MirandaMods: January 2011, at the BETT Exhibition
Image by Theo K
The resources from the BETT11 week in London from 12th -15th January, listed below, focus on themes from Achievement for All.
At Olympia, London the MirandaNet team ran four MirandaMods: three were on the MirandaNet stand in the exhibition hall and the other was in a seminar room. The quality of the resources captured in the room was much better than on the stand: the glass and metal roof of Olympia were not acoustically sympathetic.
The events had been marketed by MirandaNet for about two months prior to BETT11. Before and during the events details of the debates were tweeted and re-tweeted to about 500 educators. Some responded on the Twitter stream and others joined the FlashMeeting and commented there. Members from Australia, Greece and Gambia who could not obtain the funding to come to BETT11 attended all the debates as a form of Continuing Professional Development.
The MirandaNet team now have significant experience in leveraging these social media streams to great effect as the MirandaNet community becomes more sophisticated in their capacity to share professional knowledge stimulated by expert speakers and participant educators. The potential for outreach is for the AFA community is significant as they learn to use the technology comfortably.
Leading on the MirandaNet/Achievement for All web pages are the talks from the three expert speakers to set the theme: Professor Sonia Blandford on Achievement for all; Dr. Chris Yapp on the implications for future learning and Professor Marilyn Leask on the value of communities of practice in professional learning. Also on the website will be the videostream and FlashMeeting record of the four events, including the transcript. Collaborative maps also present the professional knowledge that was collected.
The MirandaNet team comment that the quality of the MirandaMod resources is good, given this is an ‘outside broadcast’ but obviously event better results have been achieved in the studio at the WLE centre, Institute of Education, University of London funded by HEFCE and Becta. However, this a small, agile and committed group that can set up a broadcast unit and produce results much faster than a media company and with more authentic results, because we are all committed educators. From this set of MirandaMods at BETT11 we discovered a number of things that will improve our “outside broadcast technique” for the Education Show. The equipment at MirandaNet’s disposal and the limited bandwidth from the stand were challenging. More members need to be trained to co-ordinate all the digital streams.
These are the opening resources:
- Professor Blandford’s Speech with a transcript of her speech on Scribd
- Chris Yapp’s Speech
- Marilyn Leask’s Speech
