I’ll confess: This was my first ever BETT show. Yep, I was a BETT newbie. And a first time TeachMeeter too.

My personal highlights include talking to what felt like millions of teachers (not sure if this was typical of all stands but I’m not ashamed to admit there were queues off our stand at points), attending my first ever TeachMeet and getting to hang out with a big orange robot (see above).

I also wanted to find out what it was like for a teacher to go to BETT and TeachMeet for the first time.  Oliver Quinlan, a teacher at Robin Hood Primary School, kindly obliged to answer a few questions about what he learned first time presenting at TeachMeet BETT2010.

Oliver started following the TeachMeet buzz in 2009. After attending a Midlands event through the flashmeeting he said he “was left buzzing with ideas, and keen to go to one in person.” Months later he jumped at the chance to present at BETT…

Hi Oliver. Why TeachMeet and BETT this year in particular?

Oliver: I was keen to go as soon as I heard about it as it was the first one I knew I would be able to go to and share some of my classroom practice, as well as learning about others as I had done previously. Luckily my colleagues are very supportive and gave me the time out to go down to BETT and the TeachMeet.

How many people have been in touch with you about your presentation since?

Lots! I am really happy to see quite a few people have taken some ideas from what I’ve been doing and used them with their classes, which is what TeachMeet is all about really. I’ve also had lots of support on my blog from people who saw the talk and have started corresponding with me and commenting on other issues I’ve been writing about like my MA, which has been really beneficial.

In your blog post you mentioned a few of the presentations you enjoyed - have you managed to try any out with your class already? Or even passed on to colleagues?

I passed Helen Myers details on to a colleague straight away, as I know she has been thinking of using Second Life for language learning in our school, and could benefit from the experiences shared. Miles Berry’s work on Scratch is also something our new technologies team are keen to integrate into our curriculum. Ian Usher’s teachers as writers project has made me think quite deeply about my own interests and how I can link my teaching to authentic experiences I am involved in outside of the classroom.

Do you think you’ll be getting more heavily involved with TeachMeets from now on?

Certainly, I am looking forward to this year’s Midlands event already and planning to rope in some of my colleagues this time. One of the things I love about my present school is there is a real culture of teachers as learners, and TeachMeet really fits into that as it is about developing yourself as a teacher through sharing in the innovations of each other. Next time I would like to present on something that doesn’t have a technology focus, because I think this grassroots ideas sharing model is so good it should be about way more than just technology.

Up for organizing #TM2011 if there is one?

I’m certainly up for getting involved!

Good news for anyone who possibly found the organisation a little stressful! There’s no mistaking that TeachMeet is set to shake up, and possibly shape up, the BETT shows Oliver and I visit in future. I certainly look forward to attending another if the opportunity presents itself.

So, what to take from this for BETT 2011? Know your stuff inside and out and if you don’t know the answer, find out immediately! Get involved in what teachers are talking about and are clearly passionate about. Next year, I hope to have tried out a few of the things I heard about at TeachMeet and I hope to buy Oliver Quinlan a coffee.

But before Takeovers there was TeachMeet itself. If you don’t know what Teachmeet is you’re not alone! Teachmeet is a growing educational fringe movement, centred on local evening events hosted by teachers for teachers, to allow the sharing of ideas and best practice.

It’s pretty awesome. If there’s one happening in your local area it’s a very worthwhile event to attend.

BrainPOP UK has been very supportive of these events for some time, and we were even asked to make a movie to explain Teachmeet.

But a major challenge of any movement is to encourage new members to join; to spread the word; to invite fresh blood into the tribe. BETT 2010 offered an opportunity to get the discussion and demonstrations of new online tools to a wider audience. Thus was born Teachmeet Takeover! You can read more on why we took part on our post: Off to BETT Part 3 -- TeachMeet Takeover .

Drew kicks off Teachmeet Takeover at BETT2010 on the BrainPOP UK stand

Drew Buddie (@digitalmaverick), kicked things off with a talk on using Web 2.0 Tools. This was more historic moment than perhaps it appeared. For the first time at BETT a stand was being used to promote something other than its product.

We all learned an important lesson in this first presentation, which is the importance of speaking LOUDLY!!! (BETT background noise is l-o-u-d). We didn’t have a microphone, or one of those fancy Madonna style headsets. Or even a megaphone. But most people could see and hear what Drew was presenting and that was the main thing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHF_zgESw88

The audience and the BrainPOP UK team all leaned loads about using slideshow animation tools to bring pics, pdfs, and other media to new life. Drew took stills from some great BrainPOP UK movies, and showed how they could be given a new spin as annotated resources for kids, or, indeed, by kids.

Tom Barrett was up next on the Friday and he gave a superb presentation on using Voicethread in the classroom. In case you missed it check out Tom’s excellent Google doc: “17 ways to use Voicethread in the Classroom”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1G4xVsnlhE

Friday is the busiest day but even so the stand was mobbed. In fact, the queue was building out of the stand and blocking the pathway. But that’s kind of the point -- be a little disruptive and get noticed. People were stopping and staying to see what all the fuss was about.

There were a series of great presentations on the variety of Takeovers and they’re sparking some fascinating debates about the impact and implications of Teachmeet -- such as this much-commented on post on Tom Barrett’s blog .

So if you’re off to BETT 2011 keep an eye out for TeachMeet Takeover flyers…who knows what you could learn?

We’ve just returned from attending the largest educational technology show in the world: BETT 2010. It’s an astonishing experience, where educational suppliers and teachers from all around the globe mingle for 4 days, looking at products, networking and attending CPD.

But teachers often mention the tension between commercial and classroom interests. Donald Clark, an educator from Brighton, describes a paradox of BETT, and more generally of technology in schools:

“On the whole, schools, and the teaching profession, have more than a whiff of anti-corporate attitudes. Teaching is often explicitly (not always) anti-private sector. This makes the market rather awkward, as there’s a lack of trust between sellers and buyers.“

Hedge your BETTs – the 7 paradoxes of technology in education – Donald Clark

That’s a pretty fair assessment. Sales people and Teachers don’t tend to mix, hence the “suspicion”.

Partly this is down to the way educational suppliers have directed elearning products towards schools over the years, partly due to the fact that “Schools often make bad, expensive choices and struggle to support the things they buy, leading to further suspicion” (Donald, again).

We know this. Every educational supplier knows this, deep down. Teachers are a tough crowd – and rightly so. You can also see tangential thoughts on Terry Freedman’s ICT in Education blog “7 things to do after the BETT show” and Tom Barrett’s post: “My Reflection on TeachMeet Takeover”

Can this divide be fixed? We know there are some extremely high quality pay and free tools, schemes and content out there. We know we have an amazing product in BrainPOP UK but how to convince “suspicious” teachers?

1. Build a trusted community. A “tribe” of BrainPOPpers. This takes time, authenticity and persistence. This is what we’ve been doing. This, hopefully, means you can move to…
2. Invite your community to participate.

We asked if a few BrainPOP UK Educators wouldn’t mind volunteering a sliver of their time to help show how they used BrainPOP  UK resources effectively in their classrooms on our stand at BETT 2010.

We knew their up to the minute experience of BrainPOP UK far outweighed any marketing messages or freebies we could provide.

As our VIBs arrived we kitted them out with their own Tshirts, as much orientation as we could fit into 5 minutes and got them talking to other teachers as soon as we could.

The effect was electric.

Once we’d introduced the VIBs they were away, excitedly telling classroom stories, explaining why their school bought BrainPOP UK and offering hints and tips we’d never thought of (ever considered using the letter that starts each movie as a lesson topic?).

At one point Tom Sale, a year 6 teacher and ICT Subject Leader from Blackpool, was demoing BrainPOP UK on the plasma TV to about 7 teachers at once, like he’d been talking about BrainPOP all his life. They knew he was the real deal and loved him for it.

But that’s the trick – you can’t substitute style (us, maybe) for substance (our VIBs, definitely). It’s also worth remembering that teachers are natural presenters. They spend their professional lives in front of a crowd. It’s called a classroom of kids.

The feedback from our VIBs was universally positive. We think they enjoyed seeing BETT from another point of view (and meeting Moby of course!) and, hopefully, went away richer for the experience.

“It was an honor to testify to the effectiveness of BrainPOP in the classroom at your booth. The positive energy and professionalism the team at BrainPOP UK projected were clear indicators of present and future success. It was a privilege to have been associated with you! Meeting the shiny Moby was also a highlight and am glad to have the pictures from this encounter

Thank you SO much for including me in this experience! It was awesome!!!”

Adina Popa, Technology Resource Teacher, Loudoun County Public Schools

Wouldn’t it be great if visitors to BETT could speak to teachers who love the product, not just sales people? The barriers would melt away. And if you can’t find your own VIBs then make better products and look after your community.

“Another highlight for me – was meeting Moby – I think the picture says it all. I was on the Brain Pop as a VIB – a Very Important Brainpopper! We use Brain Pop at school and in my class Tim and Moby are like another two pupils, I even went to the stand with a list of questions that my children wanted to ask! It was a great experience to meet other teachers and talk about a tool I use in my classroom”

Dawn Hallybone, BETT 2010

We’d invite them back to do it again like a shot. So thank you Ollie, Dawn, Thomas, Adina, Vickie and Annette VIB. You were stars.

We’ll leave the last word to the original VIB – Ollie Bray,  a deputy head from Scotland and LTS Advisor:

“I continue to be impressed by BrainPOP UK and its commitment to engage with the teaching profession. Not only do they make great movies but they listen to real feedback from real teachers so that they can constantly improve their products and services.

I was delighted to see the time and effort that the company has spent developing a detailed curriculum matching tool to link their movies to the Scottish Curriculum – You just don’t get this UK wide care and attention with some other companies.

It was an absolute pleasure to stand in for Tim (while he was on his lunch break) and be a VIB at BETT 2010”

We’ve teamed up with the Intel® Learning Series (Dummm…dum, dum, dum, duuuum) to show off their new Classmate laptops on the BrainPOP UK stand.

If you come to our stand you can see BrainPOP UK resources being demoed on a Classmate PC. We have to admit – they’re pretty groovy looking machines.

Intel say…

“The Intel Learning Series is a total education solution of products and services developed and distributed by local vendors to meet local needs and to implement 1:1 e-learning.”

What’s even more exciting is Intel have asked some school children to do some on the spot reportage with BrainPOP UK:

“At BETT this year we will be doing a special project with kids to show a real world demo of children using technology in action. We plan to have some children from local schools in the UK go to select Intel fellow traveler booths during BETT.

They will record some sights and sounds from our Fellow Traveler booths. They will then return to the Intel booth and do a collaborative report out at the Intel booth where people can watch them work and report out.”

David Harper
Intel BETT Team

So look out for the Classmates and and the crack Intel Reporting team. We’re looking forward to seeing their report!

We’re exhibiting at at BETT 2010 (Stand S46 on the upper balcony above the main hall) and it occurred to us that it’s a great time to meet some of our existing users, not just potential new ones. Twitter is great to keep in touch with teachers but you can’t beat face to face.

But how completely brilliant would it be if we could not only meet them but work with them too?

That’s when the idea of V.I.Bs came to us. “Very Important BrainPOPpers” who are happy to contribute their valuable time to BrainPOP UK.

So with this in mind we speculatively asked, on our blog and on our Twitter, if any of our users would be kind and brave enough to volunteer to join us on our BETT stand to demo their BrainPOP UK skills.

Well, we’re pleased as punch to say that some of you did. So each day at BETT we will have one or two proper, real life, honest-to-goodness BrainPOP UK teachers ready to wax lyrical about how they use Tim &  Moby resources in the classroom. They’re not being asked to be sales people – just to show you how they use BrainPOP UK with their pupils.

Amongst the VIBs in attendance on the stand might meet:

• Ollie Bray (Secondary, Deputy Head, Geographer and 2^nd place in Microsofts’ 5th Annual Worldwide Innovative Education Forum Awards)
• Annette Iafrate (Secondary, Classroom teacher, Geography NQT, S1-6)
• Vickie Bacon (Secondary, Maths and Enrichment specialist)
• Tom Sale (Primary, Yr6 Class teacher, ICT subject leader)
• Dawn Hallybone (Primary, Senior ICT Co-ordinator and the winner of the Special Achievement at the Hand Held Learning awards 2009)
• Nicola Stables (Primary, Y3 teacher with Y5 & Y6 experience)

So if you are passing you may be lucky enough to catch one of our V.I.Bs. They’ll be wearing one of our exclusive black “Very Important BrainPOPpers” T-shirts and they’ll have some BrainPOP UK goodies to give out.

What is TeachMeet takeover? We should probably leave that to Tom Barrett (the teacher who came up with the idea) to explain:

“Educators presenting about FREE ideas on the vendor stands at the world’s largest educational technology event. Sharing inspiration for free.”

Tom Barrett, Edte.ch blog: http://edte.ch/blog/2009/12/14/teachmeet-takeover-needs-you

At each stand, at a certain time of the day (check out the TeachMeet Takeover time table), a teacher will “takeover” part of a stand to demo free tools and resources that teachers may find interesting and useful. On our stand it will be on the big plasma TV on the back wall.

Lots of companies have volunteered to provide some space for a takeover:

• Adobe
• Scholastic
• Studywiz
• NetIntelligence
• TrueTube
• Rising Stars
• The National Archives / BFI / English Heritage
• Moava
• Promethean Planet
• VT Group
• DB Education

We’re privileged to be welcoming through the week:

• the inimitable Drew Buddie (demoing “Doing more with Tim & Moby using freely available Web 2.0 Tools” and “Wordle, Tagul & BrainPOP“)
• the inspirational John Johnston (demoing “A project to gather the voices of educators using mobile devices”)
• the main man himself, Tom Barrett (demoing “Why Voicethread should be used in every primary classroom”)

The demos will only be a few minutes long, and, having seen these 3 present before, we know you’ll walk away enlightened and full of new ideas. Also if you pick up a TeachMeet Takeover flyer during the show it will include a mini competition, along with the timetable of confirmed talks.

You will need to collect 8 ideas from takeover talks from around the show to claim some prizes from the stands taking part. We’re donating some ice cool Tim and Moby memorabilia.

Perhaps you’ll also be inspired enough to go to a TeachMeet one day.

So why are we letting teachers “take over” our stand?

There are 3 parts to our answer.

1. Put simply, we are intrigued. BrainPOPpers are naturally inquisitive people. We’re also BETT veterans and like to feel part of its evolution. It may work, it may not – but if you don’t try you’ll never know.
2. We support CPD (Continuing Professional Development). To support those who want to be better teachers. We know BrainPOP UK works best as part of a good teacher’s toolkit – we also know teachers call upon any number of other resources. Why shouldn’t we do our bit to encourage open minded investigation into new ways of doing things?
3. We’ve always been big supporters and sponsors of the TeachMeet initiative too and part of the Takeover is to encourage new people to go to a TeachMeet.

Our stand is only small but we’re sure TeachMeeters can make the best of it. You have our promise that we won’t “push” anything, we’re just happy to lend our space to help out this exciting event.

All that’s left to say really is “Bring on the TeachMeet Takeover!”

Tim and Moby in space

BrainPOP UK has been invited by the lovely Promethean Planet team to share some of the Tim and Moby magic with visitors to the Promethean Planet stand (B30), at BETT2010.

We have been given a slot every day from 3pm-3:30pm to demo how well BrainPOP UK and Promethean resources work together.

So, apart from being able to meet the BrainPOP UK team at our own stand (S46 on the Upper floor above the main hall), why not come and see us at the Promethean Planet Stand too?

So what will you see if you come along?

• A presentation flipchart based on our Online Safety movie, accompanied by one of our VIBs ( Vickie Bacon from Hurstpierpoint college ).
• A sneak preview of a very cool new way to bring BrainPOP UK quizzes and Promethean tools together.
• You will also have a chance to win a full annual subscription to BrainPOP UK!

So come and say hi. You don’t have to be a Planet member but it’s well worth signing up to be part of the frankly staggeringly huge community of almost 500,000 people and check out the 16,000+ resources compatible with their ActivBoards (or even other IWBs using the Flipchart Viewer).

At BrainPOP UK, we are huge fans of Promethean, mainly because they ‘get’ that teachers should be the focus of what we both do. Promethean have been at the forefront of building communities around their customers and their products in the UK.  They have demonstrated that this helps teachers get great value from their investment from both the hardware and software solutions.

We are proud to stand with Promethean at BETT2010 and hope to see you there.

BETT is the biggest ICT show in the world. Pretty much every ICT or elearning supplier will be there, including us, demoing our resources and much more on stand S46 (on the balcony above the main hall). We want to meet customers both old and (hopefully) new. Don’t be afraid to come and say hello – we’re not sales people, we just love BrainPOP UK and we think you will too.

Our BETT stand last year

An alternate view of our BETT stand last year

There’s a great collection of “Tips for BETT” going round on Twitter at the moment, providing pearls of wisdom to those who have not been before but we can add:

• Wear comfortable shoes. You will, cumulatively walk miles in a day at BETT. Plus there’s lots of presentations that may be standing room only.
• Don’t bring a bag. You will be offered bags on most stands. Get one of our bags instead – they will last and look very tasty. They will be the must have items at BETT we think
• Take a camera and photograph the stand name + number of memorable stands. This will make a big difference. Alternately, if you have video capability on your phone, ask the rep to do a 30 sec demo for you. Far more memorable than a flyer.
• Have a “who can bring the most useless “tchotchke” (freebie gift)  back from BETT” competition if you are travelling with a colleague or two.
• Drink lots of water to avoid the inevitable headache and try to grab lunch early or late to avoid the seriously packed cafeterias between 12pm and 2pm.
• Sign up to attend one of the FREE TeachMeet events – we’re proud sponsors; they are brilliant, fun and inspiring. But don’t just take our word for it – see for yourself.

We’re also writing a series of blog posts highlighting some of the things that we’ll be doing at BETT. Coming soon:

• Meet a VIB! – Teachers who use BrainPOP UK who have volunteered to show you on our stand how THEY get the best out of BrainPOP resources.
• Teachmeet Takeover – Teachers who will “takeover” a part of the stand to tell you about free tools they find useful in the classroom.
• BrainPOP UK lands on Promethean Planet – we’ll be demoing BrainPOP UK on the Promethean Planet stand.

If you come to our stand we’ll be doing demos; giving away Moby-tastic BrainPOP UK shoulder bags (proper bags designed to last and be re-used); pens (the archetypal and ever popular BETT staple); Moby head shaped mousemats; Moby “reward” badges and lots of other things. Make sure that we’re on your route!