TeachMeet East: Tools and Tips for Teaching

TeachMeet East: Tools and Tips for Teaching, held Saturday 9^th July 2016, Anglia Ruskin, Chelmsford Campus

I was in the middle of recovering from a rather severe bout of tonsillitis when I attended, so I had really debated whether or not I was really up to going. In the end I figured I wasn’t going to have to participate in anything too strenuous, and the alternative was staying at home entertaining the 15-month old, so I waved goodbye to her and her daddy at Rhyme Time and headed over to Chelmsford.

It was a lovely drive through very pleasant countryside, passing through a few quaint villages on the way. I got a bit het up when I couldn’t find exactly the place I needed to get to, nor whether it was okay to park, but those minor points navigated, I eventually arrived to discover I was about the fifth person to arrive. A quick refresh, then a spot of relaxed networking until everyone was there.

So if you’ve never done a TeachMeet before, the structure is very fluid. There were a few things planned for the day, but the order in which we tackled them – and in fact, if we tackled them at all – was up to us. Ideas were submitted, and people shouted out what they wanted to learn. In fact, the whole process was done on one of the tools being demonstrated: Padlet.

I’d come across Padlet before – I can’t really remember where, but it wasn’t exactly new to me, but the use of it in this way was really good. Once we were all up online (this took a little faffing, because only a few of us had Eduroam, and most had to be signed in individually as guests through email, which you couldn’t access without internet, but you couldn’t get access to internet without the email – yeah, a definite complication!), anyway, once we were all online and able to edit the Padlet, it was a fun, dynamic way for us all to add notes.

We could be anonymous, as it was a public board, so suggestions came in, popping up from everywhere, as well as comments like “toilets?”. As it was real time, it was very quick from brain storm to pinboard, so we could get going straightaway. I don’t think I’d seen Padlet used in this way before, and once the teething problems of logging everyone in and being able to find the website were resolved, it was easy to get involved.

Ultimately yes, you could just use a white board, a couple of volunteers and get everyone to shout out suggestions, but Padlet offered a couple of advantages over that:

1.      It overcomes the problem of being too shy to speak up in front of others

2.      It can be more flexible than simple text: URLs, images, videos all work (I think) so instead of saying a random non-word, you can actually direct everyone to the app you’re talking about

3.      It stores each board at a unique place so you have a permanent (-ish) record of what you covered – without you having to take a photo!

Check out our board at https://padlet.com/wall/koa2z6sulpra!

So once we’d done that, we started on the first activity, which was games to get people moving. We were divided into teams and first did a “what’s in the box?” game, where we all had to search for clues around the room, put together the clues we had and guess what was in the box. The second was a jar of tasks, some mental, some creative, some physical (“do a roly-poly”, “figure out this anagram”, “find someone left-handed”…). In our teams we got a point for each one we completed, and it was a race to complete the most.

It was fun, and got us moving, but if it was meant to be an ice-breaker, I don’t think it worked as such – you get so caught up in doing the activities, you don’t really pay attention to the people around you! It does scale up though, apparently, if there are lots of teams you can give yourselves team names and #teamname your answer.

The second thing we looked at was Kahoot! which was a fun way to do a quiz. I am definitely going to use this somehow in the next year; it was a lot of fun and adrenaline-fuelled (although I think I came pretty near the bottom in the results) – great if you’re competitive, and again, you can be entirely anonymous while playing, if you pick a non-identifying username. It relies on pretty good wifi/reception/network, but it will work even if a player goes missing halfway through. Also, crucially, it has a feedback page which is really quick and easy to fill in once you’ve finished the quiz, so hopefully you can get instant feedback, which is downloadable and then you’ve got a record of it for the future.

I was surprised when at the time this was being played with, Google Forms was also thrown into the mix as a viable alternative for surveys – I mean, yes, it’s fine, but it’s ages old, and nothing like so much fun to play with!

After that someone asked about the Cephalonian Method, which I’ve not thought about since (and I had to check my blog for this!) 2011! It sounds very different from what I thought it was at the time though. Originally I thought it involved getting the students to ask questions, then you answering the questions but offering more information beyond what they’d asked. (“Do you have a photocopier?” “Yes, it does colour, it’s available [here], at [these times], and you need [this] to operate it.”). Turns out I’d misunderstood completely and Cephalonian is lots of cards, colour-coded, with questions written on, which you hand to your audience. They read out the card and you answer, with the idea being that:

1.      You don’t have to remember to cover everything; it’s done by the cards

2.      It keeps it fresh for you because it’s not in the same order every time – you’re less likely to forget things

3.      Because they speak up once, they’re more likely to ask further questions

People discussing it did say they have had variable success with it (though the answer to that was usually external motivators, ie sweets), and it really seems more of a benefit to use for the presenter, rather than the audience. Oh well. It was good to review this, because it wasn’t what I was expecting, and because it’s been around a while, nearly everyone’s tried it and could share successes and failures.

During the break I got chatting with people and lots of ideas came bouncing around out of this as well. I wasn’t able to write down everything, but I made a few scribbles afterwards while I remembered what I could.

1.      Snap game: matching questions to answers. Give everyone a card and they have to find their pair. E.g. Q: When does the library open? A: Mon-Fri, 9-5. To make it easier you could have author names on the backs so people can use these to confirm the correct pairs

2.      Standing in Dewey order: give everyone a card with a Dewey number on, get them to line themselves up in classmark order – apparently kids (and 6^th formers) love this!

3.      Standing in referencing order – e.g. in groups of 4, one has a title, one has an author, one has a date and one has a location. They have to arrange themselves in order, and lean over if they’re supposed to be in italics – a really kinaesthetic way of remembering where the italics come in referencing!

4.      Matching books: everyone is given a book, and has to find something they have in common with someone else. The nice thing about this is that they don’t have to have read the book if they’re a weak reader, e.g. “my book is blue and so is so-and-so’s”.

5.      Conscience alley: this sounded pretty dramatic, and might be difficult with large groups. A dilemma is presented, and people line up on two sides. One side is “for” and one is “against”, and the person with the dilemma has to walk between the lines, and as they pass each person, they offer their reason “for” or “against”. I can see this being a really interesting way to debate a work in English, as it reminds me of one of my earliest English classes at high school, where we read a passage from Oliver Twist when he meets Fagin and his pickpockets. The question we were asked was “is it a good thing that Oliver has met these people?” I’d written “yes, he’s been offered a roof over his head, they have food, warmth, etc”, and the teacher had decided that the correct answer was “no, they’re obviously criminals”.

6.      Doctors and patients: strong readers pair up with weaker readers to try and explore the reasons why the weaker readers aren’t reading, and offer solutions.

A lot of people strongly recommended the School LibrariansNetwork, a Yahoo group, for more ideas, downloadable content and support.

The next “formal” topic was The Unbelievable Truth of Medical History!, a brilliant evidence game from the Royal College of Nursing. In groups we had to arrange cards with statements on into three groups:

1.      Current model

2.      Disproved theory/practice

3.      Entirely fictional

We were presented with the answers, and would have been asked to find the evidence to support our answers of the first (and second) group. There were some surprises, and much hilarity, and then we had to reflect: why should we care about outdated theories? How do we ensure that what we do know is up to date and reliable? It was a fun game, with a great message behind it, and it really trains people to evaluate.

On the back of this one of the attendees offered one of her own games as a former teacher. In a class, divide into 3-4 groups, and each group is given some pieces of “evidence”. From this, they have to piece together a timeline in their groups, then show it to the rest of the class. Some evidence would be deliberately misleading or conflicting, some would narrow it down one way but not another, etc, and she said it was really interesting how the first group would say “here is The Timeline,” then the next group would say “no, it can’t be because this,” then they’d slot their timeline in, juggling the first group’s evidence, and the first group would be affronted, then the third group would enter and eventually the idea is that they all realise that timelines are only guesswork and subjectivity, interspersed with very few bits of concrete evidence. This sounded absolutely brilliant, but I’m sure it would have been a lot of work to put together.

Other good evaluating tools – particularly with school-level info literacy – are the fake or grossly biased websites. Some mentioned include the online pregnancy test, tree octopus, dog island, bonsai kittens and martinlutherking(dot)org, though care should be taken when accessing really unpleasant sites like the last one.

The next thing we looked at was RoboBraille, which is an amazing accessibility tool which has actually been around for over a decade. We uploaded a document and supplied an email address, and it sent back a text-to-speech version of the same document. Brilliant if you’ve got lots of resources but they’re not accessible – much quicker than recording yourself – much less excruciating to listen to too!

Another tool which was discussed was Aurasma. This is an augmented reality tool, which one of the presenters had used. She said it took a lot of time to prepare something which ultimately only lasted a few minutes and could be cheated, so she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, but it might be a case of finding the right thing to use it for.

By now we were all feeling a little information overloaded, so we decided to finish up by lounging around on the new beanbags (brilliant!) and just discussing whatever took our fancy. We covered all sorts of areas, from Accelerated Reader and Active Learn to the flipped classroom and team-based learning, from nesting habits of students in exam term (a sore point at the moment!) to library pets and stress relief. One thing a couple of people had tried was golden tickets – these would be hidden in places throughout the library, and if you found one, it would be to redeem a coffee at the campus café etc – a way of getting students out of the library and forcing them to take breaks!

We rounded off the day with a tour of the Cheltenham Campus library, several floors of books built around an atrium (honestly, architects, why do you insist on atrium-style libraries? They’re the absolute worst!).

It was a good afternoon, filled with some really great ideas about making information literacy lots of fun. One thing I loved was that there was a really good mix of academic libraries, school libraries and public libraries, and it was pleasurable to escape the Cambridge bubble for a while! There was a lot of chat, a lot of problem solving and idea sharing, which is the whole point of this sort of thing. It was small enough that everyone got involved in everything, and a lot of fun.

One thing that really came out of it though was the fact that everyone felt not enough is done to support information literacy in schools. We’re given induction time, but it’s just not enough. Many of the teachers seem not to understand its importance, and then when it does become important (e.g. when it’s worth 10% of your grade in an assignment at uni – true story, bro), the students simply don’t have the skills. Some teachers even consider their librarians to be on a par with the unskilled staff at the schools and don’t seem interested in what they can offer, which is incredibly discouraging. I’m not sure how we solve this.

Still, a great event, amazing value for money (free!), and a great opportunity to meet colleagues from a variety of backgrounds. Thoroughly recommended.

Library Camp

Library Camp 7^th September 2013 (CILIP East of England, Harlow, Essex)

I’ll be honest, I was quite nervous about attending this. I signed up immediately when it was first advertised, thinking to myself “well, I can always duck out if it’s too far beyond my comfort zone.” Because the thing is, I’m awful at networking. I can’t just stroll up to a random person and say hi; it’s just not me. If they stroll up to me, and strike up a conversation, that’s fine, I won’t act like a rabbit in headlights and freeze, or make excuses and scurry off. I will attempt to engage in entertaining and interesting debate, I promise. But essentially, I was there to listen. And learn. Not to contribute.

So Saturday dawned, and my partner has been away for a week, leaving me alone at home, with the prospect of him being away another week still. At work, my colleague has spent the last week in Wales, and was spending another week there before coming back to work. I was therefore facing a weekend alone, having spent the best part of the last week alone, and knowing that I was going to be spending the best part of next week alone too. I realised that if I didn’t go to Library Camp, I would be spending Saturday at home, alone, talking to myself and gradually going mad. “Fair enough,” I thought, “It can’t be worse than this. Let’s go.”

Harlow College

I ran into slight issues when I realised that the postcode was so new that my satnav didn’t recognise it. However, I do have a rather swanky smartphone, which successfully navigated me the whole way from Cambridge to Harlow. I found where I was going fairly easily, and ended up being just a few minutes late. I was greeted warmly by the organisers, and deposited my chocolate flapjacks on the lunch table, which was groaning under the weight of the food people had brought. The number of people who had come surprised me; I’d only had what I’d seen on the wiki to guide me, and I was unsettled at the lack of movement on there. A few names (many of which I recognised) had announced their presence, and I assumed there were going to be a few more than that who – like me – had not felt brave enough to add themselves to the wiki conversations. But the camp was well-attended; probably more than 70 librarians (and at least one non-librarian) were listening to the introduction when I entered the hall.

Relaxing during the introduction

Immediately, I was struck by how relaxed and informal it was. There were people standing, some sitting on chairs, and a fair few who were lounging on the floor while the organisers talked. Then the people who had pitched ideas for discussion came forward to talk a little about what they had suggested, why they had suggested it and what they were hoping to get out of it. These ideas were written on post-its and plonked into timeslots on the schedule, juggled around to make sure that no one who’d pitched more than one idea was double-booked, and then the whole thing began!

The first session I attended was one on solo librarianship. I guess I’m not so much of a solo librarian, in that I do have a part-time colleague (12 hrs/w) and also am very fortunate to have a volunteer who puts in a full day every now and then. However, I spend huge portions of my time working alone, so I figured there was going to be something I could gain from this. And there was. Even though we all came from very disparate working backgrounds, there were lots of issues and challenges common to us all. However, sharing problems meant that we could also share solutions, and I came away feeling like there was action I could take to cope with the situation, which was a surprisingly positive outcome. And if there is a solo librarians support group set up, I think it would be really useful to get involved. [Separate solo librarians article here.]

Our schedule for the day

There was a little break while we all shifted round, so I took the opportunity to help myself to a drink; it was nice that there was always something to hand, and we weren’t constricted by a “10.20-10.25: Coffee time” deadline. If you got hungry or thirsty, you could simply get up and walk out of your discussion group, help yourself, and come back. I very much appreciated this, since in my haste I’d skipped breakfast that morning. So I moved on to the next group, which was “What’s so good about libraries?”. What do we offer that’s unobtainable anywhere else? I found this had rather a public library bent, particularly towards children, given the demographic of the audience, but it was interesting finding out a bit more about what public libraries offer, and how they justify themselves to their councillors.

Lunchtime, and some delicious home-made and not-so-home-made items, and then it was time for the next session. This was a CV/interview surgery session, which was well-attended. I found myself sharing a lot of information, but there were lots of people talking about good interview they’d had, bad interviews, awkward questions, things that had gone well, things that hadn’t…again I came away with some useful ideas, but hopefully I contributed a few too. [Separate CV/interview notes here.]

My contribution to the write-in

I wasn’t sure what to go for after that, but when the person who’d pitched the idea of a creative write-in expanded it to include all things creative, I got out my handy ball of wool and my size 5 crochet hook, and just sat for a while, thinking, listening to the scritching of pens and taking the opportunity to relax and do some guilt-free rows of crochet. Afterwards people talked about what they were working on, and I was so impressed at the novel ideas coming out. Several people had had a go at NaNoWriMo and were preparing for the next one happening in a couple of months’ time. Librarians really are quite a creative bunch!

The perils of unconferencing: last-minute changes

Last session, and I went for the A-Z of libraries, which in hindsight, was a bit of a waste of time for me, inasmuch as it was nearly identical to “What’s so good about libraries?” except for the fact that it was now in alphabetical order. Voices for the Library is generally only for public libraries, so again there was a heavy public library bias in the group demographic, and in the results. It was interesting, but not terribly relevant to my work, but I was beginning to feel the effects of information overload anyway, so I was content to sit back and let the discussion flow around me.

There was no plenary, as insufficient time had been scheduled for one (as it turned out), but I didn’t mind; I felt like I’d had as much library stuff as I could take, and I’ve never really seen the point in plenaries beyond thanking the organisers anyway, so it was a matter of picking up the remains of the lunch I’d brought with me, and heading off home. I left some positive feedback, and I shall be eagerly awaiting the next library camp!