How many of teachers have heard of, or own a copy of, books by Hattie, Wiliam, Marzano or any number of the ‘et als’ that we hear of at education conferences, on Twitter hashtags and in staterooms? And yet, Team NoTosh sees first hand how hard it is for teachers to change those small elements that make the biggest difference in our daily practice. What we’ve done for so long has become auto-pilot practice that is doubly hard to unpick and unlearn, so that we can create a more successful, student-led journey of learning in our classrooms.
Participants will leave with a stronger understanding of three key aspects of learning:
Questioning - How do you ask great questions, and get students to ask amazing UnGoogleable questions of their own?
Feedback - How do you avoid the curse of correction, and move towards peer-to-peer feedback that moves learning forward? A feedback loop can be so much more than ‘right, wrong or “see me”’.
The relationship between teacher and student - how do we put more responsibility into the hands of the pupil?
Provocation, thunks and dialogue as part of curriculum delivery - Even if you feel bound by a tight curricular constraint, the way you go about helping students discover content, instead of always seeing yourself as the disseminator and owner of it, can transform your class, one lesson at a time.
Ewan McIntosh
Leading projects around the world for clients in education and industry, Ewan is the passionate and energising tour de force behind NoTosh.
A highly-regarded keynote speaker at events around the world, he’s also the author of How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen and regularly writes about learning on his blog edu.blogs.com.
“As a French and German high school teacher in Scotland back in the 1990s, I wanted to find new ways to help students engage with my subjects – I felt strongly that technology was both critical to this and underused in the classroom, so my classes were among the first in Europe to podcast and blog as part of their daily learning.
"From here, it was a reasonably logical step to become National Advisor on Learning and Technology Futures for the Scottish Government... although joining Channel 4 as their Digital Commissioner in 2008 was a step in a different direction. But it was at Channel 4 that I became fascinated by the strategies and tactics that my creative colleagues used to create imaginative and truly engaging digital services for young people. Could I take this insight and make it work in an education setting? Yes, I reckoned I could... and that’s how NoTosh came about.”
Ian Stuart
You could say that sustainable innovation is in Ian’s DNA.
Back in 2005, as Principal Technology Teacher at Islay High School, he equipped every single one of his students with tablets... with an astonishing impact on their learning outcomes. His was one of the first schools in the world to take this approach, which is now standard practice in many schools globally, thanks to Ian’s pioneering influence.
“Harnessing technology to engage learning has always seemed to me to be both a logical and productive approach. After the success of the tablets in Islay, and the work I did with some big players like Samsung and Panasonic to make that happen, I was approached by the Scottish Government in 2013 to rescue Glow. Piloted as the national digital learning platform in Scotland in 2008, it was underused and losing profile. Over 18 months I worked with my team to rethink and revitalize the concept and today it’s the most used educational platform in the country; teachers and students can do things they’ve never been able to before, in and out of the classroom.
"I actually started out in engineering before I came into teaching and my own companies were among the first British firms to trade in the former Eastern Bloc countries. Joining NoTosh gives me the opportunity to draw on my experiences in engineering, teaching, technology and leadership to help schools and industries think differently and achieve more.”