Lots of open workshops!

I've got lots of (open) workshops coming up! All subject to having enough people book on them, but we have:

Teaching Tips for Librarians, Friday afternoon, 10th March, Sheffield.
https://shefftips.eventbrite.co.uk
This covers some of the basic teaching mechanics and is aimed at librarians. We look at: Learning Objectives; Lesson Plans; Assessment; Evaluation and some related issues. We'll give practical help, tips, interventions, and templates to use in your own teaching sessions, with particular emphasis on "one-shot" teaching sessions and active learning interventions. It will run as a highly interactive workshop.

Making Educational Escape Rooms, All day Thursday, 13th April, Huddersfield.
https://hudescape.eventbrite.co.uk
A full day workshop making educational escape room style activities, aimed at anyone interested in using escape room ideas for teaching.
The day will be hands on, with a process scaffolded to enable attendees to work in groups to create a prototype of an escape room style activity. By the end of the day, all attendees (in their groups) will have sketched out an escape room style activity and started to create the puzzles that make up that activity.

Creative Teaching Double Bill, All day or half day Friday, 5th May, Manchester.
https://mancdouble.eventbrite.co.uk
Both these workshops are aimed at anyone interested in creative and playful approaches to teaching, particularly in FE and HE sectors. 
In the morning will be:
Picture This! Using the ‘Writing Essays by Pictures’ approach to teaching academic practice
Writing Essays by Pictures is a workbook for students who need help with researching and writing their first evidence based research essay for university. It explains academic practice that often remains hidden to students through everyday analogies and offers activities that allow students to explore the research and writing process in the step-by-step way of painting by numbers.
All attendees will receive a copy of 'Writing Essays by Pictures' (list price £15).

In the afternoon we have:
Making (non-digital) educational games
In this afternoon workshop, we will follow a carefully scaffolded process to prototype educational games. Working in small groups, you will create a prototype game and share it with your fellow participants in just 3 hours.This process can then be followed after the event to quickly and easily create educational games and playful learning experiences for your learners in future.

Playful Learning conference and my escape room box

I went to the Playful Learning Conference last week, if I get around to it I might blog about the conference itself, but this post is a bit more specific!

I took my escape room box along with the materials for the library induction I've made set up and ran several iterations of it the first afternoon. It went down really well, everyone completed it in around 20-25 minutes (which fits my intended half hour induction!), and got some lovely responses from people - lots of positive vibes around using escape room ideas in education. I also played an escape room as part of the first evening social, and a lovely one put together by students one of the afternoon, so there was a bit of an escape room trend going on at the conference...

The pictures above are of some of the teams trying to solve the puzzles.

Library "make camp" in Manchester

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Lego for library teaching...

Not quite a games workshop... but last week I ran a Lego for Library Teaching workshop in Manchester.

We had a full day of exploring the use of Lego (and to a certain extent, other building materials) in libraries / learning support. It's the first time I've spent a full day running a workshop on this, only touching briefly on it in other workshops before, and I really enjoyed it - I think the attendees did too.

The video above is a summing up of the workshop by an attendee (Lawrie), there are more available to give a flavour of what we did, as well as some pictures I took on the day... one of which is below!

Alicja has already written a short blog post of the day too.

A photo posted by Andrew Walsh (@andywalsh999) on Jan 30, 2016 at 4:14am PST

Loan shark.

A game prototyped at the #libraryplay workshop in Manchester, May 2014.

Plague... a plagiarism game.

A game prototyped at the #libraryplay workshop in Manchester, May 2014.

Zombies in the library

A zombie themed game from the #libraryplay workshop in Manchester, May 2014.

Give the dog a bone...

A Game prototyped at the #libraryplay workshop in Manchester, May 2014.

A Manchester induction game

An induction game prototyped at the Manchester #libraryplay workshop.

First or fail? The image edition.

A game prototyped at a #libraryplay workshop in Manchester, May 2014.

More workshops - Manchester & London

More workshops! This time they're slightly shorter...

I've just arranged two more workshops, this time half day (afternoon only) ones and tried to make them as affordable as possible for new professionals and students.

The first is in Manchester on 15th May, the second in London on 13th June.

I've tweaked the content and reduced the timings so they'll fit into an afternoon. This saves money on catering, room hire, and in the case of London, travel & accommodation! It'll still be touch and go whether they break even, but I thought it was worth doing to give more new professionals and students the chance to attend. I've had feedback in the past from people who wanted to go, but their employers wouldn't fund them and they couldn't afford a full priced event. This is their chance!

BTW - do you like my new logo? This is to cover all the bits and pieces I do out of my "normal" job, such as these workshops and the new affordable LIS publishing house I've started.