More information for the Year 1 Study Day 26 March

The schedule for the Study Day is available to download here.

As a reminder, the activity from the first Study Day is here.

Format for presentations at next year 1 Study Day

The heading links to a PowerPoint file for download.

At the Study Day, one of the Interest Group tasks (you may remember), is to report back to the rest of the group on the work you started in those groups at the first Study Day.

There is no obligation to do so via PowerPoint: but we know from experience how difficult it is to contain such presentations, if you do choose to use it. So if you do use PowerPoint, we have set up a template for you to use.*

It will help you to produce a five-minute presentation, based on 15 slides, each showing for 20 seconds and progressing automatically, which means that you will need to rehearse and practise the presentation. Download and save it, and then open it and run it as a slideshow, and all will become clear!


* It's not actually a template file, for reasons of flexibility, but you can use it as such. Just open it, delete the existing content, and replace with your own.

Graduation 2011

We can now confirm that Graduation will take place on 27 October this year, at the ecumenical Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes. You should get letters of invitation in August and two tickets per person.

No news yet of which ceremony (there are generally at least two) you will be graduating at, but you can book the date now, and pass it on.

From Kathryn Ecclestone

To everyone who attended Kathryn's session on Saturday--the link is to a brief article in the Times from last year which summarises her position.

Teaching with technology: from the Study Day on 5 March 11

Many thanks to Carole, Jon, Ian, Gary and Simon for their brilliant contributions to this half-plenary session! I promised to post the links and/or sources...

Carole's offering was based on Moodle; the system itself is free, but of course Castle's implementation of it and content based on it is protected, so I can't pass it on.

Jon's work is based on using the under-used interactive potential of PowerPoint (tm, blah) but we can't guarantee that the macros will work just as downloaded.

He recommended http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/ as a general resource,but go here and you will find his own material.

For the music-- http://www.televisiontunes.com/ is a good starting point.

And go to http://www.wordle.net/ to create word maps of any body of text.

Incidentally, Jon is leaving the Royal Navy at the end of the year and is hoping to take his skills to a college or university environment. To contact him with any queries, translate jongarthwaite510 (at) hotmail.com into a valid email address.

Ian's use of clickers in numeracy work with prisoners is set out here:

Matthews personal response systems

Gary's short but intensive presentation on the range of collaborative tools available, the support from expert communities, and ways in which well-established web tools such as Twitter can be harnessed for educational purposes:

Bedford

...and Simon brought it all together showing how free tools can be enlisted to create a DIY VLE;

Diy vle

Just in case the link to the demo does not work directly, it is here; http://diyvle.wikispaces.com

Parity established between QTLS and QTS

Something to brighten up gloomy late winter days. The Wolf Report on 14-19 vocational education includes among many other welcome recommendations, one that QTLS be accepted as a full qualification for teaching in schools, just as QTS is accepted in FE. Not only that but the recommendation has been accepted immediately; as the press release indicates:

Mr Gove said Prof Wolf’s report was "brilliant and ground-breaking”. He immediately accepted four recommendations:

• To allow qualified further education lecturers to teach in school classrooms on the same basis as qualified school teachers....

Second Year Study Day 5 March

This post is to give you some advance notice about arrangements for the afternoon on 5 March and to enlist your help if possible.

The plan for the day as a whole is that Prof. Kathryn Ecclestone will lead the morning plenary on The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (you might like to read her co-authored book, or at least the PCE chapter of it, in advance if you can: Ecclestone K and Hayes P (2008) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education London; Routledge)

After lunch the Interest Groups meet to follow up on their discussions and report back on what you have implemented at work following Vivienne's session at the first Study Day this year, and then...

The rest of the day will be a cox and box split session:

Half of you will start with a session on Where next? looking at opportunities for further learning and development, including the IfL, CPD, the university's Diploma and MA programmes, while the other half will be looking at Enhancing learning with technology, and then you will swap over.

The technology session will probably involve a further split into two self-selected groups, "beginners" and "advanced", given that there is a wide range of knowledge and expertise represented in the whole group.

We hope that the Advanced group will largely be led by yourselves; it will be an opportunity to showcase ways in which you have made use of technology in your teaching, including social networking, blogs, wikis, twitter, and more specific tools such as Prezi or VoiceThread or even SecondLife (although I gather that is now a little passe).

There is not going to be very much time, so if you are interested in sharing your experience and demonstrating your practice, please get in touch with James Atherton as soon as possible and let me know your intentions. We'll review the offers we get, select those which offer a good range of ideas and are likely to appeal to a wide range of colleagues, and let you know if we invite you to present.

Similarly, if you are planning to join the Beginners' group we should like to hear from you about packages and techniques you would like to hear about from tutors (or indeed yourselves). These may be academic tools such as Zotero, presentation packages such as Prezi, blogging tools, cloud based facilities such as Google docs and the invaluable Dropbox.

Do get in touch so we can focus on what you want!

Watch this space for more information.