Today I gave a presentation to fellow Moodlers at the first ever TeachMeet Moodle which was organised by Dan Humpherson (@MoodleDan) and was hosted at Heythrop College in Kensington, London. The Meet kicked off at 11:00 with speed “dating” networking followed by a series of excellent and varied presentations.
The Twitter hash tag for the event is: #TMMoodle.and you can see a complete archive of the tweets here. All the details about the Meet can be found here, including a list of attendees, presentation titles and discussion topics.
Below is the recording of my presentation: Blended Learning: How Moodle changes the learning inside and outside of my classroom. Thanks to Leon Cych (@eyebeams) for recording all of the presentations.
[Update]: The video of the presentation is no longer available.
And here are the slides I used in the presentation. I did overrun a little but I don’t think anyone was too upset by that! 🙂
During my presentation I briefly discussed my belief that Moodle brings the ‘learning spaces’ of the campfire, watering hole and cave into one place, blending them together. My understanding of these concepts represent my response to reading David D. Thornburg Ph.D.‘s ‘Campfires in Cyberspace’. You can read it here and see an extensive mind map that I created exploring the ideas put forward by Thornburg here.
Presentations of note:
After dealing with a few technical issues, Gideon Williams (@gideonwilliams) used Prezi to show a wide variety of plugins that help improve the functionality and interactivity of Moodle. This really hit home as I am always looking to improve the way that I use Moodle. (See the video here.)
The other presentation that struck a chord was delivered by Dai Barnes (@daibarnes) who showed off some fab moodling at St Benedict’s School. Their VLE looks great and is used really well by a member of their Music department. Great results from a teacher being encouraged to experiment with Moodle. (See the video here.)
Honourable mentions also go to Miles Berry (@mberry) for his presentation about using Moodle to teach teachers about e-learning (and for being a really nice guy); Daniel Needlestone (@nstone) who kept it light-hearted with his ‘Mallards and Moodle’ presentation; and Helen Morgan (@nellmog) who made a strong case for form being as important as functionallity within a Moodle course. You can see their presentations (and the rest) here.
I would like to say thanks to everyone involved. It was my first TeachMeet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Anticipating and looking forward to the next one.
Great to meet you. Enjoyed your design conscious presentation, your light hearted, but thought provoking style even more. Will be investigating David D. Thornburg Ph.D.'s 'Campfires in Cyberspace' in the not too distant future.
Thanks Kristian, it was great to meet you to. You are far too kind but I am glad you enjoyed it.
I learned a lot during the day and met some great people.
I also feel that I made some progress on my presentation style but it still needs some work – perhaps a few less slides next time! 🙂
Enjoy 'Campfires', it's very interesting. My interest in learning spaces was sparked by Prof. Sugata Mitra's 'Hole in the Wall presentation at #mootuk10.
Hi James
It was great to meet you on Saturday. Hope we can keep in touch. I would like to ask you to do a presentation at our teachers conference in January. We have media teachers who would love to meet and share with you.
I also found Professor Mitra inspiring at Moodle Moot'10. Awesome!
Barbara
Hi Barbara
It was very nice to meet you to. I would be more than happy to come and present at your conference.
Please send me an email with the details. The sooner I know a time and date the easier it will be to get the time booked off from school. You can use my contact page underneath my blog header if you wish.
Could you also give me some idea of what you would like me to present on. I'm happy to do something Moodle related but I also do a lot of video work in Adobe Premiere Pro; still image work in Photoshop; and audio based work including podcasting. You can get a good idea of the sort of things that I do on this blog – have a look through the archive.
As well as this blog I keep a Media department blog here: http://chalfontmediablog.blogspot.com which i am sure the Media teachers at your school will find of interest.
I teach GCSE and A-Level Media, Level 2 Creative Media Diploma, and GCSE English.
Look forward to hearing from you. Enjoy the end of the school year, summer is almost here! 🙂
Hey James,
I enjoyed the presentation and the post. Thank you for making the video and session slides available for those who weren't able to attend. Very Well-done.
Thanks for the kind words Emory. I'm glad you enjoyed the presentation. Feel free to download/use the slides. 🙂
Hi, yes, i'll email and pass on your media blog – thanks a lot, James!
Great, I look forward to hearing from you! 🙂
James, can we establish email contact – would you still be interested in attending out conference? Presenting, I hope?
My email is bgardner@studygroup.com please send me a quick message and I’ll fill you in!
All the best for the new term!
Barbara
Email is on its way. 🙂
James.
Which brings me back to the Schools question – although an increasing number of schools use Moodle, a decreasing number, it seems, are sending delegates to the Moodle Moot Moodle Consulting.