Learn 4 Life

What next for BETT and TeachMeet - beyond the lunatic fringe - why so serious?

This year I overhead a comment to this effect -

“Looking around on the stands and at Open Source, TeachMeet etc. it seems people are being regarded far less as the ‘lunatic fringe’ and becoming more accepted.”

I often think that when you talk about new ideas and concepts applied to education, many people look at you with the same disdain they might display on finding out that you have told them their favourite uncle is a cross-dresser. “Yes dear - we know they do it but we don’t talk about that…”

That a similar attitude seems to persist for TeachMeet seems obvious and, so far, the mainstream organisations have fought shy of the big TM - it’s a well known secret but no-one wants to big it up or go public with it just yet.

But the fringe events - lunatic or otherwise - just may be the salvation of BETT in the coming years…and there has been some movement from the exhibition organisers this year and it’s all good.

The problem with BETT from a vendors’ view

I have worked on a couple of stands at BETT in the past with an excellent educational product but it’s been exceptionally hard to get people’s attention if it’s new or innovative and you are just starting out marketing. If you have ever worked on a commercial stand at BETT it can be a very dispiriting business believe me.

Trying to get people’s attention and being rebuffed or shot a dirty look as they push by in an ever increasing frenzy to get freebies off different stalls whilst running the gauntlet of leafletteers is not a very nice experience or, even, very good for your self-esteem especially if you are going out cold and unsolicited. Unless you can bribe them with a branded gonk or personalised pen - or other inducements and even then it’s a Sisyphean and quite thankless task as they make a grab for the goodies and are gone.

Image Attribution Ian Usher - Mr Ush on Flickr

It’s like a ‘walk of shame‘ in reverse for the stall staff - most people really aren’t that interested - they are overloaded with info and bags and just often want somewhere just to sit down and the last thing they want to hear is a sales pitch - often it seems the firms (as Ian Usher pointed out) do more Business 2 Business than sell to the educational establishment.

The whole process is very decontextualised - people need to be hooked in by some particular serendipity; some amazing Son et lumière (like the LEGO stand this year) and then they will come or only because they have organised to see you in advance of the show.

The bigger brasher firms can build wonderful environments - little pods where they can pamper their punters into handing over the spondoolics and who can pay experienced presenters to wow them into semi-narcoleptic comatose acceptance and submission but the average stall holder has a fight on their hands for people’s attention and money.

Of course some teachers are just there for the jolly - they seem pretty clueless about what they need or even if they really need it and they will snub and denigrate and wriggle out of any social interaction with that look they have that sits between pressurised fear of the unknown and mild irritation brought on by the fact someone has had the affrontery to stop them in their ceaseless peregrinations around the show.

There they hurry by, like the lost souls in the second circle of hell of Dante’s Inferno, like dead wraiths cursed to be ceaselessly buffeted aimlessly around in circles lusting after things they could never have…

I Don’t Know What You Want (But I Can’t Give it Any More ).

Enter TeachMeet Takeover

But on the whole the education profession is more than receptive to “what works” and engages pupils - surprise, surprise they like to watch other teachers talking about their teaching and good resources and like to see exemplars of wonderful practice.

Enter Teachmeet Takeover and something different happens. Suddenly your stand is populated by teachers giving superb presentations (teachers are good at that) and they draw a crowd. This creates more of a relaxed and convivial atmosphere in some cases and in many of the events caused people to learn quite a few new things and, perhaps, even buy some commercial products.

The TeachMeet fringe events create a highly focused social concentration for genuine reflection on good teaching and learning practice.

Unlike previous years I was on the on the Open Source Cafe Stand where a lot of people were genuinely interested in the software and they were pro-actively electing to come and talk and learn from others - there’s a budding community of people truly interested in Open Source software for schools. The Open Source Cafe was run like a bar camp but there were some great fun moments when the Jo Claessens and Andy Wilson arrived from the BBC to liberate London’s monsters to publicise the excellent BBC Open Lab resources

So I was well positioned to ask some friends about what they thought was best about BETT2010 - it was nearly unanimous that it was the TeachMeet Takeover and fringe events that were most engaging. Have a listen to the few short vox pops below :

Lisa Stevenson explained what the TeachMeet Takeover phenomenon was:

I’m going to all the TeachMeet Takeovers because I find that really exciting talking about how you can use things for free and teachers talking about all the things they DO with all the stuff that we’ve got around us…what’s happened is the stands around us have volunteered to let a teacher take over their stand for half an hour and just present about things they use in the classroom using free stuff - it’s got nothing to do with the stand that they are on …I was on Rising Stars this morning and had nothing to do with what they do; they just gave me the time, the computer, the screen and the microphone and I just took over and talked about what I do in my classroom; because BETT’s really kind of like a Trade Show selling things and we want to sell what we do in our classroom and to show, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a big budget - there are lots of things you can do for nothing.

Dawn Hallybone also pointed to the TeachMeet Takeover as the main thing she had experienced at BETT. But with reference to most of the “content” at BETT she said :

Have I seen a lot that inspires me yet - no sorry.

BETT took off for me this year for a number of reasons.

The comms tech is getting more ubiquitous and invisible.

Despite the O2 network going down (presumably because of the concentration of iPhone users) people were communicating more than ever on Twitter and their numbers seemed to be growing - the ad hoc comms infrastructure within the building during the show between stallholders, teachers, advisers and almost much anyone else seemed to be starting to come together.

Stand Owners are becoming more receptive to TeachMeet

The blend of communication and “genuine” human interaction at show level was a new element. There seemed to be less of a disjunction between people and more of a positive engagement. The savvier commercial providers got the mix just right - people like Chris Ratcliffe of Scholastic definitely “get it” and were disseminating video blogs of their own about events around their stand including the TeachMeet Talks. Well done Chris!

Thousands of little social interactions were happening all over the place and you could see the human face of the use of tech - people meeting people they knew on twitter but never met in the flesh before - people renewing professional friendships - educationalists are highly gregarious so it worked and I would maintain that it was more authentic than other possible scenarios because all the participants are so engaged with learning. The changes at BETT could almost have been a metaphor for the change I predict coming in education….

The Theme of Fun

Throughout the show and all the fringe festivals there was a definite theme of “fun”. There was a game of Tig going on between Twitter users  - did you miss that? Yes, Tig, Tag whatever you want to call it - people were showing up on stands and tigging people. They could be commercial vendors or teachers or advisors - it didn’t matter - it was fun and it brought people together and broke down barriers to human communication - it was facilitated by apps like Twitter though that made it easier to say where people were and to broadcast out that you were coming to get them. In the Amplified session on Thursday we discussed the role of “play” in work. Here’s a couple of snippets from that conversation. Here Kevin Mulryne, of the National College for leadership and schools and children’s services, discusses the “fun” things that went on in his work at BETT.

At TeachMeet on the Friday it was fun - it always is - one of the highlights was Ian Yorston who told us about his role as ‘The Unreasonable Man’.

The quote in that video clip could be the ethos behind TeachMeet Takeover in some ways…no wonder he got such a rapturous response.

Again - highly entertaining and fun but also very informative…

I predict that as the tech gets more invisible, seamless and ubiquitous so the opportunities for serious fun will increase. As a species we are extremely ludic, playful to the extreme or we should be and learning should be fun - otherwise why do it? The elements of “play” will always conquer the dour naysayers in the long run - people take their play extremely seriously. Take this whole discussion on gaming on the Wednesday at the Amplified Education event….

What we saw at BETT this year was the beginning of a new way of doing old stuff - genuinely engaging educationalists breaking down the barriers to human interaction by using traditional well tried skills. I’d call it “Remixing Education” and it’s beginning to come into focus as people begin to understand that the underpinning technology no longer matters - it’s reaching such a mature level that the organisation and vision can be easily enabled now to cater to people’s individual needs around knowledge and skills and that those are in constant flux anyway as everyone moves forward into the 21st Century and new competencies.

MirandaMod Debates

I always enjoy filming the MirandaMod debates because they are held at BETT and are open to anyone to come and join in. It’s always touch and go if anyone will turn up but as we broadcast out onto Twitter when it is beginning they always do. And contributors always prove fascinating and are the spearhead for a lot of very innovative research. Many people Twitter in from abroad or ask questions around the video stream.

It’s about the people not the tech

It is a constant mantra - all these peripheral social activities at BETT have added up to a marvellous week. Whether you are a stall holder, a teacher allowed out for the day, senior leadership or a pupil it can be good fun.

So why isn’t it mainstreaming?

So I totally agree with Gareth Davies about the fact that the bigger government non-profit agency stands should encourage TeachMeet Takeover.

And the one big question I would ask is:

Why does Teachers’ TV never film or show anything to do with TeachMeet? If they did so - it would become more mainstream and then some proper infrastructure/ funding for dissemination could happen?

Failing that I suggest the TeachMeet crew ask for some funding from all the stands that supported BETT2010 this year to do a drill down mailout to individual teachers as suggested by Tom Barrett in previous campaigns. Getting a personalised letter would be good - even better would be mailshots sent out by all the regional LA TeachMeets and the stands punters who have data about who they have giving an event and informing people of what a TeachMeet is and where they can find one.

It’s heartening to see several messages from people on Twitter saying they are going to hold local events new to their area. What would be even better would be schools hosting an event in a place that is not necessarily the school and build a social evening out of it. There’s enough social scaffolding and event templates for this now.

When the time came - each region could point to BETT and The Education Show and build on this year’s success. And remember it’s not just teachers but everyone involved in educating their children. Why not get a few parents along next time as well …?

Breaking down the silos

Informal learning will be one of the massive growth industries in the coming years - I’ll leave the last word to Dughall Hine founder of School of Everything on his attitude to learning and tech that he espoused at Tedx Orenda on Wednesday Night (if you weren’t there video up soon…)

I’m not one of these people who get really excited by technology - I get excited when technology allows people to do real stuff - it’s fun…

Desktop Broadcasting of Second Life with TwitCam - “Inside Broadcasting”

Here’s another first from Learn 4 Life. Using Twitcam to Broadcast out Second Life from your desktop. Simple blocky but effective if you use a tripod and don’t move your avatar around too fast.

In this broadcast I even managed to stream in a video into Second Life on a media player. The sound is superb but the video being shown comes across as stills but then my broadband connection can only take so much through my Mac.

Oh an I forgot to add I was also talking to Chris Smith @shamblesguru on Skype as well on voice - go and play. A whole new Inside / Outside broadcast model. Voila!

Scratch in Open Sim

Thanks to ReactionGrid and @dstrawberrygirl, Learn4Life now has a place on the Open Sim grid and I am officially a “Gridizen”.

Chris set me up an account in minutes and I was able to have a quick play with Scratch for Open Sim.

Here’s a very quick video of the basic process. I simply downloaded the Scratch for Open Sim application - written in Squeak here (courtesy of a link from Rich White’s excellent Greenbush Labs Blog - Rich tweaked Scratch for Second Life for Open Sim as a universal app for Windows, Mac and Linux) and then I was able to write code that could control a prim on the Open Grid in seconds.

I simply dragged and dropped the building blocks onto the interface and then copy and pasted the code into TextMate and from there into my prim on Reactiongrid and presto - it worked first time. (NB you don’t need to even copy to a Word Processor on a Windows machine - but do on a Mac)

So much more engaging than Scratch in 2D don’t you think ?

If you are a teacher in a  UK school thinking of a quick start in Virtual Worlds and want to explore Open Sim I’d thoroughly recommend ReactionGrid for their pricing and prompt service. They even have a virtual turn key solution Banbury and the educational apps they can offer and other services are well worth looking at http://outpost.reactiongrid.com/. They can make worlds secure and in my experience are still small enough to offer a very personalised service and what’s more their main developer is UK based - so what’s stopping you - get in touch with @dstrawberrygirl now.

Piglets, Pixels and People…Video/audio event magnification…Outside Broadcast comes of age…how to use it effectively - some ideas…

HOW TO MAKE VIDEO AMPLIFY AND AUTHENTICATE COMMUNITY ACTIVITY

I have been live streaming video for about 6 years now in different guises. From the pre YouTube days when I needed the help of specialist media companies to live stream, and virtually a whole server to push the video out (with a massive bandwidth bill to boot) - to a few years back when I discovered Mogulus (now Livestream), Ustream, FlashMeeting, QIK et al.

It always struck me very forcibly how important it is to get both the mediums - (real time synchronous video with commenting from viewers on Twitter) and asynchronous (after the event more polished and post produced embedded in a series of good resources) to play to their various strengths.

One of my first video jobs was to build a website for the world’s first Virtual Opera in a girls secondary school in Kings Cross and show the daily rehearsals as they were performed as a series of flash movies then stream the finished opera in real time - twice!

Part of the deal - which was sponsored by Nesta/ Futurelab as it was then was to get match funding from Commercial companies to enable provisioning of kit and services for the event. But the Commercial companies, at first, couldn’t see the concept - they didn’t “get it” - remember this was pre YouTube.

So for weeks I shot digital video of rehearsals - then went home in the evening - edited and encoded the video and then renecoded it into flash uploaded them to my server and wrote the HTML for the flash movies and created the finished web pages. The videos then began to tell a story and people started to understand the filmed narrative.

As the site began to grow and the movies began to populate the website we got more and more sponsorship because the companies could see the narrative emerging and the community started to tune in and, in turn, bounce off of that content. But more than that the community was global so the opportunity to show sponsorship on a much wider platform riding on the tails of a very local story became an established model. So when YouTube came along later it wasn’t that unexpected to me.

Parents were able to see their children rehearsing and the countdown to the live stream of the performance. Companies could see their ROI grow day by day with the popularity of the site which was getting a lot of media attention as it grew - everyone’s attention was captured because of the community looking in on itself and responding.

So the asynchronous video helped to magnify interest in the event and the event drove the activity and buzz around the community. It was a virtuous circle but also a hell of a lot of hard work into the early hours of every morning for about three months…

LIVE STREAMING vs ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO BROADCAST - how they are different

Fast forward seven years past many many jobs and contracts to the Open Source Schools UnConference this week where I was able to broadcast out live from the NCSL using a Mac laptop and a “dongle” - it’s nothing new I’ve been doing it for years.

Over the past two years I have perfected the use of a mini outside broadcast portable filming unit I carry everywhere with me - it easily enables me to film, stream and document the day for others who could not make it there physically. Six years ago this was my dream - today it’s a reality and the technology to produce live streaming is getting smaller and more powerful by the week…

Inside this case I have 2 tape DV cameras, 3 Flip cams, allied mini tripods, broadcast quality external mikes, ethernet cables, dongle, portable mini hard drive, 32GB USB stick, gaffer tape, pag lights, extension leads and many, many other things that are invaluable. These resources have been built up over time as a result of trial and error.

GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE TO FINE TUNE THEIR SIGNAL - the “human” part of broadcasting

Something always goes wrong and video streaming is an inexact art, so with the coming of Twitter it has been much easier to crowdsource “talkback” from your audience. This is something the mainstream media companies are only just beginning to get.

The people who are both viewing the stream and on Twitter, will give you instant feedback on the reception their end - allowing you to tweak the stream dynamically with others helping you all over the world (although you need to make educated guesses about the quality of some users’ client machines sometimes).

I guess the difference between myself and a “professional” outside broadcaster apart from the cost of the kit, is the fact that I know a fair number of people viewing remotely and I have a good professional knowledge of the people and exemplars I am filming. Sometimes it’s not unknown for me to ask a question on behalf of a remote viewer or myself because the mediated role between active broadcaster, participant and viewer being very much changed by such involvement. The broadcast is both local and global in that respect and authenticity underpins what I do. I don’t do generic video streaming of any event - only the ones with which I have a good professional knowledge of the practitioners and their communities. This helps give a more genuine context and more compelling narrative when broadcasting…

At the Open Source Schools UnConference at the NCSL this week - I managed to stream most of the main sessions (except my own as usual) and with the help of Drew Buddie (http://twitter.com/digitalmaverick), Joe Dale (http://twitter.com/joedale), Tony Sheppard (http://twitter.com/grumbledook) and Dai Barnes (http://twitter.com/daibarnes) most of the other sessions were captured on a series of Flipcams for asynchronous viewing later (I will badge and upload these day by day through August).

As I was filming to DV tape + live streaming I was also monitoring the Twitter hashtag for #osschools and various DM’s from various people about the quality of the stream. By quickly interacting with people I could get immediate feedback about broadcast quality and (try to) correct any dips in volume / picture quality. Plus I could feedback to some presenters in real time on the side…

Those asynchronous films will act as a repository, reminder and CPD resource for those people who were at the conference but couldn’t make the parallel sessions as well as an overview for those people who couldn’t make it there in person. They also act as an historical resource and downloadable archive for people interested in all aspects of Open Source software. Local authority advisors, teachers and others can also point to and embed those films in their local websites and blogs and build further localised CPD sessions around them if they wish.

MAGNIFYING SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT WITH LIVE VIDEO STREAMS BY USING SATELLITE EVENTS

Then, this morning, I was at a remote viewing of TEDGLOBAL OXFORD in Spitalfields London.

About 20 people turned up at 8 am and about 8.20 we were all led over to a viewing suite to see the TEDGLOBAL event streamed live. Nice to be part of a group of people who got access to tickets to view remotely.

So the event is held in Oxford and then broadcast out and what I would call “socially magnified” by being sent to a remote suite of viewers - however - there’s no interactivity between the remote viewers and the broadcast. In the breaks people network locally. It’s a good model but not ideal.

If I were to make a diagram of this experience of the event it would look like this :

Now this is a BIG simplification. But basically - apart from the peer to peer Twitter Channel between users there is no human interaction going on between the live audience and the remote one, between the presenter remotely and the socially magnified group of observers apart from introducing the morning and getting on with the stream. This is a very low level of media use - in fact the best social currency going on is the twitter stream around the media and both events.

SUPERCHARGING STREAMED MEDIA

I have recently been filming for the MirandaMod sessions - I  film for post production to produce a quality film like this - which will include people’s discussion, embedded Powerpoint Slides synchronised with talking heads etc (NB flash movie takes some time to load):

Click to play

but I also film dynamically encorporating live streams with discussions face to face and remotely and  with the help of the amazing Theo Kuechel we would also use a FlashMeeting Stream to include participants in the discussion “virtually” for reflective workshop sessions that augmented the face to face ones:

Now FlashMeeting is traditionally a serial video conferencing application where everyone’s stream is visible in miniature and people take turns to broadcast out - a diagram of use might look like this:

It has some nice features built in like voting and polling and a text chat channel. But that “serial” model of video transmission or streaming can also be wasteful if you wish to amplify live streaming socially - all you have to do - and it is what people hit upon in the MirandaMod sessions - is add a DV camera on a tripod to a computer where a group of people are meeting + show the FlashMeeting on a whiteboard in that room as well. You then immediately magnify the social interactions and make them highly dynamic. So you end up with a modified Flashmeeting not unlike this:

SO WHAT HAVE PIGLETS GOT TO DO WITH IT? OUTSIDE BROADCAST MADE TRIVIAL - CONTENT STILL KING BUT SOCIAL INTERACTION EMPEROR

Today, after having returned from the TEDLIVE session in London I turned on Twitter to see a live broadcast of a Sow who had just given birth to her piglets from Saltmarsh Community School Animal Enclosure :

This was an amazing feat and reminded me of Mark Robinson’s BirdBox Cam back in the mists of time. But whereas in those days you had to hook up a video camera to a computer network and stream out from there today services like TwitCam, BlogTv and a host of others allow you to Stream out with a couple of clicks.

What then becomes important is the way that instant streaming can be organised to work for education by magnifying human interaction at distance and therefore amplifying the educational value of such experiences between schools and individuals.

So here are a couple of possible pointers to help that magnification happen.

1) If you have an exciting event coming up and you’d like a global audience use Doodle and Eventbrite to get people to agree on an optimum time when you could stream and then gather data on pre audience figures and demographics to help you contextualise the broadcast and create excitement for the event…Use programming tricks from traditional broadcast media…

2) Try to have remote audiences put up the stream on a whiteboard for a larger audience (locally) to see and have a teacher mediate with the broadcaster using Twitter taking questions from their pupils about the broadcast dynamically.

3) If you want to increase this capital, this magnification of rich but global social interaction through media - why not write a web page where two or more Twitcam streams are embedded in a HTML table or just bring up two browser windows and use that as an adhoc video conferencing mechanism between schools. Again putting up the streams on a whiteboard and having teachers or pupils mediate with questions and answers to magnify the social interactions and to model communications.

Now that Outside Broadcast is so easy and trivial to do people will have to consider battery life for cameras (or phones), connectivity and other issues - schools can build boxes of resources similar to the one I have outlined above - now there’s no bar to going anywhere to broadcast…obviously services like this will be available for mobile phones and so as equipment costs  become cheaper the ongoing miniaturisation of kit will ensure that the broadcasts will become ubiquitous.

But as always the most important considerations are the “human” issues surrounding ubiquity of video streaming and this will mean the emergence of a number of protocols and literacies as well as a host of other other issues arising from the “always on” video revolution.

Imagine total ubiquity of media streaming - YouTube live - what is worth watching, what not? What is appropriate and what not? How can you optimise human interaction blended with remote events? What is to remain private and what open? All these are digital literacy issues and will need to be addressed if they are not to be subject to ignorance and further moral panics as they evolve.

With the advent of Google Wave and Live Streaming the internet is going to be always on, totally dynamic and panoptic - what will we do then in terms of social interaction? These are important issues if we are not to just condemn and lock away these wonderful resources.

So to precis some of the issues I have outlined here in this blog here are some things to consider about the live and asynchronous video in the educational sphere:

Live streaming - what for - events? What are authentic narratives that can drive learning forward that bring value to community activity. How do you stage manage these scenarios and serendipities and how do you optimise, magnify and authenticate the human interactions- what are the risk factors and how can you minimise them. How do you write an ethical canon of use?

Transmissive streaming - how to make a simple transmission more compelling, appropriate and meaningful to teachers and learners. What mediation skills are needed - how can teachers or facilitators aggregate web 2.0 resources to create a buzz around learning - how can they archive, optimise and amplify social interaction using these skills.

On my way back from the TedGlobal transmission I came across a demonstration involving local community groups about usery and the national debt. After talking with a couple of the protesters I took out my iPhone and took an
AudioBoo recording of the core protest message. It was pure serendipity and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting this out to Twitter because I felt it was of interest :

It was simply a matter of holding the iPhone up and two clicks. The event held my attention because it involved a community of adults and children who felt strongly about a certain issue and I felt it worthwhile broadcasting. However this can be very decontectualised and one sided so…

The protesters have a web site http://www.londoncitizens.org.uk/ for context. If I were still teaching I would be tempted to use this as a case study in Citizenship - ask my pupils what the provenance for the ideas of the group was - yes - they are a charity what are their aims - do you agree with them? Were they exploiting young children or raising awareness and other similar issues? In effect it would be a wonderful resource to build a case study on. Of course I would need to clear that with my senior management and set in place a number of checks and balances to socially “skin” reflection about the protest and stimulate debate. But without those mediation skills it’s merely another transmission in a plethora of audio out there on the net. I might not even be able to access it from within the school network for starters. So the need for managing institutional interfacing with web 2.0 tools under an enlightened Web 2.0 policy would be vital. I could go on but I won’t labour the point.

These new highly dynamic video and audio media narratives need careful managing but many teachers and institutions are ill equipped to deal with, manage, elicit and mediate the grammar, syntax and protocols of such emergent theatres of activity and all the peripheral web 2.0 augmentations. It’s vital people start to think about this now rather than just have kneejerk reactions that will lock down a golden seam of learning opportunities and a host of new digital epistemologies that carefully managed can make learning far more meaningful and compelling.

MOVING FROM THE VIRTUAL TO THE REAL AND BACK AGAIN - VIRTUAL CPD IN ACTION

As part of this theory I am going to host a Virtual Conference about Digital Literacy in Second Life on Learn 4 Life Island to put these ideas into practice. The speakers I have for the conference so far are Carol Rainbow talking about E-Safety and Josie Fraser on Digital Literacy. I will be talking about the issues involved in this blog.

Ideal attendees will be Local Authorities, Senior Managers, Practitioners. In the first instance people who know how to navigate Second Life and operate an Avatar efficiently. They will also be prepared to buddy up with people who have never been in Second Life to model interactions on a screen or whiteboard to others in their physical space. They will be expected to mediate the experience for others locally and virtually.

It is intended to be a shot across the bows of how to run effective CPD virtually and intended to amplify that experience for others in an authentic and effective way. Tickets are now available from Eventbrite here:

http://learn4life.eventbrite.com/

TeachMeet Inspiration

I have been working on the TeachMeet BETT 09 films for the last month and now I can finally begin to release them slowly on a regular basis. They will be coming out from the TeachMeet Talks channel which has been sponsored by Futurelab for the whole year..

This is the first one to come out - Lisa Stevens on having the courage to just try new things with technology and learning. Notice she talks about the community not the tech…

Click To Play

I love teachers like this, who have the courage to have a go, to try something new, who rise to a challenge - it really is as simple as that and the TeachMeet films will be an example of more and more people who are doing just that. Trying new things, experimenting and often with fantastic results. Show these films to your colleagues - it’s not about how well you do with technology - it’s about connecting with people and fostering learning in a postive way.

TeachMeet definitely marks the genesis of a whole new breed of teacher - one who is willing to take risks; to open out the variety of ways they can engage with learners and most importantly to have the courage to  learn themselves, knowing they may well make mistakes along the way. Lisa talks about validation, audience, learning in a heartfelt passionate way. I’m glad there are people like this teaching our children in this country. I hope these films inspire others to go down similar paths…