If you weren’t at Trinity College in Carmarthen last night or watching the Livestream then you missed a great night with lots of fresh, exciting activities to use in the classroom. It was lovely to see so many new faces willing to share their experiences and we were really impressed with the student teachers who were brave enough to get up and share their own ideas! The night started with Helen Lewis sharing the details of a project to develop thinking in the Foundation Phase. Using Video Stimulated Reflective Dialogue – pupils were given cameras and allowed to film their learning. The outcomes showed that not only did the children become more aware of their own thinking, but it also allowed the teachers to reflect on the thinking opportunities they were creating. 
Next up was Matthew Jones who in two minutes discussed how he was using film for enquiry based learning. Then we had Dr Russell Griggs talk to us about promoting values based education through the use of digital photography. He also shared a link to Rachel Boyd’s wiki that has lots of useful ideas for the classroom.
Tom Cox, a primary school teacher from Tenby, but who should be on the stage then showed us how he collapsed the curriculum and used green-screening to inspire creative writing.
The lovely Bev Evans, who many people will know if they follow Teachmeets then showed us a Primary website called Build your wild self and explained how it could be used across the curriculum. Then Tim Burton (no not the director – but probably much more entertaining) discussed how we should be equipping with the skills to be truly digital literate. He also shared a website http://novemberlearning.com/resources/ that he said was a brilliant resource for digital literacy.
In the next two minutes Duncan Whitehurst showed us how to create books using the ipad and the impact that was having on pupils learning. Then to great applause from the audience Manon and Laura, two student teachers talked about how they were using Beebot in the classroom with Foundation phase children. They were swiftly followed by another set of students who gave a great argument for using Facebook in a learning context and showed examples of their learning communities. Julia Ault then expanded on the idea of Personal Learning Communities by showing how Twitter can be used to develop a global learning community. She also gave a great demonstration of how to use lists in Twitter. 
Tim then returned for a quick 2 minute presentation on developing links with a school in Ireland. He recommended http://www.epals.com/for finding schools worldwide that are interested in communicating digitally.
Then Bev gave us loads of ideas of how to use Google Maps across the curriculum. I particularly like the ways she uses it for storytelling. Then we had Matthew told us about using Magic lamp in filming. Gwydion Wynne then worried the audience by flying his drone around the room – we’d watched him practice earlier in the day so wondered whether we would leave the room unscathed!
Duncan then showed us how he was using ipads with children to successfully film adverts and have the pupils evaluate their work. He was also kind enough to give everyone the address to The PGFL blogthat contains loads of ideas of how to use the ipad effectively in class. Then we had Bev finish off a really enjoyable evening with a quick explanation about #addcym and the weekly Twitter chat.
A huge thank you to the staff and students at Trinity, for your hospitality. And to all the presenters for a really fun, inspirational evening. Apologies that not all of the presentations are here – the wireless dropped out so we missed some of them!
