TeachMeet East: Tools and Tips for Teaching, held Saturday 9th 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!
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 6th 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.
