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We hosted this year's fringe event, TeachMeet, here at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland on Wednesday night. The evening was very well attended, and the quality of the presentations was second-to-none. Inspiring stuff! The concept behind TeachMeet, as I explained in my previous post, is to present great ideas for classroom practice. The innovation of these teachers gave us a fresh insight into the people we're making resources for, and to the level of creativity the learners in these classrooms will be used to.

The about the evening has been great - we hope too that it raises awareness of the materials we're making. At the event, we showcased new-look Bitesize, Learning Zone and Pinball; as well as , our day where schools get to make the news (often with the help of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ journalists) and the LAB. Hopefully, everyone who attended will tell their friends and colleagues about them and how great they are.

One of the much-fabled traditions of TeachMeet is the TeachMeet toy camel - owned, I believe, by . The short, snappy presentations are only two or seven minutes long, and anyone who dares run over their slot gets a cuddly toy camel launched at them from the audience. There's a great blogpost (and picture) by of the toy in question at this year's BETT conference! As far as I could make out (in between hurrying around organising things) the camel only made two appearances this time, for and , who both gave excellent presentations - though I'm sure someone will put me right if that's not the case...

Hosting TeachMeet was a new but exciting opportunity for us, and we hope that the teachers who attended go back to their classrooms buzzing with ideas and new contacts, as well as a taste of what we do. A great experience, with potentially wonderful outcomes!

The is taking place on Wednesday and Thursday this week at the SECC. It's a great event, with lots to see and plenty of seminars and discussion areas to take part in.

I'm looking forward to wandering round the stalls and meeting new and exciting people, but I'm particularly excited about the keynote speech by Carol Dweck, which I signed up for weeks ago. Her recent book, , is one that I've only just started reading, and already I'm hooked. One of her central ideas is about the 'two mindsets' of learning - a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The blurb for her keynote explains this rather succinctly:

Every word and action sends a message. It tells children - or students or athletes - how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed mindset message that says:

'You have permanent traits and I'm judging them.'

Or it can be a growth mindset message that says:

'You are a developing person and I am interested in your development.'

I'm interested to hear how these subtle psychological differences can make huge changes to the way people learn. We are working on some tools which will tap into many of these principles... more on that very soon! If you can't make her seminar at SLF, you can hear Professor Dweck discussing her ideas in her own words .

Here at PQ, we'll be hosting the popular fringe event to the festival, . TeachMeets are informal gatherings where teachers get to demonstrate some of the good practice they've encountered or delivered over the past year, or discuss a product that they feel has enhanced the classroom experience. Presentations are very short and snappy (seven or two minutes!) and speakers are chosen at random. It's an exciting event to be a part of and we're really looking forward to it. The TESS featured a about TeachMeet in their September 18 issue. Ollie Bray has been the major organiser of the event this year and has . There will be a Twitter backchannel during the event - hashtag #TMSLF09 - and I'm sure it will form the start of fresh debates and discussions. John Connell has already kicked things off by - who knows, maybe we will come up with one tomorrow night! Some of the suggestions on John's blog have been very thought-provoking; including the oft-asked question about how to get new teachers, or even more experienced teachers who aren't used to these events, through the doors and participating. What format do you think would work? Should we do more online to back up the 'meets'?

For those who are coming to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland tomorrow night, I look forward to meeting you in person, but I will blog about the evening for those of you who can't join us. Happy SLF, one and all!

I've been lucky enough to attend some Social Media Workshops here at PQ this week, run by Double Shot Consulting. Yesterday's session was an introduction to ; today was all about , and tomorrow is devoted to . The videos that I have linked to here are made by , and I love their 'Plain English' approaches to what can seem like complex ideas.

Now,anyone who's been following this blog, or who has met me at an event or even chatted with me on , will know that this was somewhat preaching to the converted. At each point when a new online tool was mentioned, the lovely Justin and Simon who were running the course would ask for a show of hands of who was using it already. This morning, a turning point came. They stopped including me in the count, and I realised I had been identified as a real geek.

I'm not a geek for geek's sake, though (or, I like to think not). I genuinely believe that social media are the way forward, not just for broadcasters and techies, but for teachers and learners. Yesterday, of showed us their podcasts and resources for language learners - inspiring stuff. I'll definitely be using some of their quick lessons in the future.The wonderful , whose is listed in our 'blogroll' on the right, was today's guest. John said something rather illuminating this morning (and I'm paraphrasing here) - that teachers who did not equip learners with the tools to navigate and filter information they access online were simply not doing their jobs. I have to say that I am inclined to agree with John on this.

When you're shown how simple tools like , and its various filter engines, and are to use, it's unfathomable that they aren't part of every teacher's daily routine. It's easy for me to say, I hear you cry, with the time I have on my hands, the lack of 30-plus children to teach and the technological know-how I have at my disposal. All valid and fair points. But in any job, in any profession that deems itself worthy of the title, people have to constantly retrain, learn new skills, enhance their own knowledge. Good teachers are, after all, consummate professionals. If teachers can meet the challenge of the seismic shift that is (and I have no doubt that they can), it is a much simpler task entirely to get them to engage with technology that can help enrich the classroom experience - for them as well as the learners. Perhaps better use of is the answer? Or just a more integrated culture of using internet resources alongside traditional methods? Those at the chalkface will know best and vote with their lesson plans, but learning must not stay still while the world turns.

I'll follow up this blog with another one directly about the whole point of blogging, and using social tools as part of your personal learning network. Ollie Bray, who's currently seconded to , but whose substantative post is as DHT of , has blogged extensively on , it's well worth a look.

We're very excited here at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland Learning, as one of our long-term projects is has just gone LIVE! Pinball is a unique set of tools which are all about spontaneous creativity - getting initial ideas noted and then developing the ones you like. Given that creativity in education is a real hallmark of , we think that Pinball is going to be one of those tools that you return to again and again.

Each of the tools forms part of the creative process. The most obvious entry point for anyone having an ideas session, or an active class with pupils shouting out suggestions, is DotDash. The concept behind this is to see your ideas immediately, so as you type each one in and hit 'return' another lovely little bubble pops up. At the end you can print off your ideas (to me it looks like a tree!) or send them to one of the other tools... and this is where things get really interesting!

A good example is Drop Zone, which puts your ideas from DotDash (or that you type or paste straight in) on a Generation Game-style conveyor belt, and allows you to separate them into groups, whether into 'bin it', 'keep it' and 'think about it', or Group A, B, and C - whatever fits your project. Wild Reels similarly allows different groups or sets of ideas to be put together - but generates random juxtapositions that really get the creative juices going. In the user testing process, teachers liked using this tool for everything from generating creative writing ideas to variable equations... there were more suggestions that we could ever have imagined. Snapshot is our image tool, for those very visual ideas. All of the tools allow pictures to be included as well as text, but here you can mess around with images to create something new. If my explanations aren't quite clear enough, there's a handy help page showing you all the tools in turn.

The beauty of the tools is that they are flexible enough to be used in classes, workplaces, at home - wherever people are being creative! The fact that the tools are so simple and easy to use will demystify the creative process, which can often seem a bit woolly and abstract. Do give them a try and bounce some ideas around. Let us know how you're using them, and the weird and wonderful ideas you come up with. We'll certainly be using them on our next development day (as much as we loved our post it notes!) and we think our ideas will be all the better for it.

For the second of her posts, we asked Mollie Tubb to listen to the Keir Bloomer interview about Curriculum for Excellence and to respond with her initial reaction to the published guidelines and headlines...

I doubt if there's a teacher in the land who wouldn't subscribe to the basic principles underlying the new Curriculum for Excellence which was launched in a blaze of political rhetoric earlier this year. We'll not be quibbling about those four key goals, to produce those 'Successful Learners', who become 'Confident Individuals', 'Responsible Citizens' and 'Effective Contributors' to society. Did any of us go into teaching to produce anxiety-ridden, abject failures? Even the most jaundiced member of the public, wondering how a teacher could ever complain about being over-worked after that long, long summer holiday, might concede that most of us are in it for the right reasons. We like our students, and we want to see them thrive.

So if I'm allowed to take the four goals as read, and nothing very new, let's turn to the that follow from them. The new curriculum is to offer Challenge and Enjoyment, Breadth and Depth of subject matter, , and Individual Choice, and it's to be Coherent and Relevant - all laudable, and all familiar. There's not much to quibble about here either, although no doubt more critical thinkers across the land will take me to task on this.

It's the way the goals and design principles are to be achieved that rings a little hollow to an old-timer who's been in the teaching business for - well let's say we're counting decades now. We're to provide the right 'Environment for Learning', choose the best 'Teaching and Learning Approaches', and think creatively about the 'Ways Learning is Organised'. The trouble is teachers don't choose the environment, and creative thinking about your delivery methods is difficult if the classroom's bursting at the seams and you've no real support for the disturbed pupil who's bent on wrecking any activity.

I started in schools, but I'm teaching in a college now. We have our own issues of course, and when we're teaching to national exams and qualifications we're working to strict frameworks like all our school colleagues. But I have friends still in school, still bent on delivering that high quality education, (they're mostly parents themselves after all), and still trying to foster all those aspirational values. I don't have the right to speak for them, but here goes. Their view of the 'vision' outlined in some of the papers might be clouded by a major change in the system introduced years ago, and the burden it imposed on their time. We all spend disproportionate amounts of our day on running and recording the results of endless internal assessments. The immediate demand to lay vast paper trails of checklists for everything you do absorbs the energy and time that we'd rather spend on those innovative and engaging lesson plans - which we'd love to deliver in an ideal environment to reasonable numbers of kids.

If you want excellence, let your teachers plan their classes and teach - hire someone else to manage the assessment system, and get us off the paper trail. Dream on?

Mollie Tubb