This week I attended the inaugural Victorian PYP TeachMeet at Firbank Grammar in Brighton. Initially, I had heard about a ‘small’ gathering of teachers who could share their skills in the form of a 2-minute or 7-minute presentation; just some word-of-mouth at the Making The PYP Happen conference a couple weeks ago from a colleague who teaches at Firbank. He suggested that I sign up to be one of the presenters on the night. It turned that over 150 PYP educators and administrators would congregate across two open learning spaces to listen to over twenty different presentations about a range of topics, not limited to but including:
- Blogging as a transdisciplinary tool by @mr_kuran
- Making authentic links to the POI for single-subject teachers by @ashleamills
- Getting all nice and collaborative with Google Drive by @pconnellyelearn
- Teaching children not to believe everything they read online by @mish1970
- The Homework Game: Is it worth playing? Taking My Learning Further
- ‘Todaysmeet‘
- Immersion into UOI and Summative Assessment Rubrics
All of those topics, and more, by those who actually put such ideas into practice, providing their own examples of how they work. A thought-provoking, engaging gathering of, by and for many excellent PYP educators.
There are not too many forums that boast a format in which teachers can share their skills, participants can be easily engaged and so many different ideas can be expressed. A big congratulations must go to all of the staff Firbank Grammar for coordinating a truly successful and worthwhile event, to the Victorian IB PYP Network for their hard work and initiative, and to all the other presenters who took some risks to stand before their colleagues so that we could share, collaborate, think, reflect and learn.
My only wish is that we find a suitable platform upon which we could share some of the presentations online and apply some of those amazing ideas in our own learning spaces!
In the meantime, here is my presentation about blogging as a transdisciplinary teaching and learning tool.
Be sure to check out our class blog to see it in action.
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The week culminated with the #PYPchat last night, where educators from around the world discussed this week’s topic: International Mindedness.
Once again, some wonderful ideas from some brilliant minds. I certainly encourage all teachers, be they PYP-trained or otherwise, to join in the conversation next time!
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Follow the hashtags on Twitter for the conversation:
#vicpyptm (Victorian PYP TeachMeet)
#pypchat
My Inquiry Teaching & Learning Journey 