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This is a ‘mac’ post not really aimed at education except in so far as a lot of educationalists seem to be using Dropbox. Dropbox is of course a cloud storage & synchronisation application. Basically dropbox sets up a dropbox folder on your computer and syncs it with one online. You can set up dropbox on several computers and they are all kept in sync. This is extremely useful if you use different computers in different locations. I have my home mac, desktop at work, work laptop, iPhone and the iPad I am typing this part of the post on, all with the same files seamlessly synced. What makes drop box different is that on a computer it’s just another folder you do not need to do anything special to keep it in sync.

If you want to get a dropbox account & give me more storage on dropbox Get Dropbox.

I’ve been using drop box as a working directory for sometime now, as week as a way to view files on my phone and the iPad as well as being able to work on files at home and at work without worrying about taking them back and forward. Recently I’ve started using in a couple of slightly more sophisticated ways.

FastScripts

Dropbox Fastscripts

One of my favourite utilities is FastScripts, this is a menubar application that allows you quickly run AppleScripts (it also does shell and other scripts) these can be given keyboard shortcuts and are sorted into application specific lists.

Fox example I often use tiny url to shorten urls so have a script that takes the current URL from safari and puts a URL onto the clipboard. This script has a shortcut of Apple-ALT-control-U.

FastScripts list scripts stored in the Scripts folder in either the mac’s or user’s Library. Inside that folder it organises the different applications scripts inside an Application folder folders:

Fastscript libs

In this case you can see that the Applications folder is an alias. What I did was to move the applications folder to my dropbox folder, I then dragged it back, but with the command and alt keys held down. This left the folder in my dropbox but creates an alias in the Scripts folder, FastScripts sees the files in my dropbox. I can then create the alias in my other macs Scripts folder replaces the one already there. Now when I make a new script on any of the macs it is shared with the other ones and available through FastScripts.

TextMate, Droptext

I find that I use plain text files more and more, I write blogs posts, todo list, web pages and first drafts in TextMate. TextMate has some amazing features that are way above my head but I find it a must have application. Some of the files I use often I keep in a folder _notes in dropbox. Also in dropbox is a textMate project. A textMate project is just a easy way to see all of the files inside the _notes folder and its subfolder (power users can do a lot more with projects).

Textmate Project

What is great is I can access and edit these files from any of the computers I use and view them through the dropbox app on an iPhone or iPad. I can also use a 59p app droptext to edit these files on the iPad.

I have never really been one for productivity systems, I’ve always like 43 Folders but mainly as a distraction. However, I do like automating repetitive tasks and things that work automagically Dropbox, FastScripts & TextMate fit that bill.

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Strip designer

This week I have added five new apps to my iPad and thought I’d post them here. 

The whole post was made on the iPad all text ‘written’ with Dragon Dictation.

The first is BBC News and this is just a translation of the BBC’s new site for the iPad that it works very nicely. It’s pretty slick there is a series of all news feeds on the left and you could see the articles on the right. You can customise the feeds so I’ve already remove sport and added the Scottish news  it seems very iPad friendly and like quite a few  designed read and access media in an attractive way.

Another media viewer I’ve  installed is FlipBoard which has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet and on twitter. This app pulls information from different sources, Facebook or twitter and from collections and about different things, say technology or entertainment.the app presents these streams in an attractive way.   You can to flip through the pages with some pretty effects.   What I think is really impressive that is with the tweets from your twitter stream it doesn’t just to show the tweets, if a tweet has an article linked it will present some of the article, with a photograph that will present the photograph.  FlipBoard has been a little controversial as it is pulling in content by scraping rather than they’re getting it from RSS feeds. To me this doesn’t seem too much of a problem most of the longer articles are shortened so you need to display the source along with any adverts and branding to read the whole thing. This viewing is done in the app rather than in safari. 

The next  app is regexecutioner which is an app  to help learn about regular expressions.   I do occasionally attempting to learn and to  use snippets of regular expressions. Hopefully this may  get me up to speed.  It is a pretty straightforward app were you can see  examples and you can take a regular expression and  a text block instantly see it’s result.

StripDesigner  is more of a creative app.  You can see from the screen shots that are  illustrating  this post that I have used it to present and annotate some screenshots of these application.  It’s a really nice ComicLife clone.  I tried on the iPhone first there the screen space is a wee bit limited but on the iPad and it just works very nicely indeed.  You can choose different layouts of up to five pictures.  You can add texts and the other things, adjusting fonts, text size and drop shadows in an easy and intuitive way.  I think it would be a great application to use in a classroom and I imagine I’ll be using it quite a lot.

The final application I’ve installed this week is Dragon Dictation which is an amazing application.  I have recorded all of this post and it turned into text using Dragon Dictation  it is very straightforward to use: you press a record button, you talk, you hit the Screen to stop.  Dragon  then analyses this (I imagine it sens the audio to a server) and brings back the text. You can quickly clean up and edit the text.   I tried it first on my iPhone you can tweet straight from Speech.  I then they tried on the iPad  and had one crash so made sure  to a copy of each section of this post as i  recorded six different sections. I had to do a little cleaning up, but given my accent and the fact that there is no training period make this application seem like magic.

    

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With Glow blogs looking like they may stimulate the use of blogs in more Scottish classrooms I though I might put together a few posts about some ideas around starting to use blogs in the classroom.

A few years ago I blogged about Starting Blogging in the Classroom with some advice that I still think holds good. I’ve published some general notes at OpenSourceCPD Blogging, Introduction to blogging & Blogging with Pupils which may be of some use.

The above still stands but I want to pick up some details and tips, starting with short term blogs in this post.

Setting a date by Damon Duncan
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I couple of weeks ago I was following a lovely class blog: International Week. The blog uses posterous’s ease of publishing media very well, the children are recording short pieces of audio with easi-speak mics and uploading them to the blog. The mics are in my opinion a great tools for the classroom.

In the week the blog has also had pictures, animoto, youtube, a survey, google maps and writing. It is a great example of using posterous in the classroom.

Kevin McLaughlin has produced an inspiring post about the week: A week of blogging and creative learning

One of the things I like about this blog is the length of time it ran: 1 school week, 5 days.
I spent a fair bit of time moving old posts across when I left Sandaig to here. I am a digital hoarder. I love the ability to look back through a year or 3 of a blog and I really like the connections that build up and grow on a long term blog. When I was teaching at Sandaig Primary my main blogging focus was Sandaig Otters which ran for 5 years at that url and is still being updated at a new home: Sandaig Otters.

But I also organised quite a few other blogs some for individuals, some for particular projects and these included a few short term blogs.

Short term blogging is, I think, a great way to add any short term project, trip or collaboration in class.

One of the first blogs I organised for short term use was The Listeners – Primary Six Writing Week which only has 11 posts. I probably spent more time customising the design than the class did blogging. I still feel it was a success, the children in the class were very much focused by publishing their work online and very much encouraged by the comments they received.

Since then I’ve organised quite a few short term blogs, including trip blogs and blogs for short school projects. Of course if you have a established weblog you could just use categories or tags to organise a set of posts round a theme or project, but this can be a great way to dip your toe into blogging and finding out how it could help your teaching.

Scottish teachers now have easy access to blogging tools with the release of glow blogs. At he time of writing the blogging facility is fairly basic but several improvements will be made before the start of the next session. Setting up a glow blog is very straightforward and LTS have produced some introductory material: Glow Blogs – An Overview « Glow Help Articles, glow blogs can be set to be private with only glow users, or a subset of those users having access or open to the public. I would recommend that you open the blogs up to the public. If I didn’t have access to glow I think I’d be very tempted by posterous as a simple way to set up a blog and get pupils started.

Although setting up and using a blog is technically very simple you need to think a wee bit about the attitude of the pupils, they need to know that they are not using bebo, facebook or messaging their friends, that they have a responsibility to themselves, their class and school.

Short Term Advantages

  • The pupils will not have time to forget the safety information or become fedup with you reminding them.
  • The initial excitement of publishing online will hopefully not fade over a short term project.
  • By setting limits in time and scope for the blog makes it more doable and less likely to lose focus or drift off which can happen with long term class blogs.
  • If the blog is collaborative with another school setting a fixed period will give all parties a target that is easier to met and give attention to than an open ended project.
  • If you are hoping that an audience will have an effect on your pupils organising that is simpler, and your audience will be more likely to stay the course.
  • It is probably easier to give pupils more control over the organisation of a short term blog with simple aims.

Short Term Tips

  • Makes sure the blog is set up and you are comfortable with using the interface
  • If you are going to use photos make sure the pupils know your rules for posting, (probably no named faces).
  • Pupils can use the cameras, edit and resize pictures independently. I am alway surprised at how many school taking photos is a job for adults.
  • Similarly with other media, make sure that you are not going to be needed to get it sort out and posted. If your pupils are not regularly handling cameras, importing and editing media files make sure you have at least a couple of experts before the project starts.
  • You can prep an audience, contact another school, explain to parents how to post, do a wee bit of online publicity (twitter).

Short Term Examples

International Week the blog mentioned at the start of this post is a great example. The rest are ones that I have organised, not that I think they are particularly good examples but I know more about them.

Snakes and Ladders, this blog was set up for a project designed to help integrate children joining our school when the one across the road closed down. Half a dozen primary sevens were given the responsibility of keeping the project blog up-to-date and did a great job. Another team were tasked with creating a video which was posted at the end of the project. The pupils were not in my class and basically organised themselves during the project.

The Dream Dragon – A log of the dream dragon project quite a different blog, mostly updated by myself and used as a teaching tool for a fairly long project with sporadic activity, I wanted the class to have an overview of the project.

World Cup 2006 I noticed quite a lot of classroom blogging about the current World Cup, this one stimulated a few reluctant boys, unfortunately the Scottish term cut it short.

We blogged trips to Holland in 2005, 2007 and 2008 these blogs were much appreciated by parents as were the Holland 2010 posts which kept my ‘tradition’ going after I left school. Trip blogs are a great way to demonstrate some of the powers of the internet to your class and to get parents interested in blogging.

I blogged a weeks trip to Glencoe 2006 to do outdoor activities. When a class I had previously taught to blog went with their next teacher to Blairvadach they were perfectly capable of organising the blog themselves.

Elephants was another week long poetry blog which gathered some of very interesting comments I’ll return to some ideas about comments in a later post. Like the The Listeners blog having a separate blog meant we could customise it for a particular project.

Bottle Poem

McClure – Sandaig is a collection of 3 blogs for a collaborative project with a class in Georgia in the USA.

In one of the blogs I made some fairly crude customisations that allowed comments to appear with the same weight as posts. I did this, as usual, at the last minute but I think it was a nice idea it reminds me that blogs are not fit for every purpose and were not designed with the classroom in mind, hopefully in the longer term we will get blog like software that will allow even more customisation than is available now.

This particular hack was performed quickly at the last minute and I would not have been able to do it if the blog had been a long term one. Short term blogs are ideal for all sorts of experimentation.

I am sure I’ve only scratched the surface of the use of a short term blog I hope these examples show that it can be a useful tool in the classroom and would allow folk unfamiliar with blogging to make an achievable and worthwhile start or experiment.

I hope produce a few more posts about classroom blogging which might be helpful to people starting out with glow blogs next session and will tag them glowblogs. I would be interested in collecting any other short term use of blogs in the classroom.

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I’ve blogged a bit before about adapting glow to show video and audio. I’ve found another way to do it using the TopUp Javascript library and jQuery

Here is a screencast to show how it works:

This goes in an xml webpart in glow:




Here is what is going on:

Line 1 includes the jQuery Library hosted by google.

We then have a simple script using the library.

Line 3 setting jQuery to noConflict, this means that we use jQuery for our main function name rather than the $ shortcut. I am not sure if I need to do this but it fixed some early experiments.

Line 5, this is where we use jQuery, we use it to add a css class of top_up to any link that links to an m4v file.

Line 9 add the TopUp javascript library from gettopup.com. This is enough to make m4v videos play in a popup window but in the last bit of the script we just ajust some settings.

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Glow Blog Screenshot

Yesterday saw the launch of blogs in Glow. A much requested feature from the beginning it is great to see Glow getting into a web 2 world at last. To set up your blog you need to have creating a blog allowed by your ASM, after that you just add a Blog webpart to a glow page and click create. You can create a private blog, one that can only be viewed by glow users and an open blog, I know which one I’d go for;-)

Alan Hamilton has published a table explaining how glow users roles map to the blog’s role: Glow Blogs | #learnerham. I think I’d go for giving any pupils as much permission as I could. At Sandaig Primary the children always blogged with admin rights and they never put a foot wrong.

Yesterday I set up a quick test blog just to see how thing work, I managed to get in first and spent a while trying things out. It is, on first impression, a pretty standard WordPress set up and I managed to change my theme, add stuff to the sidebar and make a couple of posts. I had a bit of trouble posting an image as there seems to be a wee bug in the system, I’d guess this will be easy to fix.

The blog both integrates into glow, with a version (without media) of the Quick Press area in the glow webpart:

Blow Webpart

this could be handy if you wanted a text only blog, but I am more interested in the fact that with a public blog you can log into the blog admin directly using your glow login through the magic of Shibboleth.

Feature Requests I’ll be making

To celebrate day two of glow blogging I though I’d make a couple of feature requests.

  • Storage space; at the moment this is set to 10mb:
    Storage Space
    Two header graphics and a couple of other small pics and I am at 3% of this already. My graphics are fairly well squashed (unlike some who should know better;-) ), 10mb gives very little space for audio or video files. I’ve not tested the upload file size limit. I know Glow has been very good at increasing storage space for standard glow sites when it is needed and hope they will take the same approach here.
  • Settings, not too surprising but you can’t do a lot with these, the one thing I would love to see turned on is the ability to activate the MetaWebLogAPI, this would enable lots of good stuff, the use of specialised blogging clients and, more interesting to me, blogging from mobile devices (ipod touches for instance).

I’ll not be lobbying for lots of extra themes, though other folk might, the one I’m using, K2, has a fair amount of customisation available and I don’t think the limited number of theme is that important.

Getting started blogging

Especially if done in full public view there are some potential difficulties. I personally feel that the advantages hugely outweigh these, but I also feel it pays to tread carefully. I always used to repeatedly stress to my pupils there responsibilities in publishing to the world. I likened it to a school trip, explaining that blogging was like going out into the world as a school representative. In the same way as I expected excellent behaviour on a trip I expected excellent behaviour on the blog.

Teachers too have their responsibilities, we need to try to get he best out of blogging, introducing it in a structured way. Three years ago I blogged: Starting Blogging in the Classroom and think that is still a reasonable approach.

Ever since I started pupils blogging I have felt that it is a wonderful classroom activity and I hope that the glow blogs will lead to an explosion of classroom blogging across Scotland.

I am also hoping that these blogs will be listed on ScotEduBlogs making that an even more powerful resource.

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Twittering Haiku in the Garden at Night, after Chikanobu by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Attribution License

For quite a while now there has been a fair amount of discussion about how twitter is becoming the main conduit for web 2 type teachers to keep in touch and that blogging is on its way out.

I was interested to hear a couple of views about this on the edonis project podcast recently. Jaye Richards wondered if twitter was just a little too positive, not having space for critical discussion. Robert Jones talked about how it was hard to interest teachers in twitter if they did not already have an online network of some sort.

Although I tweet with a fair degree of enthusiasm I do sometime worry that it twitter takes something away from blogging. I’ve noticed a decrease in comments here and elsewhere and a decrease in my commenting beyond a quick tweet. For example my previous post here is sitting with no comments but several tweets.

Yesterday I read a few posts that convinced me that blogging is alive and well. I though I’d link to them here:

Margaret Vass posted Learning, Teaching and ICT » A Secondment Whirlwind Tour – 2 Years in 2 Minutes. Margaret’s blog is a constant source of inspiration for me and this post has me thinking hard about my professional role. She also points to some of the work she has done on ePortfolios and the main points she has learnt, one What about the pupils?: Comments should go beyond “I think I did OK” or ” I think I have more to learn.” is perhaps relevant to the blogs versus twitter theme.

Mr Mallon, posted some Good Advice from Rolf which he recorded on a trip to CERN. Particle physicist Rolf Landau gives advice to the many Scottish young people who are about to take up Physics. I’ve not listened to the 59 minute recording yet, but what a wonderful example of the way blogging can provide resources to pupils.

Meanwhile in the English Department Mr W asks What Texts D’you Teach? he is in the market for new texts for his English Department and would appreciate any suggestions. He is collecting them on a google spreadsheet through a form Neil already has a good number of suggestions.

I found all the above on the ScotsEduBlogs front page, but saw the next linked from twitter.

S1 adventures in posterous on Kenny O’Donnell’s blog. Kenny gives a rundown of some of the ways S1 in his school have been using posterous. There are some great examples of students work linked. I was particularly interested in the students not only persisted, but experimented with their blogs because it required nothing more than sending their work from e-mail and the suggestions about e-portfolios.

I could of course linked to lots of other great blog posts from around Scotland this week, but I think these give a flavour of the the valuable information and conversation going on. As much as I love twitter posts like the above linger in my mind for longer hopefully helping me in all sorts of ways.

This brief unscientific survey shows the great value of blogs and I’d suggest that the odd visit to ScotsEduBlogs will always interest and inspire at least as much as watching the twitter stream.

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107of365[NTR23] by ntr23
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

For the last couple of days I’ve been testing an iPad. In many ways a compelling device. I’ve not used it enough to come to any real conclusions but though it worth noting some thoughts.

I am using the iPad to write this post & the first thing I noticed is the easy and  straightforward typing and the relative difficulty of typing tags such as <:p&rt; to get to a < you need to hit the number keypad and then the symbols one, switching back to letters and then numbers if you need a /.

At first play the things that the iPad seems best at are viewing and reading tasks, for me email, rss, browsing and quick googles. I may change my mind on that one if I get iMovie or keynote. I would love to see GarageBand for the iPad, it would be great with a touch interface.  It seems faster to check mail by grabbing the iPad than it is to move to the computer.. The speed that the iPad opens and launches apps is very impressive. I spend a fair bit of time reading RSS and google reader works well. I’ve used the iPhone version of netnewswire but as the iPad version is a bit more expensive than I am used to paying for apps I’ve not got that one. Instead i am using google reader and FeeddlerRRS which  is a free reader for iPad FeeddlerRRS uses your google read account too and it seems to work well. I’ve probably read more of my feeds in the last couple of days than the previous week. It is easier to read whole articles on the ipad compared to a phone where I would typically star or bookmark for later consumption. It is also easier to jump to the post and leave a comment.  I don’t think FeeddlerRRS works offline though which was an advantage of NetNewsWire on the iPhone. I could load my iPhone and read feeds on the train without worrying about s connection.

Somethings will take a bit of getting used to. I started this post in Pivot’s mobile interface:

Pivot mobile

b
This is pretty nice but I rsn into problems when I ‘minimised’ the page:

iPad safari  

I was thinking of this as equivalent to tabs but found when I swapped back to the pivot page after copying a Flickr embed code that the page reloaded and lost my text! I’ve switched to Notes to prevent this happening again and started using another note to hold snippets: 

iPad notes

I am also using Flickr to post images rather than uploading them here with TextMate.

 Ipsd apps

I am using 2 free apps PhotoPad to edit pics and the iPhone darkslide app to upload to Flickr. I think in the longer term I’d want a more efficient blogging app or I’d use Mail to post to posterous if I was doing a lot of iPad bloggIng.    

I’d be interested in trying out some of the HTML apps if they were iphone priced rather than the slightly more expensive iPad ones. I am not sure I’ll be editing much HTML on the iPad.    

What is impressive is the easy to use interfaces with all of these apps. I’ve not had to look of help or instructions on any of them. Things just work. The device is surprisingly delightful: the smooth way menus appear or say TweetDeck flips over to display  a webpages link in a tweet is lovely.

I am very interested in seeing how ipads would fit into a classroom and compare use with the iPod Touch. I imagine they would be a powerful shared device, sitting in the middle of a group to be grabbed and passed around better for collaborative work that the Touch. 

I am looking forward to testing the iPad in as many ways as I can think of over the next wee while and seeing the possibilities develop.

 

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Mp3s_in_glow

A while ago I blogged about adding some functionality to glow: Glow Kludges, in a fairly crude way. This technique for embedding players for audio and video content into glow semi- automatically has proved useful to several teachers and classes and in a few groups I’ve created.

I’ve managed to refine some of this a bit recently for both audio (mp3) files and some video formats, this is one of the improved techniques.

Again the idea is to replace a link to an mp3 files in a glow document library with an embedded Flash player. This avoids users having different behaviours when clicking on a link to an mp3 depending on their operating system, browser and settings

We use 2 JavaScript libraries jQuery and the jQuery SWFObject Plugin and a small fragment of code, links to the libraries (jQuery is hosted by google and can be loaded from there, I’ve uploaded jQuery SWFObject to some glow webhosting space) and the Dewplayer Flash mp3 player.

The links to the libraries and code are put in a glow xml webpart:

//first link to the 2 libraries
<script type = "text/javascript"src = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js" > </script>
<script type = "text/javascript"src = "http://publicwebsites1.glowscotland.org.uk/jjjs/jquery.swfobject.min.js" > </script>
 <span style="color:#0080FF">// now replace links to mp3s with flash player</span>
<script type = "text/javascript "charset = "utf - 8 " >
$(document).ready(
function() {
// href$=.mp3 is the selector finds all links to mp3 files
    $('a[href$=.mp3]').each(function() {
        audio_file = $(this).attr('href');
        $(this).flash(
        {
// dewplayer.swf is the flash document hosted in a glow webhosting site
            swf: 'http://publicwebsites1.glowscotland.org.uk/jjjs/dewplayer.swf',
// these arguments will be passed into the flash document
            flashvars: {
                mp3: audio_file,
            },
            height: 20,
            width: 200,
        }
        );
//we need to stop the link to the file working
        this.onclick = function() {
            return false;
        };
    }
    );
});
</script>

Basically with the above snippet of code in an xml webpart any links to mp3 files on a page will be converted into a flash player. The xml webpart can be hidden by setting its titlebar to none. When pupils upload mp3 files into a document library on a page the flash players will be embedded.

jQuery is an extremely powerful javascript library that is easy to use by folk like me with very limited JavaScript knowledge and very useful for adding functionality to glow.

By the By anyone interested in altering glows appearance should check out the Consolarium group, Charlie Love has sorted out how to apply a custom theme to the pages there and posted an explanation and resources on his blog.

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photo by Mr Ush Some rights reserved

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 look like? (is this for new organisers of events? support from the TeachMeet body?)

  • 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