Just a short post after my previous efforts in the past few days. As you must all know, I am a massive fan of Teachmeets and they are a great way of sharing ideas. One problem though is that you get a lot of information thrown at you very quickly. Another is that they happen all over the place and it’s always difficult to attend them all because of geography and working hours. Yes, you can watch some online or back later but still, collecting all of the ideas can be very tricky.
So how can this be made easier? One thing that Bett Teachmeet has is an email address that allows attendees to email their ideas back to the organisers. This could be things they’ve picked up on or ways they’ve used a certain tool in the classroom after seeing it at a Teachmeet. While discussing Teachmeet at Bett with @tomhenzley and discussing this feedback system, we came up with the idea of a blog. What if people could write a blog post saying what they had learnt at Teachmeet and how they had taken the ideas back to class? After all, this is the whole point of Teachmeet isn’t it?
Posterous seems like a perfect solution. So @tomhenzley has been busy setting it up. The idea being we will launch this at Bett, but if other Teachmeets want to use it too, that’s fine. After you attend a Teachmeet, you email your feedback, tagging it with key words e.g. primary or tmbett2011 and then it will appear on the blog (after we verify it) and people can read it and search for it online. Will it work? Who knows. Might do. The verification is to stop spam rather than to edit comments of course.
So, your challenge this year is to attend Bett and then share what you’ve learnt with others. How did you take that idea, that thought and use it with your children? Details of the blog will be posted nearer the time. You can’t evaluate something you haven’t been to 🙂
One of the things that came out of the online discussions earlier this year was that there was a definite lack of clarity around forthcoming TeachMeets from the overly busy wiki and that catching up on what had happened was tricky, too. Getting ideas together pre and post event in a more curated way is essential.
Since December John Johnston and I have been working at the basic infrastructure for something to see how it would work and part of this is a curative blog post that brings together all those references – photos, video, blog posts, tweets etc – from each event. The idea is to bring posts wherever they are found together into one permanent post (more than that then becomes harder for newbies) while allowing for people to post on their own sites. John’s been setting up a WP site and we’ll open up the admin to those who want to join the melé, above all in curating stuff from a few of the recent events as well as from forthcoming ones.
Ideally, we’d get the Posterous posts from tmideas appearing on that site, too. If/when you get it setup it would be great to grab hold of some admin details so that we can make it work together.
Cheers,
Ewan
Will it work? Of course it will judging by the reaction we received to our GTAUK posterous blog. You’re blog posts are setting the scene for a great TeachMeet at BETT.
Another smashing idea Mr Addison (what was in your Christmas dinner?!). Will be great to be able to both share ideas and find resources easily – posterous is a great choice!