Wednesday 21 March 2012

The Kitchen Table Conference Continues




Another day, another badge.  This one’s for The Round, the e-publishing collective set up by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings in 2011. It sound exciting and subversive and I am looking forward to finding out more – and perhaps, buying their new book of lesson ideas 52.
I’m thoroughly enjoying watching the interviews. At the fag end of a hard day, listening to a ten minute chat is infinitely easier than sitting through an hour long talk. Once again, I find I have come away from my quick whistle stop tour of the British Council Glasgow Online site with a handful of ideas to mull over, websites to pursue and books to look out for.
Thanks to Diana Laurillard’s plenary I’ll be heading to  https://sites.google.com/a/lkl.ac.uk/ldse/  to see how I can improve my abilities as a lesson designer. And after watching the interview with Scott Thornbury, I’ll be delving into task based learning, and looking into how technology can help to build a classroom culture of autonomous learning.
So far, a recurring theme of this conference seems to be an exploration of the way that we as teachers use technology in our classrooms. Rather than just using what is there, it should be our challenge to ascertain the needs of our learners. Then we need to creatively adapt existing technology to fit these needs.