Archive for January, 2012

TeachMeet Brisbane

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, social media, technology on January 23, 2012

During 2011 a range of TeachMeets were held throughout Sydney.  A central wiki was set up to coordinate the events and the hashtag #TMSydney ran hot during the meets.

The events were great successes, described by participants as welcoming, supporting and positive.  This is not surprising, when you consider that the ethos behind the event is that it is strictly free professional development run ‘for teachers, by teachers’.  What I thought was most attractive about the TeachMeet structure was the short presentations – either a 2 minute ‘nano-presentation or a 7 minute micro-presentation (or Pecha Kucha).  It sounds like an ideal way to hear a little bit from a lot of people.

You can therefore imagine how stoked I was to hear that someone was organising the first ever TeachMeet in BRISBANE!

#TMBrisbane

TEACHMEET BRISBANE will be held from 4-6pm at Moreton Bay Boys’ College on Thursday 1st March 2012.

If you would like to register or get more information, you can visit and join the TMBrisbane wiki: http://tmbrisbane.wikispaces.com/

Of course, I was so excited to see the event come to Brissie that I had to volunteer to present.  It will also be a great chance for me to refine my pecha kucha style!

(I also look forward to the #TMBrisbane hastag drawing together more of the Brisbane edu-community)

Pass it on

If you would like to be involved in TeachMeet Brisbane, or to support the event, take a look at the flyer available for download on the wiki.

In the Twittershpere you can participate in the backchannel from anywhere (not just Brisbane!) on March 1st by adding #TMBrisbane to your tweets.

Finally, this video about TeachMeets made for Sydney West is a great one to pass around to folk who are new to the TeachMeet concept…enjoy!

 

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New Years Resolutions – 2012

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections on January 17, 2012

By nigelhowe (CC BY 2.0)

OK, just a couple of weeks late for a post like this, but what can I say?

I feel the urge to make some plans.

  1. Go to less conferences: I loves me a good conference 🙂  But when you fill up every break you have with a work trip, you never actually have a break.  Sounds reasonable enough, however I am already slated to attend the AERA annual meeting in April, the AATE conference in October, and the AARE-APERA conference in December.  At least that’s one less than last year I suppose…
  2. Learn more names: 9 weeks to learn 80 names – by golly! Putting students into reading groups helped me to learn more names last semester.  Next semester I think more students will be joining Twitter for their assessment task, so that will help a little more.  But my big idea this semester is to use OneNote better for this kind of thing, giving each class its own folder and importing student photos where possible.
  3. Finish three academic papers: This is my year to publish, I’m sure.  Thesis writing burnt me out for a long time in terms of wanting to write, but this year my resolve is firmly in this direction.  I need to remember how to write and be happy.

It’s got to be dangerous to make more than three new years resolutions, so I’ll stop there!

I still have a month before university teaching starts again.  Plenty of time to work on some writing.  But also plenty of time to work on my blog, and on my unit outline, and a raft of other things.

At least this post is out of the way.

First posts of the year; they make me kinda nervous…

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