Teachmeet North East London

Last night I attended the North East London Teachmeet held at the Learning and Development Centre in the London borough of Havering.

I was invited to do a mini-note presentation and talked about the use of technology as part of a blended learning environment. My talk was titled “Mr Barrett I Have Got Glue on My Laptop” and I used Prezi for the first time which worked really well. 

I was pleased to have an opportunity to meet Dawn Hallybone who talked about Games Based Learning in her school. She talked about using the Nintendo DSs and Pictochat as a way to do shared writing. A lovely idea to engage lots of children with writing. I will be picking her brains some more as we place our order for a class set of Nintendo DSs for our Year 4 children. (Should we get the new DSi though?)

Ollie Bray, the ever present feature of many TeachMeets, was attending and talked through some of his work with Maps, Mashups and Milkfloats. Some of the first person navigation of Google Earth he talked about, using the GE API, would be ideal to enrich a storytelling unit. I also loved the Milkfloat driving which was a lot of fun. Olli never fails to leave me with something to think about and take away to use in my classroom. A great talk.

If you attended I hope you had a fruitful evening learning some new ideas and meeting people. Please let me know what you made of it all. If you you enjoyed it perhaps consider coming to Teachmeet Midlands on the 15th May at the NCSL in Nottingham.