It's grins up North

This year's Northern Grid for Learning Conference in Newcastle was a great experience for the 230 or so education professionals who attended. The day long professional development event was hearty, encouraging, inspirational and highly entertaining - not something that can be said of every conference I have ever attended. I won't go into too many details of the day, which has already been covered quite well by the likes of Bill Lord and Martin Waller, but I will say this: There was plenty of smiling time. In a time when education is being squeezed and where there are not a lot of reasons for teachers to be cheerful, this event was quite a tonic. Russell Prue, in his inimitable, hilarious, and ever so slightly camp style, opened the proceedings with a barnstorming keynote. The humour was at times sledgehammer stuff, with Russell poking fun at inept government ministers, and parodying rigid school systems. We need a new model of assessment he argued, and it should not be based on 'guess what's inside the teacher's head.' He severely criticised the manner in which standardised tests and exams are conducted and gave us several OMG moments - as he exposed some of the differentials that are evident between what teachers teach and what learners learn. Shift has already happened, he remarked, and the world is not turning back to where it once was. When we ban mobile phones in school, he asked, who are we trying to protect? The learners, or the teachers and the school? Warming to his theme, he received one of the biggest laughs of the morning when he said: 'No pillock in London has the right or the expertise to tell you what to do in your own school'. It was indeed an impressive start to the day, and many delegates went to coffee with grins all over their faces.

The workshops following the break were varied and fast paced, including sessions on digital storytelling, new tools and web applications, school blogging, using tech to support language learning and learning platforms from a whole host of familiar Twitter familiars, including Ian Usher, Dan Roberts, Lisa Stevens, Steve Bunce, Joe Dale and Bev Evans (all of whom are great value to follow on Twitter). Ian Addison's session on 15 ideas in 15 minutes was one particular highlight for me, because the ideas were wide ranging and far reaching in their potential. Jan Webb's session was equally eclectic, as she took us on a journey through a number of useful ICT applications, and showed the memorable and delightful video of twin babies holding a conversation about a lost sock.

I won't go into details of my own closing keynote, but Russell Prue referred to me as a 'Dynomutt' (I assume by this he meant I was barking, but I will take it as a compliment) ;-) I will say that I probably had the most difficult job of any the conference presenters, and that was to try to summarise and consolidate on the back of so many excellent presentations, as well as attempting to follow them when they had been so inspirational. I guess one of my main contributions to the conferences was to call all those teachers present to make a difference, be champions and agents of change, and to never, ever give up, even when the odds appear to be against you. If you are fighting a gorilla, I told them, you don't rest up when you are tired. You rest up when the gorilla is tired.A big thank you must go out to Simon Finch and the rest of the Northern Grid for Learning team for organising a very enjoyable and thought provoking event. Simon's images of the event can be viewed here.


It's grins up North by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.