On Thursday we joined six other MN tech companies at MinneDemo19. It was a great night of meeting a lot of new people and getting a glimpse of the exciting tech community in the Twin Cities. Seven companies give a 7-minute demo on stage. No slides, no videos, just a live demo in front of a full house. Karin, Ben and I showed off DocentEDU by creating a lesson on stage. A good show of the technology by demonstrating our product and creating a lesson in less than seven minutes in front of 800+ people! Karin and I are used to entertaining a crowd in our classrooms but this was absolutely amazing. At the end of the presentation we announced the launch of the beta.
Education Needs it's MinneDemo
Heading home after MinneDemo I struck me that education should have an event like this. MinneDemo is just as much about the community and connecting with others as it is about seeing what new exciting software people are making. Teachers are stuck in their classrooms and often don't even know about the cool new lesson someone down the hall is doing with their students. Conferences, "unconferences" like EdCamp, and twitter chats are the only times I interact with anyone outside of my classroom and even then I don't get to see what their lessons are like. We teach lessons every day but never get to see what the others are doing, it's wrong!
A night of talking with other educators and seeing some really cool lessons/activites/labs would be a lot of fun. I'm not sure what the format would be, but certainly sticking to the format of no slides. TedTalks come to mind, but that's a lot of slides. Well the idea is there...
Thanks MinneDemo and entrepreneur community of the Twin Cities, you rock.
https://vimeo.com/118879829