Create the space for dialogue
During BETT 2010 we, the teachers, tookover commercial stands to talk about free tools for the classroom. Here is rare footage of me in the wild (!) presenting about “Why I think every primary classroom should be using Voicethread.”
Here is the Interesting Ways doc for Voicethread. A big thankyou to everyone at BrainPOP UK for letting me takeover their stand and for sharing the video footage.
Try something different. If it turns out to be a mistake then you’ve learned something, so it isn’t really a mistake.
The TeachMeet community tried something different this year at BETT. We mobilised, we tookover vendors’ stands and talked about free ideas teachers could use on Monday. We made an attempt to pass on the inspiring ideas that are regularly presented at the face to face TeachMeet events, to those who may have never attended one. Teachmeet Takeover made a small step out of the echo chamber that the community often gets caught speaking to.
Yes we made mistakes, we stumbled, but the idea I think is sound enough – here are a few things I have learned, observed and thought about from the last few days of TeachMeet Takeover
I have been thinking deeply over the last 3 days about the relationship between sales driven companies and the teachers sharing free ideas. For some of the talks there were 30-40 people on the stands – we were bringing them in. That is obviously good for the vendor but it also good for teachers sharing ideas with other teachers. Maybe 3 or 4 people stop and look at some of the vendor’s fliers or products, similarly maybe 15-20 people go away and find out about the free idea they heard from a presentation.
Perhaps we need to bridge the often gaping chasm between these two communities if we are to properly amplify some of the messages, ideas and ideologies to the majority of teachers which are so intrinsic to the TeachMeet community. There has been plenty of reference to the disconnect between teachers and those who sell products, but I am more convinced that we need to build partnerships to effect large scale change in schools. The interesting thing is that companies at BETT are desperate to find ways to engage with their users on a more authentic level. I think TeachMeet Takeover has provided a viable option and it works. Importantly the teacher community has acted first on this, it is on our terms, we have defined how this engagement happens and so can keep the right intentions at the heart of what happens in the future.
None of the vendors involved deliberately hijacked an audience to peddle their own wares – they really did just let us takeover. I think that turning people on their stands into real sales is harder then encouraging teachers to look further into a free idea that is presented. Also a person’s subsequent research into how they might use a free tool will inevitably lead to teachers’ blogs and maybe the domino effect is that they start to find out more and more free tools and ideas. We must be aware of the knock on effect a single 10 minute Takeover talk could have in the weeks ahead.
I heard about one teacher attending TeachMeet Takeover who had never heard of Twitter or any of the online tools that were being presented. After his first talk he spent his day at BETT attending most of the other Takeover talks collecting the 8 ideas he needed to win the goody bag prize. Hopefully his head is buzzing with that bunch of new, free ideas and is thinking about how he can best use them to support learning with his class.
A BIG thankyou to all of the vendors and teachers who contributed to TeachMeet Takeover this year.
We were able to apply some of the feedback from Thursday to improve things for the following days – I would be grateful to hear more of your thoughts and reactions from the Takeover events. What should we consider changing or improving for next year? What stories from Takeover have you to tell?
Something new is happening at the BETT show this year, the largest educational technology trade show in the world. Not a new product or technology service. Not a new website or gadget. This year some companies have handed over their brightly coloured stands to teachers. They are downing tools for 30 minutes and giving teachers the controls!
Teachers and educators have voluntarily signed up on a wiki to “takeover” these stands throughout Thursday, Friday and Saturday and will be speaking about free ideas. Sharing classroom inspiration for free. This, ladies and gentleman, is…
But why would a brave few companies allow us to takeover their expensive stands? Here are a few reasons, the first from Chris Bradford from BrainPOP UK, one of the very first companies to offer their support (and orange stand) to TeachMeet Takeover:
We support CPD (Continuing Professional Development). To support those who want to be better teachers. We know BrainPOP UK works best as part of a good teacher’s toolkit – we also know teachers call upon any number of other resources. Why shouldn’t we do our bit to encourage open minded investigation into new ways of doing things?
The second set of remarks come from another Chris, this time Chris Ratcliffe from Scholastic UK who has been instrumental in driving this idea onwards:
At BETT, I usually spend a lot of time talking to very interested consultants and advisors (and I like doing so), but I don’t spend a lot of time talking to teachers. My feeling is that as the stands are much more corporate than at the other shows, it is much more serious; and to get people to be excited to come back time and time again it needed something different.
To me, when I came across TeachMeet, it felt like the perfect solution. To have teachers standing up and talking to other teachers about what gets them excited would be just the sort of thing that would lift the show.
If you are attending the show you can see the full timetable on the wiki or why not download our flyer which has all of the details. Not only that but the flyer has details of a competition too in which you can win a £350 goody bag just by collecting some idea, here is a snap of part of the flyer.
If you are at BETT please help by taking part and heading over to the stands, you might learn something from the teachers presenting. If you are not attending be sure to follow along on Twitter, the hashtag for the 3 days of takeover talks is #TMtakeover.
If you are attending, presenting or showing at FETC or ISTE in the US this year why not try something similar. Companies: hand over the controls – let go and learn! Teachers: takeover and share your great ideas for free!
I am delighted to welcome John Johnston, an Education ICT Development Officer in North Lanarkshire, Scotland for a guest post. John first inspired me to start blogging and has continued to do so ever since then. It is a great pleasure to have him as a guest explaining about another of his innovative projects: EDUtalk.
I’ve just found out that I am not going to make it to BETT this year, chief among the many disappointments is that I am not going to get face to face time with many of the folk I know through blogs and twitter and that I will not get the chance to do some recording and evangelising for EDUtalk.cc.
Fortunately Tom has given me the chance to rectify this and fulfil both of these ambitions at once in another way. If through this blog post I can persuade some BETT attendees to produce some audio for EDUtalk I will have evangelised EDUtalk. Listening to reports, reflections, conversations and interviews will add an extra dimension to the blog posts and tweets I will no doubt read in the near future.
Edutalk builds on a project at the Scottish Learning Festival 09 SLFtalk. SLFtalk collected short pieces of audio from a wide range of educators at the SLF and published them on SLFtalk. The audio was recoded on a range of devices, mostly mobile, and posted through a variety of services.
EDUtalk was started to continue to give educators an opportunity to create or listen to podcasts created on the hoof. We, David Noble and myself, see this as ‘guerrilla podcasting’ an alternative to heavier more complex and official channels. In 2010 we are running a EDUtalk365 project in the hope of getting one podcast for every day published on EDUtalk, BETT hopefully gives us an opportunity to keep up the pace.
At the end of 2009 we ran TeachMeet Mobile, a new format of TeachMeet, where contributors produced live audio which became episodes of EDUtalk365.
Full instructions for publishing audio by these and other methods can be found on EDUtalk.
After you send in your recording it is put in the moderation queue for EDUtalk, not so that we can censor or edit it, just to avoid publishing the inevitable spam. If you are recording someone else make sure they have given permission to publish (you should be able to make this clear in the audio). All audio published on the site is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License. At SLF we manage to keep the delay in publishing to a minimum and plan to do the same during BETT.
Podcasting is a powerful medium. David and I believe that hearing someone speak adds an extra dimension. Although podcasting can be criticised as slower than reading and harder to link from it has the advantage of adding emotional emphasis, portability and you can listen while doing something else. Try reading a blog post while washing the dishes.
We think EDUtalk ‘lowers the bar’ to publishing a variety of audio online and we hope that others experiment with these ways of gathering voices. By publishing you audio on EDUtalk you gain distribution, an audience and due to the CC license you can easily republish elsewhere if you like. We also hope that collecting a mix of different voices for all areas of education will make compelling listening.
Typical EDUtalk episodes are short, 1 – 8 minutes long and cover a wide range of topics. The focus for EDUtalk365 is curriculum change. So far contributions have included:
David has produced some prompts which you may find useful when planning the content of the audio that you are contributing:
Although I will not be at BETT David will. As well as recording his own and other peoples’ thoughts, he will be attending TeachMeet BETT and hopes to get permission from the presenters to record their audio and publish it over the next few days at EDUtalk.
We hope that EDUtalk will prove a useful resource for sharing idea and information from BETT and that you will contribute to it.