Bettr and TeachMeet education unconferences
Last week Olympia was turned into a vast education and technology expo for - as well as seeing a lot of interesting things at the expo, I went along to two associated events:
On Tuesday, Backstage went along to the offices with some of our colleagues from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning to- a one day education unconference.
It was an interesting day with some very cool people and ideas. Subjects such as web services for education, what we can learn from previous learning web 2.0 applications, as well as experiences of planning and organising web conferences were discussed.
Ian Forrester gave an overview Backstage and a lightning overview of dataportabilty, and our colleague chaired a thought provoking discussion on 'a ´óÏó´«Ã½ Micro for the 21st Century' - how to encourage students to get enthused by technology and shape the future of UK industry.
On Friday night, I popped along to , an unconference for teachers, where I heard about how teachers and students were using technology in the classroom.
It was a lively and enthusiastic crowd, who had signed up online to do talks on a multitude of subjects. Because there were more volunteers than slots, speakers were selected via an online random generator to give six minute lightning talks on subjects such as how Photoshop was being used by students to create threaded news stories, to a band who were offering a song for students to remix under and how teachers were finding to be a really useful tool. They mentioned using Twitter in various ways, for connecting with each other, as an alternative to search engines and for students to use with Google Earth to locate other schools by conversing with people around the globe.
The teachers were also connecting and participating from all around the country via flash broadcasting and the back channels were buzzing so much that at one point it was announced that TeachMeet was the 8th most tweeted subject.
