Friday 18 December 2015

Can Crowdfunding Pay for Edu PD?

What have the following Connected Educators, who have a collective following of over 237,000 followers on Twitter all have in common?

Shelly Sanchez (@ShellTerrell - 67,700 Followers), Nicholas Provenzano (@ -            51,800 Followers), Sarah Thomas ( -25,800 Followers) Joe Mazza ( -       20,100 Followers), Craig Kemp (@MrKempNZ -17,200 Followers), Susan Bearden (@s_bearden -     15,400 Followers), Sam Patterson (@SamPatue - 9,081 Followers), Zeina Chalich (@ZeinaChalich       6,869 Followers) Dan Ryder ( - 6,080 Followers) Julie Szaj ( -                            5,242 Followers), Jesse Lubinsky ( - 4,428 Followers) Allison Fuisz (@allison_fuisz -           2,449 Followers) Kevin Hime ( - 2,102 Followers), Jaison Oliver ( - 1,778 Followers)
Carina Hilbert (@CarinaHilbert - 1,678 Followers), Derek Larson ( - 1,301 Followers), Valerie Lewis ( - 1,037 Followers), Nick Patsianas ( -748 Followers), Kirsten Innes ( - 809 Followers)

They, along with another 40 educators and industry experts would like to attend the UK Digital Citizenship Summit on the 23rd January 2016.

These educators have also identified a number of companies from major tech companies like Twitter, Skype, Voxer and Google and well established EdTech companies like Schoolology, RemindHQ and Edmodo to up and coming startups like Declara and Buncee who they would be happy to advocate for during their visit to the UK.
It has taken 4 weeks to get the event organised but everything is now in place and the early sponsors have ensured that the event will be free of charge to delegates.

What I would like to do now is to explore the extent to which we can develop the #Get2ISTE model and to see if we can answer this question that EdWeek posed four months ago:


I believe that Crowdfunding can pay for educators PD and feel that it can be done in a way that it helps to improve and further develop relations with educators and EdTech companies. HOWEVER a little bit of work needs to be done in order to realise this.

There isn't a great deal of time left to explore this prior to the holidays and/or in time for BETT and the #DigCitSummitUK but I'm going to work with the educators who are keen to explore the idea to see what we can do.

We got a conference arranged in 4 weeks, why not see if we can make a dent in crowdfunding professional development and see if it can have a positive impact on Edu/EdTech relations. 

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