Did you not hear it back in April? It would have been about 7.15 in the morning on April the 15th. It would have sounded like someone whooping with delight (and yes perhaps the sound of feet doing a little jig) as I found out that Google were going ahead with a UK based edition of their Teacher Academy.
There was some serious grinning on the way to work that day.
On July 29th 2010 the first ever Google Teacher Academy outside of the US took place in London, it was the culmination of over 2 years of perseverance and “mild harassment” as Cristin Frodella, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Apps for Education, put it.
Ever since 2007/2008 when I began seeing US teachers sharing their ideas and experiences at teacher academies I began my mini campaign to bring it here. After all there was a huge community of teachers in UK and Europe who were busy innovating with Google tools in the classroom. I felt that it was only right that we had the same opportunity to celebrate and champion our successes.
Sadly taking the GTA outside of the US wasn’t possible back then and as I have realised more recently Cristin has had to show her own perseverance to continue to run the event for teachers in the US. Nevertheless I continued to send the emails.
Samantha Peter who works in London for the Ed Apps Marketing Team was the main target and she has been fantastic in helping me to continue to push for the event here. She helped to setup a meeting with Cristin at BETT 2010 and they were able to put a face to all of the emails. To cut a long story short Cristin later emailed me on April 15th with the good news.
On a personal level it was amazing to help bring the Teacher Academy to the UK and to be part of the planning team that did it. But I was a participant too – the GTA was new to me, and the event was special in its own right. Different than anything I have worked on or attended before.
We all feel we want to make a contribution to the communities we work in and I consider this to be one of my most important.
The cohort was truly international and was also made up of a large UK contingent who never stopped innovating or making learning exciting for kids in their classes just because the Teacher Academy wasn’t coming to our shores. Some of them will no doubt be part of the next event.
The style was one of positive urgency – that we were going to use every valuable moment to learn something new. Not a second was wasted. This was clearly a very different professional development event, of which UK teachers had never likely seen before.
I am sure it will be the first of many more to come. If not then “Compose Mail” is only a click away.
