Teachmeet North-East London takes place on 31 March 2009. Teachmeet is an "unconference", in which there is no formal structure and no leading keynotes. Except that, erm, in this Teachmeet there is a bit of a structure and there are a few leading speakers. We've tried to take the best elements of each approach, you see.
Now you may think that such innovations go against the grain and are not in the spirit of Teachmeet, but, in the words of an astonishing (real) estate agent I once dealt with, that's an advantage. Read on to discover how come, and why it's one of the reasons you should attend.
- Everyone gets to speak. That's right: if you have put your name down to give a presentation you have been put on a roster to speak.
- You won't prepare a presentation for nothing. That follows on from the first one.
- We've dispensed with that fruit machine random selector thingy. Given what I said in point #1, the only point of a random selector would be to determine the order of speaking. What a lot of time taken up in such a trivial pursuit! The order of speaking has been determined by the order in which people put their name down on the wiki, spread across 4 columns in a spreadsheet. Don't worry: all will become clear in the next point.
- We've ditched the idea of sitting in one room for over three hours listening to speaker after speaker. Even the most seasoned CPD-goer starts to flag after a while. Instead, we're using four breakout rooms in which there will be six or seven speakers at the most. Hence the four columns mentioned earlier.
- You get to choose your own selection of speakers -- well, bundles of speakers to be more accurate. Where speakers have told us what they're going to be talking about, we've put that on the speaker roster, and will be showing that on a big screen.
- There are a few mini keynote presentations, or "mini-notes", each of which lasts just 15 minutes. That's right: we get to hear some great speakers and some great ideas, without being bored into the ground in the process!
- It's different. If your experience of professional development is being herded into a basement and forced to watch PowerPoint presentations all day long whilst being talked at by someone who assumes you can't read, Teachmeet will show you a whole new world!
- Meet other people who are doing wonderful things in their classrooms, local authorities or other types of work.
- Hear some brilliant ideas for things you can do with your pupils or students or colleagues.
- Enjoy the feel-good fact that comes from knowing that you're contributing to a good cause: proceeds are going to help rebuild a school in Cuba that was destroyed in a hurricane.
- Sorry, did I forget to mention that there's a raffle, and that you will be buying a ticket?
- You'll have a chance to win some fantastic prizes. (But only if you buy a raffle ticket -- see point above.)
- Get on television! Well, video at least: Leon Cych will be there with all his video recording stuff, so I've been told. This could be your big chance!
- There'll be some nice food and drink...
- ... a chance to meet the sponsors...
- ... and no sales pitches.
More info is on the wiki, where you can register for the event.
Follow the event on Twitter too.
And Facebook.
See you there?
What do you
think? Please leave a comment.
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