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TeachMeet North West – Expanding the Audience

I had a great time on Friday night at BBC 21CC in Salford at Teachmeet NW.  I presented briefly on Google Forms as per my previous blog post and listened to a wide variety of great presentations.  I’ve collected all the links and chats from the evening together on the wiki.  And, although it went against the ‘talk only on what you’ve done in the classroom’ Teachmeet rule, I did a very brief demo of Google Wave.  Let’s be honest, I knew the ever-so-slightly geeky audience would like to see it!

But this got me round to thinking, how do we expand Teachmeets beyond the geeks?  Almost every person in that room on Friday was on Twitter, had a blog etc etc..  I emailed all staff at my school on Monday about Teachmeet, a few took the proverbial out of me, a few said it sounded great, ‘but on a Friday night?’, in the end – nobody came.

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How not to set up a learning network

Not all online learning networks actually thrive, here’s a tale of a failed attempt by myself:

Ghost Town

I have been involved with a couple of projects in Manchester as part of a collaborative of schools from across the city. Part of this was the continuation of the LEMA project and the creation of some great resources that I have discussed elsewhere.

During this work the idea of an online space for sharing links, ideas and resources was mooted.  I jumped at the suggestion and went to work looking for a solution.  A Ning was the first obvious idea, I’ve been part of some excellent examples over recent years, although my use of them has dwindled since Twitter invaded my time.

One of the key requirements for the website was the ability to store files, Ning can’t do this inherently.  We could have used another online file hosting service and linked to it, but many of these are blocked by school and LA filtering systems.  Having ruled out Ning, I found a similar competitor called Grou.ps .  This startup seemed to offer all that we needed, a space for sharing links and resources, a forum and blog posts if things really took off.

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