POPtalk

There are going to be lots of people writing up their experiences of #TMHants, held last night in Southhampton.

Ian Addison and Gideon Williams did an incredible job of pulling this event together – but it was really the attendees that made it so special.

Probably the most interesting thing about last night was that for 95% of the attendees this was their first Teachmeet! And they loved it! There was loads of passion, excitement and genuine gasps as inspiration was shared.

So rather than going on about the presentations, I want to share some of the  random conversations that I had – for a mix of selfish and more altruistic reasons! Sorry not to include everything but this is only to give a flavour of the power of the ‘unconference’ model.

I finally got to meet Charlie Dean – who was sporting a very rare VIB t-shirt – and who was very kind about BrainPOP UK. It was great to hear how much her class enjoy the movies. More than that, she introduced me to some of the teachers at her school, who were also great. For example…

I had a great talk with the deputy head at her school about the power of teachmeets, the problems with ‘normal’ CPD, and the barriers of ICT. I did not get her name but she was super keen to come along to TMFishbowl on the 17th June, partly because of the success of #TMHants .

After watching Jon Audain’s fantastic presentations, I caught up with him and Emma Goto, and we swapped iPhone apps, early years sites and realised that we were all Tiggers!

Finally, Kristian Still came to find me at the end of the event to say some very nice things about BrainPOP UK – a perfect end to the night. Kristian said (and I’m paraphrasing here – based on my rosy memory of his words!) that he was hugely impressed with BrainPOP UK’s commitment to Teachmeets, to having authentic conversations with teachers and kids, and that we had brought a great resource to schools. I almost fell over with gratitude, because that it exactly what we set out to do, and here was a fantastic practitioner in a normal school reflecting that back to us.

We then went on to discuss about how his Digital Leaders, kids trained to be expert in edtech, might work with BrainPOP UK to share some learning…another great unexpected outcome from this fantastic event!

Finally, as I drove home up the A34, I kept replaying the evening in my mind and found it rich in ideas, practical activities and relationships with people that I want to continue.

Tired as I was (and am), I went to sleep (once I was in my bed, not while driving) H A P P Y.

Nice.

We get asked a lot to sponsor TeachMeet events, which we are very happy to do, where it’s appropriate and we’re able to constructively contribute.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidgilmour/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

There’s nothing official or organised regarding sponsorship or external support. TeachMeets are generally non-commercial and we respect that.

But, still, we also recognise that it’s difficult to get people to an event and raise awareness.

So if you are holding a TeachMeet, no matter how big or small, no matter where or when, and need a bit of help we want to offer a simple BrainPOP UK sponsorship package, if you want it.

1) Your very own Teachmeet movie

We will create you one of our special TeachMeet movies starring Tim & Moby to help advertise your event and describe TeachMeet to those who want to know what it’s all about.

We’ve adapted the movie for the Scottish Learning Festival, Blackpool (twice as their first was so successful!), Perth, Yorkshire and Humber, Hampshire, Norwich, Clackmannanshire, Northamptonshire, East Lothian, Falkirk and…well, you get the idea. You simply need to tell us:

• The name(s) of the organisers
• The location and date of the TeachMeet
• Any hashtag you have created e.g. #teachmeet
• An address to send the goodies to
• Expected numbers (just have a sensible guess)

We can usually get it ready in a few days and you can then embed it into your TeachMeet wiki page or in whatever digital space you are using to promote your event.

2) Freebies*

We can also supply you some goodies to give out to attendees. How you use them is up to you – maybe as a reward for attending or an incentive to go in the first place. It would be useful if you could tell us expected numbers but as that’s not always clear until the day itself just make it an educated guess and we’ll see what we can do to make sure everyone gets something.

• Badges: We now have a special TeachMeet badge that we will always supply as part of the sponsorship. This is only available to people who have attended a TeachMeet and should be worn with pride!
• Poster: We can send you a batch of posters to give out as gifts. They make any classroom wall look good.
• Mugs & Tshirts: As a special gift the organiser(s) will get a much coveted BrainPOP UK mug or VIB tshirt.

3) Competition

We know that you want as many teachers as possible to come along and experience this unique form of CPD. So we’re happy to offer your attendees the opportunity to win for their school a free years access to BrainPOP UK, worth up to £699.

We will supply you free trial sign up cards that attendees will fill in to get a free trial to BrainPOP UK. You then pick one of those cards out of a hat and that school wins a free subscription. Hoorah! Everyone else at least gets a no obligation free trial to check out BrainPOP UK.

So that’s our sponsorship package for TeachMeets. All you have to do is contact us. We can also put you in touch with other TeachMeet organisers who have run successful TeachMeets whose brains you can pick for advice and tips, though the community in general is very helpful.

All we ask in return is that you add BrainPOP UK as a sponsor (logo and homepage link ) to your Teachmeet page/blog/communications etc where appropriate.

Other places you might want to approach for support include Scholastic, Rising Stars , 2Simple and Vital CPD, who, amongst others, have all historically shown strong support  for TeachMeet events.

*All freebies are subject to avaliablity and we reserve the right to amend the pack without notice. But we will try our best to provide a good selection!

BrainPOP UK was proud and excited to host the first ever Teachmeet Takeover at BETT 2010.

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.

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”

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 firmly believe there’s no one better than someone who uses your product, day in, day out, to show it at its best.

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”

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!”

We’ve been BrainPOPping in the UK for a year now so before we sign off to wish all of you a merry Xmas and happy new year we thought this is as good a time as any to stop and reflect back on an amazing year.

We sometimes say that a Tim & Moby movie takes your understanding of a concept “from nothing to something“. That also couldn’t be a better way of describing what we’ve been through in 2009.

There’s so many things we could list and the team will never agree on exactly what the top 6 should be, but we all think the following were pretty significant moments.

1. Our first customer!

You never forget your first time, so they say. Well our first ever customer was Okehampton College in Devon. Thank you for placing your trust in Tim, Moby and the BrainPOP UK team. We hope you’ve had a very BrainPOPpy year.

2. BETT 2009

If you’ve ever run or staffed a BETT stand you’ll know what a rush to the head it can be. We were a teeny tiny team at the start of the year and the sheer amount of tasks we needed to squeeze in took us by surprise. We thought we’d ticked all the many, many BETT boxes but we’d missed off one important thing: electricity. We just didn’t realise power was something you had to organise.

And for an online service electricity is pretty important.

Luckily our very able stand design company, BJA Designs, sorted us a last minute Sparky and we were up and running in time.

On the plus side our hard work paid off and we met 100′s of teachers, the vast majority of whom hadn’t heard of BrainPOP UK, and made some firm friends. Just don’t get us started on the amount of pens we ordered. It was also good experience for exhibiting at BETT 2010.

3. Teachmeet at the Scottish Learning Festival and multiple TeachMeet movie adaptions

Ollie Bray, a long time fan of BrainPOP (especially in Geography), asked us if we could produce a special one-off BrainPOP UK movie to inform people what a TeachMeet is all about. We’ve always been big supporters of CPD and TeachMeet – how could we refuse? You can see our TeachMeet movie on Youtube, where anyone can embed it into their own website.

Soon after, as tends to happen when an idea really starts to gain traction (go viral?), we were asked to do movie adaptions for Perth, Blackpool, East Lothian and Falkirk TeachMeets. Little known fact: If you ask for an adapted TeachMeet movie we put YOUR name into the famous Tim & Moby letter.

The TeachMeeters also kindly put the movie on the front page of the TeachMeet Wiki website. This year TeachMeet is going to happen across 3 nights: TEDxOrenda, AMPed (Amplified) and the TeachMeet itself.

As well as TeachMeet Takeover, where exhibitors open up a part of their stand for a TeachMeeter to “takeover” for half an hour to demo free and useful Web 2.0 type classroom tools. Naturally, we think that sounds really worthwhile and lots of fun so we voluteered too.

4. Our Swine Flu movie goes past 10,000 hits…then 20,000…then 30,000…

A little while back Swine Flu was a big headline topic. One thing BrainPOP does well is react quickly to classroom needs, when we are able.

In this instance we made a Swine Flu movie aimed at kids, to help answer some of the basic questions (“You can’t catch it from eating bacon, can you?”) and quell a few fears children may have.

We decided to upload it to Youtube and allow people to embed it in their own school blogs and websites. To keep an important topic free. We wrote all about our decision to do this on our blog: The little movie that could.

We got loads of favourable comments on the movie and it even ended up being reported in the TES and the Times Schoolgate blog.

5. Our first UK movie – Bonfire Night

BrainPOP UK is part of the global BrainPOP family. Our resources are currently nearly all anglicised versions from the incredible collection of movies on BrainPOP.com. But part of the appeal of a UK BrainPOP is to develop new UK resources that are meaningful to UK classrooms. Our first UK movie was Bonfire night. It was a UK subject scripted by a UK author. It was a very proud moment to finally launch a bit of BrainPOP history.

There’s lots more coming in 2010, but we won’t spoil the surprise just yet.

6. Listening to classroom stories

This is a fine entry as our last pick and a personal favourite. As well as the reviews BrainPOP UK has garnered over the last 12 months there’s little better than hearing from our users.

We love to tell classroom stories of how different teachers around the UK are using BrainPOP UK resources with their pupils. Whether you are a Newly Qualified Teacher, Home educator, Award winning ICT Specialist or Maths Teacher we’re happy to show off your BrainPOP thoughts on our blog.

We know there will be many more stories to tell in 2010 (2009 was just lighting the touchpaper for the BrainPOP fireworks coming in 2010) so we’ll simply wish you a very merry Xmas and happy new year from all the BrainPOPpers, from around the world.

Ho ho ho!

Welcome back to school, all our fellow BrainPOPpers and POPettes, old and new.

We hope your summer break was a proper break. We know the sun only made a few appearances but when it did we hope you got out there and enjoyed it.

You might have read about some of the stuff that’s coming up from BrainPOP UK this Autumn term? Well, it’s time to draw back the curtains and announce some of them in more detail.

1. Our new Curriculum browse tool. We’re going back to the drawing board with this one. It will allow all our users to quickly and efficiently find and view a BrainPOP UK movie by a number of different curricula. And it will even be exportable as a Flash widget to plug into a webpage.
2. POPboxes – we’re very excited about these. Soon you will be able to pick a favourite BrainPOP UK movie and embed it into your very own VLEs and Blog pages. There will be different flavours available depending on whether you have subscribed to BrainPOP UK or not. The official announcement on how to get one is coming soon.
3. POP Press! - Our new termly email newsletter  – keep up to date with all things BrainPOP UK as the year progresses.
4. Complete tagging for the new Curriulum for Excellence for Scotland - every single one of our movies, old and new, will very soon be browsable by this curriculum AND the old 5-14 curriculum. We’ll be at the Scottish Learning Festival and the Teachmeet if anyone wants to chat about it.
5. We love BrainPOP UK…stuff. BrainPOP UK Tshirts, Moby and Tim cut out masks, Moby badges, BrainPOP UK posters, stickers…there’s going to be lots of fun resources to use as creatively as you like in your class or win in competitions. All we’re interested in is hearing about how you used them.
6. New and exclusive UK only movies on UK specific subjects - we’re keeping these hush-hush for now but we will be announcing them when we’re ready.
7. We’ll be on the look out for BrainPOP UK schools to do case studies, provide testimonials, write blog posts and help us test new technology in the classroom. If this is something you want to do you know how to contact us.
8. More fun on our Facebook group, our Twitter feed, our Youtube channel.
9. 160+ new movies are coming! Quick! Get your lesson plans ready, ladies and gentlemen, because you are soon going to be treated to movies such as:

• Rise of the Roman Empire
• Isotopes
• Galaxies
• Ants
• Graphs
• Adding and subtracting integers
• The computer mouse
• The Cold War
• Punctuation
• Sun protection
• Roald Dahl
• The Lord of the Flies
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Did I say there’s going to be a movie on Bogies? I didn’t? Well, there is.
• And Pirates! Garr!

We’ll be blogging the full list at a later date so keep an eye out.

So there’s lots of BrainPOPpy awesomeness coming your way. We are bursting with ideas on how to help you use technology to engage your students.

Work with us to make the ideas go from theory to classroom practice. And have enormous fun along the way.