This ETRU Special was co-hosted by Dai Barnes and Doug Belshaw. We’ve been discussing Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Platforms on-and-off for weeks now, so the time had come to have the chance to invite some experts in and have a lengthier discussion. We talked to Jeff O’Hara (@zemote), co-founder of Edmodo, discussed the various options when it comes to integrating a VLE, and some ideas for best practice. We finished with approaches for getting all staff onboard when deploying a VLE institution-wide. 
Many thanks to Sinclair Mackenzie for grabbing the audio from the FlashMeeting!
Dai Barnes has collated the links from the meeting.
Make sure you visit the wiki page for the ETRU Special on VLEs. Some great links there!
The music sample in the podcast is taken from Alice Russell’s ‘What We Want’
Background:
EdTechRoundup is going from strength to strength. In order for this growth and success to continue, some of us felt that some planning and discussion regarding the future of the group was required. As a result, this evening a few of us who have a stake in EdTechRoundup met together via FlashMeeting to talk about the future of the group. These were:
Dai Barnes, Tom Barrett, Doug Belshaw, Joe Dale, Louise Jones, Sinclair Mackenzie, David Noble, and Joe Rowing.
A couple of others (John Johnston, Lisa Stevens) were unable to make it due to other commitments.
Agenda:
- Roadmap - where are we headed?
- Sustainability – allocation of roles so everyone knows who’s doing what.
- Guides – showing how to go about capturing audio, editing podcast, etc.
- Security – who is going to have access to what?
- Technologies – are we happy with what we use? Is FlashMeeting serving our needs?
- Any other business - has anyone got any other suggestions?
Decisions made:
- Due to capacity issues with FlashMeeting we shall:
- Ask E2BN/Open University if we can have a larger ‘room’
- Ask those intending to attend a weekly Sunday FlashMeeting to add their name to the relevant wiki page in advance. Those beyond #25 (in the first instance) may be asked to leave in favour of those who have signed up.
- We shall not be asking for monetary contributions for members at the moment.
- The group shall be known by the abbreviation ETRU, being the tag to be used on blogs, wikis, etc. On Twitter, the hashtag #ETRU should be used.
- Dai Barnes shall be in charge of passwords for EdTechRoundup accounts. He will change them regularly and inform those who need to know by way of a collaborative Google Doc.
- As a group, we shall work towards producing guides on how to do the administrative tasks we all have a part in. This should allow enthusiastic but less technically-able newcomers to take a part in the group.
- A new installation of Wordpress somewhere on the EdTechRoundup domain (either subfolder or subdomain) shall collate posts from ETRU member blogs. These will have either been tagged ETRU or be within a category of that name. The collated posts will be displayed in excerpt form on this ‘hub’. We shall be following the model of NextGenTeachers, of which Tom Barrett and Doug Belshaw were part.
If you’d like to view/listen to the two-hour meeting, you can do so at the link below! Please add any thoughts you have in the comments section. 
Dai Barnes ably guided us through this week’s packed agenda. We managed to squeeze into the 50-odd minutes:
- Work/life balance
- Your history of computing
- Nintendo DS – what games to buy and when to use them
- Is there such a thing as a good Acceptable User Policy (AUP)?
- Blog hosts – have we finally lost patience with the ads on Edublogs.org?
Many thanks to John Johnston for grabbing the audio from the FlashMeeting!
Dai Barnes has collated the links from the show on Diigo here.
Lisa Stevens has tidied up the ETR wiki page a bit for this week’s show.
The music sample in the podcast is taken from Alice Russell’s ‘What We Want’
The first EdTechRoundup Weekly FlashMeeting of 2009 saw a welcome return of the mix of (mainly UK-based) educators discussing all things to do with educational technology. Daniel Needlestone discussed the slot he had to promote edtech/elearning at his school during an in-service training day. After that, we discussed the resolutions we’d made relating to educational technology, and then we talked more about education in 2020.
Happy New Year!
Many thanks to John Johnston for sorting out the audio.
Dai Barnes has collated the links on Diigo here.
Lisa Stevens is currently working her magic on the ETR wiki page for this week’s show.
The music sample in the podcast is taken from Alice Russell’s ‘What We Want’
We were back to full strength for this week’s FlashMeeting. In addition, it was great to welcome a couple of North American educators into the mix to give their perspective on all this edtech-nical!
This time around we discussed TeachMeet East Midlands 2009, Tom Barrett’s proposal to use Google Docs for online reporting to parents, the idea and importance of ‘digital permanence’, and much more besides.
You can listen to the podcast by subscribing to the RSS feed of this blog in iTunes (see button in sidebar), or by using the embedded player below:
ETR Weekly 4 [45:22m]:
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The links mentioned in this week’s meeting have been kindly collated by Dai Barnes and are available at del.icio.us
A reminder that planning, contact details and more information is available on the EdTechRoundup wiki, maintained fabulously by Lisa Stevens, the wiki pixie!
The music sample in the podcast is taken from Alice Russell’s ‘What We Want’
This week’s discussion centred around the use of audio – including podcasting – in education. There were a good number of people at the meeting, and some experts in the field, such as Joe Dale and Mark Pentleton.
The agenda for the meeting is available on the ETR wiki, along with a link to a replay of the FlashMeeting itself, if you want the unedited version including video!
Our apologies for not releasing our discussions for a while – we’re busy people! You can listen/view our meetings in between ETR 1 and 2 via the Meetings page on the wiki.
ETR #2 - How to use audio effectively in education [52:10m]:
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Links:
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The fifth podcast in the series by the EdTechRoundup team is a little different. This time around we’ve recorded a special discussion we had around the subject of VLEs and the Scottish 
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