Every1Speaks Intro from Ideonic on Vimeo.

Philippa is truly diligent in her work and doesn’t like taking shortcuts so she spent close to three days producing this and we hope you like it as much as she enjoyed making it!!

If you’ve got any suggestions for future stop-motion video’s please let us know.

I booked the 6:40am flight from Newcastle to Cardiff thinking ‘wow, that’s early’ without proper comprehension of the 4:15am alarm it would necessitate :(

Bleary eyed I arrived at Cardiff Airport around 8 and was collected by the fantastic Ty Golding who took me on an impromptu tour of Barry Island where I got a cuppa from Marco’s Cafe on the seafront.

Barry Island Primary is a beautiful Victorian building touched with the vivid colour of art produced by collaborations between parents, local artists and the children. Just about every outdoor space featured a striking piece of art and a fairly recent addition included a low level climbing wall requested by the school council.

The main focus of the morning however was an iNet Primary Cluster Wales network meeting at Christ the King Primary, Cardiff. Bernadette, Head Teacher, talked us through her ethos (developed and refined over 10 years) around forming habits of mind – ‘ways of being’ – through reinforcing acts until they become habits.

Bernadette discussed the value of visualisation using various ‘maps’ as part of teaching throughout the school. Different maps are used for describing qualities, comparing & contrasting, classifying and cause & affect.  She emphasised her focus on meta cognition, critical thinking, developing questioning (using Bloom’s taxonomy), forming a community of enquiry, P4C etc…. I knew I was in the right room! :)

INet is far more established in Secondary Schools in Wales and

During the meeting I also added a new quote to my collection: ”if you never change your mind, why have one?’ De Bono.

After my visit to Christ the King school and I did a bit of a solo tour round Cardiff finding out: 1) all art galleries/museums etc are free in Wales and 2) Cardiff is the worlds first ‘fair trade’ capital.

Day 2:

A brisk (read chilly) walk then scenic (read slow) train journey from Cardiff to Barry Island was the perfect ‘wake up shake up’ to get me going ready for a full day starting at Barry Island Primary. Ty had organised a succession of the ‘who’s who’ from the Vale of Glamorgan primary sector to meet during the morning and I even scored for a freshly baked biscuit prepared by some Y3 pupils, to keep me going.

Firstly I met Kelvin, HT at Romilly Primary and heard how his school was one of, if not THE largest primary in Wales.  With triple form entry and around 700 pupils maintaining great engagement with pupils and parents was at the fore of his thoughts.   Kelvin works closely with Ty and they are partners in a comenius project with schools from 9 countries.

Next came a chat with David Morris, Head Teacher at Jenner Park Primary who’s school has a really active Pupil Council with their own area on the school website.

My third morning meeting was with Nia Cule headteacher at Colcot Primary - I arranged to visit Colcot the next morning and meet Mark and chat in more detail about how Every1Speaks could support school life.

The afternoon was spent at Cadoxton Primary first working with the school council then speaking with Janet Hayward, Headteacher.  Janet has not been the headteacher for very long and was formerly head at Barry Island Primary.  The day culminated in a curry and network in Cardiff – basically a cracking day!

Day 3:

First thing Thursday I caught the train to Barry and was collected by Mark Ellis, Dep Head at Colcot Primary. Mark took me up to school where I chatted with him and Liz Prescott (ICT Coordinator) about how they use technology at Colcot and how Every1Speaks could help them develop international collaborations. Mark’s really keen to team up with some international schools so if there’s any of you reading please get in touch!

Mark drove me down the street made famous as Stacey’s home in the hit TV programme Gavin and Stacey, on the way back to Barry train station from which I caught the train to Rhoose. Rhoose (home of Cardiff Airport) is a really interesting village where the primary school is the heart and focus of the community.

Eisteddfod fever was rife at Rhoose Primary (Rhws in Welsh) – don’t worry it’s not contagious ;) It’s a Welsh language creative arts competition featuring story telling, dance, singing etc – if you’ve never heard of it. The pupils all submit their stories anonymously and the best (the unenviable job falls to Louise the Head Teacher) is crowned ‘Bard’ for the year at a lavish ‘charing’ (awards) ceremony.

The entrance to the school perfectly emphasised the welcoming and artistic atmosphere prevalent in every class.  One particularly interesting visit was to Damon’s (School Council Coordinator) class where each pupil was busy making a caricature of someone famous in clay called a Grogg.

The six schools are very close in terms of vicinity but also practice – many staff have worked in each other’s schools and it’s a great first hub of schools to test Every1Speaks in Wales!  I’m really looking forward to working with the schools more intensely between now and Easter and hope all the staff and students are having a relaxing half-term!

KidsMeet borrows a lot of it’s format from the now world wide series of TeamMeet events invented by Every1Speaks investor and partner Ewan McIntosh. Currently, the first event we’ll be involved with is 28th March at Sir John Lillie Primary School, Fulham (#KidsMeetLdn). Peter will start of proceedings discussing what a confident presentation looks like!

London again?!

I know, we’re based in Newcastle and yet EVERYTHING good seems to go on in London ;)

Well, in June 2011 we helped support Ewan, Gayle Sutherland and Thorney Close Primary School to stage TEDxKids - which achieved great success culminating in an 8 year old’s talk featuring on the TED website as one of the talks of the week!

If you’re a regular attender of TeachMeet, or you just like the sound of this then the benefits of taking part are obvious. We’d be delighted to explore supporting some KidsMeet events in the North East – or indeed anywhere nationwide.  If you don’t want our help setting this up :( then just visit the KidsMeet Wiki and sign up yourself, alternatively – buzz Peter an email.  Are your kids ready??!

For those of you that tweet and follow us, you’ll have noticed an exciting announcement today.  As a reward for all of the lovely people who regularly tweet about us we’ve created a Twitter World which displays avatars that represent twitter accounts.

Twitter ReVisualised

We wanted to make an interesting way to visualise the tweets and discussions around Every1Speaks on Twitter, and also reward those who often tweet about and engage with us. In a website development meeting back in October we had the idea of making a Twitter planet, Jeremiah had on request – the characters heads neeed to be big!

You’ll see we’ve retained this idea, the avatar’s head gets bigger the more you tweet about us. Customising your head is easy, simply send a tweet and hash-tag the head you like (e.g. ‘Please change my head to #head5 @Every1Speaks, thanks!’). This can be done through a normal tweet or through the ‘customise’ pop-up on the Every1Tweets.com page.

Development

We had the idea a couple of months ago but obviously had higher priority tasks to work on first with the release of Every1Speaks V2 on the horizon.  Earlier this month Adam helped to build a lot of the back end functionality which gathers the data from Twitter. Caius then used his superb skills creating the front end in HTML5 and Javascript, and along with Becky who created the art assets the project soon came alive. For you techies, we’ve asked Caius and Adam to create a development blog post about the project to discuss the more technical details a little more.

Even though we have launched the mini site, we still have some plans for development and it is something which will grow as we do.

What people said

We’ve had a some great responses today from Twitter, and thanks for everyone who has gave their feedback on the project. We would love to hear from more of you, so please let us know! The best way, is of course through Twitter! If you have tweeted at us, take a look at the planet or search to find your avatar.

@lisiboDear @every1speaks – you are great and wonderful – please can I live on your Twitter planet and have pink bunches ;o)

@asober ‘@Every1Speaks Nice one guys! Did you generate that yourselves? It looks awesome!’

@ewanmcintosh ‘Loving @every1speaks’ way of rewarding the tweeps that like their #studentvoice platform, with Every1Tweets: every1tweets.com’

Hoping for plenty of others to get involved and make storing all of this information difficult for us! If you’ve got any questions, please get in touch with hello@every1speaks.com

Poster

Show your Love for Every1Speaks with our new Poster! Individuals, Schools, classes or groups – we hope to get as many people involved – Take a look at some who already have!. Be creative, take a photo in an unusual place or in a creative way, and we may even reward the more creative photos with a small prize!

We first used it at this years BETT event, and got some lovely people to start out ‘We <3 Every1Speaks' album collection off. So if you Love Every1Speaks, show your love and send us your photo.

Download as a PDF and print it out to show your love for Every1Speaks! We would love to see your photos! The easiest way to add them is to our Facebook Page in our ‘We <3 Every1Speaks' Album!.

Download

After being home for a day or so the BETT-lag has finally worn off, voices have returned to normal and we’re not writing and speaking in tweet-lengths anymore.  We spoke to over a thousand people at our stand alone this year. Wow. Of that, at the last count, we’d taken contact details for around 250 ‘hot-lead’ interested schools, PRU’s colleges and Universities as well as quite a few potential worldwide distribution partners.

BETT is such a cacophony of sales messages that getting lost in the crowd is easy.  We found this particularly tough going last year although educators looking for something truly innovative will usually find you if you’re interesting enough!

Friends of Every1Speaks

We rekindled friendships with Tony Parkin, Eylan Ezekiel, Rachel Jones and Terry Freedman as well as the guys at Real Smart, Frog and Dell AND made new friends in Douglas Archibald, John Sutton, Dughall McCormick and Richard Smith amongst many more!

What next for Collaboration?

If you didn’t get a chance to at the conference, please upload a picture of yourself to our Facebook page holding our new IHeartEvery1Speaks poster to show the love!

BETT 2013 is going to be much bigger than previous years and in a new venue, on new dates. We’re planning to do something special but would love to know the opinions of educators out there, is it worth us spending the money to exhibit? We could just meet you all in the cafe for a coffee after all! ;)

We’ve made the Every1Speaks logos available to download for anyone who may like to use it. Feel free to use it in any Web or Print publication, but please let us know as we’d love to see how your using it! We have two logos to choose from, which can be used in various ways.

Download

We’ve signed up Nicola – Principal at Aldborough E-ACT Free School – as our latest advocate of Every1Speaks. Aldborough is E-Act’s first ‘free school’ and one of the first in the country.  We spoke to Nicola following Jeremiah’s talk  at the Guardian’s Innovation Conference. This is what she said.

It was great to meet the team from Every1Speaks. Impressed by the software available to help raise ‘voice’ in school and across our school community we have signed up to work with Peter and Jeremiah. Our school is new, having opened in September 2011 and currently has a small (120) pupil population of Reception and Year 1 children, which will grow to 420 on roll across the Reception and Primary Phase. We are looking to use the software with families and stakeholders to involve them in the growth of our school, encourage them to have their say, and also as a tool to engage parents in the use of innovative technologies…. Where everyone is a learner! We can’t wait to get started.Nicola Percy, Aldborough E-ACT Free School

Parent Voice

We’re really looking forward to see how Every1Speaks works in a purely ‘Parent Voice’ and ‘Teacher Voice’ setting.  Nicola has discussed her plans for engaging her Governors and wider parent group in regular and relevant discussions with each other and her teachers.  We’ll keep you posted…!

Let me know if you’ve got any questions!

I’m going to write a separate piece (one a day this week to keep it interesting) on each of the sessions I attended…

21stC Skills

The day started brightly with a meet up with our mate Doug Belshaw who got us up to date with the latest at JISC and Purpos/ed over croissant.

Our first session featured three educationalists; Stephen Crowne, Sam Dutton and Mick Waters sharing their opinions on the question: ‘How will changes to the curriculum impact on students 21^st century skill set?’

Within the room, interestingly, the Idea of a ‘21stC skill set’ seemed to be limited by its focus on technology when to me the biggest obstacle to success is one of aspiration.  I’ve often heard teachers talk about what could be collectively termed a ‘poverty of aspirations’ amongst many of the young people they teach.  When you’re faced with combating a mind-set shaped by a family with three generations of unemployment the challenge of awareness raising, let alone inspiring positivity, towards employment prospects could be trying.

The Pupil Voice

I set up an IdeaMap to collect young people’s ideas simultaneously and the answers we collected online mirrored a lot of what was discussed by the panel.  You can have a look here at what they discussed. Some of the really interesting ideas put forward were totally different to the ones we discussed in the room.

Please add your thoughts via the comments below or on our IdeaMap.