I was fortunate enough to speak at the BETT show a couple of weeks ago. I did have prior experience of speaking in this large, busy, international forum – but a few years ago. Since my last appearance, the world has gone thoroughly digital. Being an Educational Technology forum, it seemed that most of the audience had a Smart phone. Details of my talk had been flagged a few times on Twitter by my facilitator, who had been appointed by NAACE, the hosts for the event. My talk was entitled ‘Should pupils be allowed mobile devices in the classrom?‘ and it examined what 14-16 year olds are saying about the technology they use.

At the start, the hash-tag (#) for the talk was announced and I saw several people get their mobile phones ready. At one point whilst I was speaking, I thought someone was asking a question, and then realised they just had their mobile phone above everyone’s heads to take a photograph of one of my slides. Towards the end, the facilitator began to ask some of the questions that had been coming in on the Twitter feed.

Overall, I found the experience very exciting. Some people have contacted me on Twitter since the talk and asked further questions. It was rather disconcerting to see the cameras at first, but I quicky realised it just meant that people were interested. I think I felt a little uneasy as this was the first time I had shown my research data and I realised that without my ‘publishing’ it, the data was now ‘out there’ – where exactly, I had no idea as BETT is an open forum and anyone can walk in off the street. A couple of the ‘photographers’ have been extremely professional and contacted me for permission to use my work in a wider forum, and I am grateful for that.

Afterwards, reading the Twitter feed, made me feel that the audience had been fully engaged. I was very interested to see which ‘headlines’ they had picked out of the 45-minutes I was speaking. It gave me some pointers as to which areas to develop for future work as well.

Advice?

If you are planning to speak and you know your audience will have access to mobile technology, you should consider the following:

1) Give a hastag for your talk at the start, maybe highlighting it on your first slide.

2) Make sure you have a facilitator who can monitor your twitter feed. It is impossible to do this and speak at the same time, so very useful if someone else can filter the messages.

3) Be aware that your slides may be photographed. If you don’t want your information going any further than the presentation room, issue a ‘No cameras’ message at the start of your talk. Otherwise, be aware that your slide could be on the Internet (without your name attached to it) in a matter of seconds. And, even if you ask for no cameras, there are no guarantees that no photos will be taken.

4) Review the tweets after the session: Interesting way to get feedback from your audience.

5) Put your talk on your blog? I have already been asked several times why my talk is not yet on my blog – and the simple fact is that I am unsure as to modern protocol. I used videos of pupils -and I don’t have their permission to be on the Internet, so I want to use transcripts instead. If I publish online, I think I rule out the possibility of the work being accepted by a journal at a later stage. Finally, and the real truth of the matter – I am writing it up for my Masters dissertation and most of my time is being spent on the dissertation. The talk for BETT was my early analysis and I would like whatever I publish finally to be the finished article…

So, apologies if you have come here looking for my BETT talk – you’ll just have to settle for my advice on presenting in the digital age instead for today.

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