Building an Ed Tech Community

Thinking of launching an ed tech community on your own campus? We’d love to share our experiences with you and learn from yours as we’re still growing IGET! Feel free to contact any member of the Steering Committee to trade ideas. To help you get started, we also offer you the following resources:

Communication

We currently rely on the following means of communication:

  • A public listserv, the main means of communicating within the IGET community. We use this to announce upcoming meetings, advertise job openings of possible interest, and solicit help or ideas from other community members.
  • A steering committee listserv, helps those on the committee communicate more rapidly with one another.
  • This website serves as a means of archiving key information IGET produces, such as minutes to our meetings, announcements of upcoming meetings, etc.
  • eWeek, which is our weekly, campus-wide announcement system. We include announcements of upcoming meetings here.
  • LinkedIn. Though we have a presence there, we haven’t seen much traction as of yet.

Template Agenda

At Illinois, we’ve settled-in on the following structure to our public meetings, which are typically about 90 minutes long:

  • Welcome and introductions (10 minutes). As a community, we value spending some time getting to know everyone. Sometimes that’s a quick “around the room,” other times there may be an icebreaker or a “turn to your neighbor”-type introduction.
  • Subcommittee report-outs (10 minutes). IGET does form subcommittees to help the steering committee expedite its work. This has included a social committee and a professional development committee.
  • Campus news spotlight (10 minutes). We try to highlight any news that not everyone might have heard, yet, but would be helpful for the ed tech community to know about in this section.
  • Technology tapas (15 minutes). Somewhat of a “lightning round” of short, 5-minute max presentations about some new technology or new use of an existing technology an IGET member has encountered.
  • Main dish (30 minutes). The Steering Committee regularly surveys the members to learn what topics would be of most interest to them. The Steering Committee then picks on topic and recruits 1-3 experts on campus to come and speak on the topic.
  • Open topics (5 minutes). Just a chance for anyone in the IGET community to speak-up and voice a question, concern, idea, etc.
  • Close-out and next steps (5 minutes). Winding-down the meeting by reviewing any key lessons learned or action items.