30 and by then many of the exhibitors were packing up. If the rumours are true and the event is run again next year, then I think I would try to spend more than just one day there to ensure I could take something from the event for my professional development.
As always, I was economic with slides but I have embedded them anyway. There’s also an audio recording of the morning session attached to this post.
