A Teachmeet is a conference organised for teachers, by teachers. They are much less formal than other conferences that you might have been to, allowing teachers to share (and celebrate) their own classroom experiences with each other.

I’ve never been to a Teachmeet before, so I’m very excited to be attending my first one in a few weeks… on Friday 18th September at The Hop Farm, Paddock Wood. The event is free and takes place from 7pm until 9pm. If you’re involved in education and you’re able to get there, come along!

Find out more (and sign up if you plan to come) on the wiki… and if you’re able to give a presentation, add yourself to the list!

Many people use the ‘Bookmarks’ or ‘Favorites’ feature of their web browser to save links to their favourite sites. Did you know that you can also save your bookmarks online, using sites like Delicious?

This has a number of benefits:

• You can access your bookmarks online, from any computer that has an internet connection. So, you can save bookmarks from a home computer and access them at school, and vice versa.
• You can save huge numbers of bookmarks… adding lots of bookmarks to your browser’s collection can mean that things get cluttered and disorganised. Online bookmarking sites usually use ‘tags’ to help you sort and search through your bookmarks, meaning that you can save hundreds / thousands of them without things getting jumbled.
• Online bookmarking allows you to share new and useful sites. For me, this is the biggest benefit. By connecting with other teachers, I can see the sites that they are bookmarking, and they can see my bookmarks too. I often browse through the bookmarks of people in my ‘network’ and discover lots of interesting web sites.

If you’re not using it already, sign up with Delicious and follow my bookmarks… you can find them at www.delicious.com/markjwarner. We also have a delicious account for our school’s bookmarks, which allow us to share useful sites with staff, children and parents. Have you tried online bookmarking yet?

Twitter always seems to be in the news lately. If you’ve not tried it out, why not? It allows you to post 140 character messages to others… sometimes people use it to share what they’re doing at different points in time. However, it’s also a great way of connecting with others and there is a large community of teachers who use it to:

• share ideas and experiences,
• ask questions and get support,
• recommend sites and resources,
• collaborate on joint projects.

Here is a fantastic guide to help teachers get started with Twitter:

If you’re looking for people to follow on Twitter, don’t forget that you can follow my accounts @TeachingIdeas / @markw29. Then browse around at the lists of people who I follow / who follow me – there are some wonderful educators out there, and Twitter enables you to get in touch with them.

I’ve recently added some wonderful pictures to our gallery of Display Photos. Thank you to Kimberley and Danielle for sharing their photographs.

If you have any photos of displays that you are able to share with others, please email them to mark@teachingideas.com and I’ll put them online as soon as I can. Thank you!