Practical Pedagogies Conference

We've just had our Practical Pedagogies Conference here at the International School of Toulouse.

It was our brilliant, and here sharply-dressed, history teacher, Russel Tarr (of activehistory.co.uk and classtools.net fame)  who came up with the concept and worked on most of the orgainising, though credit goes to everyone at the school for supporting and assisting in all sorts of ways. Like our previous Practical Learning Technologies in the Classroom conference in March 2012, this was about us teachers deciding what we thought would be really useful to share and creating a range of workshops. Russel then threw it open to attendees at the conference, and we ended up with an astonishing line-up of sessions.

Disppointments? One: the inability to be in two places at the same time. Even so, with a bit of research, it's possible to catch up on some of the sessions I missed. Like Ewan McIntosh's session on "hexagonal thinking".Another: I'd wanted to run a workshop with Jim on creativity in maths, but for various reasons we didn't run it (next time). But I loved running a session with Estelle on Valuing Talk, and one with Rosy on Big Questions and Philosophy for Children.

It was fantastic to have time with a bunch of really motivated and knowledgeable colleagues, some of whom I'd known on Twitter, but not met. The conversations in between sessions (and in the evening at the restaurant), as you'd expect, are as essential as the workshops.

the restaurant, Thursday evening

Just now - another blog post about the two days, by Ben Rouse
...
And now - Dave Stacey's blog posts

And later - Russel's initial reflections