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TeachMeet Hits its Fourth Birthday: Coming of Age #tmfuture
71 year ago
TeachMeet is entering its fifth year and the unconference for teachers, by teachers has helped hundreds – maybe thousands, in fact – to try out something new, alter the way they already teach and learn, join a community of innovative educators or completely transform their way of working.
The hope was that the model would spread. It has, but as those who have created and helped pull TeachMeet together over the past four years, we want to see it spread further, deeper and with increasing quality of input from practitioners. This post outlines how we think we might manage this.
This is the beginnings of a conversation with those who care about TeachMeet. Add your views in the form of any blog post or comment or tweet – tag it #tmfuture
What are the goals of TeachMeet?
TeachMeet was originally designed to:
- Take thinking away from the formal, often commercialised conference floor, and provide a safe place for anyone to pitch their practice.
- Provide a forum for more teachers to talk about real learning happening in real places, than one-hour conference seminar slots allow.
- Showcase emerging practice that we could all aim to undertake; sales pitches not allowed.
- Be all about the Teach, with only a nod towards tech that paved the way for new practice.
- Provoke new ways of sharing our stories: PowerPoint was banned. We wanted people to tell stories in ways that challenged them, and the audience.
- Empower the audience to critique, ask questions and probe, all online, through SMS or, later, Twitter.
Over the years, these ‘rules’ have altered, leading to some great innovations, others less so. The answer to “What is a TeachMeet?” has become a myriad of meanings, some pretty far off the original goals. We need to help and support people to organise, run and contribute to events that build on previous ones. We need to make TeachMeet as accessible to newbies as it was in 2005. We need TeachMeet to once more find its focus.
Supporting the “infectiousness” of TeachMeets
- Organising TeachMeets should not be easy. Taking part in them should be. But more support is needed for organisers.
- Sponsorship is hard if there’s no bank account into which funds can be sent.
- Without sponsorship, any event over 30 people becomes tricky to organise while also giving people a special night of learning, the time, space and mood that gets people over their self-conscious selves.
- Paying for refreshments and venues is impossible if there’s no organisation to pay them the precise sum.
- The best TeachMeets provide social space, social activity, entertaining MCs, good refreshments, good online coverage and some form of online ‘conclusion’ – this needs coordinating by the organiser(s), but it’s not a skill everyone will have the first time around.
- We’ve got a superb opportunity to curate the best bits from all these TeachMeets that are happening weekly – this needs a degree of oversight.
A means to make TeachMeet more sustainable, easier to use for sponsors and organisers, and have the ability to do something spectacular
TeachMeet is owned by the community that shape it – but there needs to be a body to manage sponsorship and sponsors, and provide support for new organisers so that they maintain the TeachMeet goals. We assume that if someone is organising a ‘TeachMeet’ they would like to emulate the success of those popular early TeachMeets, and better-supported national conference ones (e.g. SLF and BETT).
What would support from the TeachMeet body look like?
- Seeking of sponsorship all year round – including ways and means to get your message to as many teachers as possible
- Brokerage of sponsorship – i.e. one place sponsors and those seeking sponsorship can come together, in a transparent manner
- Recommendation of onsite support (good venues at discounted rates/free, A/V, event organisation [for bigger venues], catering etc)
- Suggestions for various formats that have worked in the past
- Mentoring from previous TeachMeet leaders including on-the-night help
- Featuring of content and promotion of the event in a timely manner on an aggregated, higher profile TeachMeet site
- A group calendar so that events can be seen by geography and date
- Promotion of TeachMeet through international and national events, using contacts of existing TeachMeeters
- In-event publicity (e.g. if you plan an event at a regional ICT day or national event, then we can help broker paper materials for insertion into packs etc)
But, above all, TeachMeet is reaching a point of saturation in the UK – things are going really well in terms of enthusing teachers about their own learning. We have a great opportunity to carry over a small proportion of the sponsorship and contributions towards creating a TeachMeet culture in countries where teacher professional development in this way is still blocked by barriers physical, financial or cultural. This is just one idea, harboured for a long time but unable to realise in the current setup.
This body can take the form of:
- A Limited company (with a Director and shareholders)
- A Charitable Limited Company, with a board of directors and voting rights for fellow ‘shareholders’ (we could work out some way of people being ‘awarded’ shares based on [non-financial] involvement?)
- A Social Enterprise, perhaps formed as a Limited Company (see more information on what this means and how it might work (pdf))
- A Charity (this feels like a lot more red tape to pull through and perhaps not entirely necessary)
As we take things forward we invite you to contribute your ideas and thoughts to make things work smoothly. We want you to comment, probe and make your own suggestions before the end of June, using the tag #tmfuture
Pic: The main room awaits TeachMeet Midlands 2009 :: Ian Usher
#newleaders
11 year ago
Doug Belshaw and Stuart Ridout were instrumental in the production of the fantastic #movemeon book,
“Tips, ideas and suggestions for all teachers from the Twitter community.”
The book was created from the tweets of fellow Twitter users, all collated with the #movemeon hashtag.
Another effort was soon started after this one titled #newleaders. I will soon be one of these new leaders and so this week I asked Stuart Ridout if we could give it a fresh look.
The tag has gained momentum over the last few days with hundreds of tips and ideas suggested about school leadership.
You can see all the tweets here at TwapperKeeper.
For the first book it took over 300 individual ideas, tweeted with the tag, to produce the book.
This is the edu-Twitter community press!
Crowd-sourcing the sort of professional development advice we need. The power of this sort of advice is in the origin: our peers.
I have no doubt that in time other topics will emerge we can contribute to. If each of us makes a single 140 character contribution we can achieve so much together as a community.
Please help with this new book by writing a tweet with your leadership advice and don’t forget the hashtag…
#newleaders
Optimus Prime Cartoon Style Robot Mode by frog DNA
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
EDUtalk at BETT 2010
02 years ago
by tombarrett
in Blogging
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.
What is EDutalk?
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.
How to EDutalk
- Pick up the phone: Use Gabcast. We have a gabcast channel whose content is automatically sent to EDUtalk, see the Gabcast instructions.. All you do is phone up and talk, gabcast and EDUtalk do the rest.
- Tag it: Use AudioBoo or ipadio and tag your content edutalk. The podcasts will be automatically posted to EDUtalk.
- Email it: Email any audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com. Record on an mp3 player, your computer or phone. Email it as an attachment and it will be published.
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.
Why EDUtalk?
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.
What to EDUtalk?
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:
- Contributors own thoughts and experiences
- Workshops and Keynotes at conferences
- A conversation with or between colleagues
- An interview with someone with an interesting insight into, or experience of, curriculum change
- Discussions with students
- Audio resources which can be used by students or other professionals.
David has produced some prompts which you may find useful when planning the content of the audio that you are contributing:
- How are you/they engaging with the changing curriculum? How are you/they changing the opportunities which you/they provide for your/their learners?
- What differences have you/they noticed so far? How are learners responding? What challenges do you/they envisage?
- Which resources are effective for you/them and may be of interest to others?
- What are your/their reflections on curriculum change so far?
- Who or what has inspired you/them lately?
EDUtalk at TeachMeet BETT
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.
