The evolution of EdTechRoundUp

In late 2007 I helped bring together a group of UK-based educators with the intention of releasing regular podcasts about real-world educational technology. That group became known as EdTechRoundup. It was officially launched during the TeachMeet at BETT in January 2008. Later in the year, with the weekly discussions becoming well-attended, we made the decision to release our discussions as a separate podcast: EdTechRoundup Weekly.

During February 2009 even bigger changes have taken place. Following a successful ‘special’ on student blogging and WordPress Multi-User, I called a meeting of those for ease-of-reference I called the ‘admin team’. These are simply people who have already got involved with the behind-the-scenes work of extracting the audio from the FlashMeeting, tidying up the wiki, editing podcasts, etc. As such, membership of this team is open to anyone.

The result of our discussion can be found here on the blog. We decided to focus more on developing the community and therefore the following has come about:

• We shall use the hashtag #ETRU on Twitter and other social media sites (#ETR was already taken!)
• As a consequence of the above, we shall be known as EdTechRoundUp (note upper-case ‘U’)
• Those intending to attend our weekly FlashMeetings should sign up on the relevant wiki page. This is to prevent problems if the FlashMeeting becomes full.
• A new subdomain, http://hub.edtechroundup.com brings together blog posts relating to educational technology from those involved in the community. Any regular attender of the weekly discussions can ask to have their blog posts syndicated.
• In order to facilitate better feedback from those who listen to the ETRU podcast a forum has been set up at http://forum.edtechroundup.com. Listeners can then ask questions and seek clarification, as well as it being a place weekly discussion participants can continue their conversations!

If you weren’t aware of what EdTechRoundUp have been up to, we would invite you to come and join us! We meet at 8.30PM every Sunday evening for around an hour. Failing that, please do listen to the podcast, read our syndicated blog posts, and get involved in the forum! 😀