Meet your speakers

Ewan McIntosh is an award-winning educator and the founder of NoTosh Limited, based in Scotland, Australia and San Francisco, with a global reputation for researching and delivering new learning opportunities for some of the world’s top creative companies and school districts. The team has a unique ongoing experience in creativity in creative contexts (working with some of the world’s top fashion, media and tech companies) and research-based learning and teaching development with schools.

Ewan McIntosh was one of the first teachers to use the earliest eTwinning portal to foster connections with schools around Europe. In spite of great partnerships and world-leading technological and learning innovations that emerged from those early days, the bug to connect didn’t spread beyond the four walls of his classroom.

Over the past 10 years, McIntosh and colleagues at NoTosh have been exploring how technology and learning informed by research have, in fact, made connectivity and collaboration the number one concerns of most schools. The trick to inspiring a move from teacher-led projects and loose connections? It may lie in the agile leadership of those who have ‘leader’ in their job title, and, above all, those who do not.

http://www.notosh.com

http://edu.blogs.com

Sugata Mitra

Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. 
He was awarded the $1m TED Prize in 2013 in recognition of his work and to help build a School in the Cloud, a creative online space where children from all over the world can gather to answer 'big questions', share knowledge and benefit from help and guidance from online educators. The School in the Cloud brings together Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) to link in with the Granny Cloud, originally set up in 2009 following an appeal for retired teachers willing to offer a few hours a week to help teach English to Indian schoolchildren. This mentoring and encouraging role is still a vital part of the success of this educational approach today. Much of his current research builds on the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, which Sugata instigated in 1999 while chief scientist at NIIT. Children were given free access to a computer embedded within a wall between his office and an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi http://www.sugatam.wikispaces.com. 

Workshop session 1- Saturday 6 June 10.10-11.10

Dorota Drajewicz

Dorota Drajewicz is the Erasmus+ Delivery Manager at the British Council. Erasmus+ is a European Union programme, managed in the UK by the UK National Agency. The UK National Agency is a partnership between the British Council and Ecorys UK. Dorota has worked at the British Council for the last three years, working mainly within the schools sector. She has been involved in the delivery of previous eTwinning National Conferences and the HSBC Mandarin Programme based in the UK. Since the launch of the new Erasmus+ Programme in 2014, Dorota now manages the Customer Service and Events team based in Cardiff, Wales. She coordinates support for applicants and beneficiaries of the Erasmus+ programme in fields of schools, youth and higher education.

Paddy Carroll

Paddy Carroll works at a primary school in Doncaster and has been a boring Y6 teacher for too many years to mention. Every so often he takes part in random eTwinning projects using interesting technology to keep the children sane, whilst preparing them for SATs.

Drew Buddie

Drew is Head of Computing at the Royal Masonic School in Rickmansworth and has been proud to be an eTwinning Ambassador for almost a decade. He is currently Chair of Naace, and is coming to the end of a Values-based Comenius project working with six other European schools.  He has been an advocate of the use of technology enhanced education for many years and is convinced that the ubiquity of tablets in education and the existence of easy-to-use tools to aid collaboration, have ensured that education is now able to properly utilise such tools seamlessly to aid Teaching and Learning.

Christopher Burgess

Chris Burgess is the MD of CBiS Education and 2015 finalist of the BQ Emerging Entrepreneur of the year awards in Yorkshire. From a young age, Chris was always interested in technology, taking apart the family’s appliances and putting them back together, always with parts left over! As a young entrepreneur, he started selling computer upgrades from his father’s garage.

Starting CBIS (Corporate Business Information Systems) in 2004, the business developed software and online solutions for various sizes of business and government organisations. After a stint building robotics for MOD challenges, an opportunity came up to use real world experience and examples to provide resources to schools. Thus, CBiS Education was launched.

Chris has been working with various schools over the last 18 months on a variety of engaging, hands-on projects, the latest of which was to build a life-size Dalek for “March of the Robots” in Leeds City Centre.

Website: www.cbiseducation.com

Twitter: @cbiseducation

Action Jackson

Action Jackson is a motivational speaker, lover of cheesecake and booster of energy...he loves working in education making people feel amazing and bringing power and life into your vision.

Action Jackson challenges and empowers you to

Dream big

Act now

Never give up

Because you are amazing

He lives on Twitter as @ActionJackson- beware you will get inspired. Also on YouTube, if you want to see his crazy motivation videos check out

YouTube.com/ActionJacksonLive  

He loves hugs so if you go and see him, you can get one for free :) Let's make this world a better place by inspiring one another.

Vicky Gough

Vicky Gough is Advisor Schools and lead for MFL at the British Council. Vicky Gough has worked across a range of British Council programmes for schools in the UK and overseas and is especially interested in those that can support the teaching and learning of languages as well as global learning.

Jo Speak

Jo is deputy headteacher at Oakwood Primary Academy in Leeds which is part of the Co-operative Academy Trust. She is a British Council ambassador with experience of working with schools of all phases on international partnerships, eTwinning, the global curriculum and the International school Award. Having worked with schools in Latin America for over 10 years, she has most recently established a hub of schools in the UK and Mexico through the Connecting Classrooms programme. Her own school has put British values, Co-operative values and Mexican values at the heart of all its partnership activity with Colegio Americano de Tabasco, in Mexico.

Clare Seccombe

Clare Seccombe was a secondary language teacher for fourteen years, for seven of those an AST specialising in primary languages and the international dimension. In 2009, she changed phases and now teaches Spanish and French in Sunderland primary schools as well as speaking at conferences, training teachers and trainee teachers, writing for publishers and making resources. Clare is an avid blogger and tweeter who set up and maintains the web site Light Bulb Languages (http://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk)

Ray Chambers

Ray Chambers is the Head of ICT at Uppingham Community College. He has been teaching for six years. He likes to use technology to help improve the outcomes in many lessons around his college. He has been doing a lot of work with using tools such as Touchdevelop. He has also been using Minecraft to help engage students in difficult subjects. He regularly blogs about the work he does via raychambers.wordpress.com and you can find out more about his work by following him on twitter @lanky_boi_ray. He is a recent National Teaching award nominee and is passionate about engaging learners.

Joe Dale is an independent languages consultant from the UK who works with a range of organisations such as Network for Languages, ALL, the British Council, the BBC, Skype, Microsoft and The Guardian.

He is host of the TES MFL forum, former SSAT Languages Lead Practitioner, a regular conference speaker and recognised expert on technology and language learning. He has spoken at conferences and run training courses in Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, the Far East and Australia . He was a member of the Ministerial Steering Group on languages for the current UK government and advised on the Linguanet Worldwide project for The Language Company. He created ICT activities for the new Institut Français, ALL and Network for Languages Primary French Niveau Bleu course and was short-listed for a NAACE Impact Award in 2013 too. Joe was recently described in a Guardian article as an 'MFL guru' and 'the man behind the #mfltwitterati.'.

Joe was key in updating the ICT elements of the QCDA SoW for KS2 Primary French; he also designed games for Heinemann's 'Expo'. Joe has featured in several Education Guardian articles and has himself both written for and been quoted by the TES. Joe has also written for the TES ICT blog and produced video tutorials for the CILT 14-19 website. Joe recently starred on a Teachers TV programme and has spoken about the Rose Review proposals on BBC Radio 4.His blog www.joedale.typepad.com has been nominated for four Edublog Awards.

Workshop session 4- sunday 7 june 9.15-10.15

Lesley Atkins

Lesley Atkins is International Education Officer for Glasgow City Council and a British Council Ambassador. She previously worked as an English and EAL teacher in West Dunbartonshire and Glasgow. She has been developing international education at school, Local Authority, national and international level since 2000 and has presented at national education conferences in the UK and overseas. Recently Lesley has led and coordinated a pilot eTwinning project in partnership with British Council Scotland and Education Scotland to demonstrate the power of strategic planning for international school partnerships, the critical role of the eTwinning Ambassador to support change and curricular improvement and the transformative potential of an international education.

Kate Walker

Kate Walker provides regional leadership for the British Council’s education work in the United Kingdom at the British Council. This involves developing the education portfolio for UK audiences, planning and delivering programmes of engagement for regional and institution-level audiences, training colleagues around the British Council’s global network on UK education policy and practice, and taking a lead role within the organisation for devolved education systems. Prior to taking up the role in July 2014, Kate headed the British Council’s education work in Scotland.

Before joining the British Council, she worked in the higher education sector in professional roles. Kate headed the widening access team at the University of Strathclyde, managed admissions to three schools at the University of Edinburgh, and delivered a university outreach scheme to three thousand 9-11 year-olds in Hampshire. She has also worked as a teacher in a Swiss high school.

Lisa Taner

Lisa has been active in eTwinning since 2006 and is a British Council Ambassador. Her day jobs are as Local Advisor on the Global Learning Programme England and Global Learning Associate for HEC Global Learning Centre, London including being designated trainer for Connecting Classrooms in London region.  She is a passionate advocate for global learning in the curriculum and also retains her previous role of training schools in all things EAL.

Lisa Stevens

Lisa is a Primary languages educator and consultant, working as PLL (Primary Language Learning) and International coordinator at two contrasting Birmingham primary schools. Lisa is a passionate advocate for creative primary language learning integrated into the curriculum, and an avid user of technology as a tool to engage and motivate pupils and enhance their learning.

She has worked in this country and abroad to support schools with language teaching and technology skills (sometimes as an ADE), and has consulted on various projects including The Lingo Show, BBC

Primary MFL website and the production of language materials for The Guardian as well as working with CILT, AQA, ALL, Osiris, British Council, Links into Languages, Rising Stars and Apple. She is a member of TES MFL panel, producing a weekly list of recommended resources from the TES Resources site, as well as writing a blog called ¡Vámonos! (lisibo.com)

Lisa rarely stays still for long and believes in getting children out of their seats, involved in and ideally leading their learning. She tweets as @lisibo when she's not running - and sometimes when she is!