Artifact #1

Description: Tech Meetup Invitation

The first task of creating a community of practice is inviting participants to the conversation. The first Tech Meetup occurred January 15th, 2015 during lunch. I delivered each invitation personally and explained it's purpose and plan for exploration of technology. Since teaching staff are divided by grade levels into two lunch periods, two different sets of people attended. The first group agreed that a new name was more appropriate: Tech Munch.

This is an example of the invitation sent out for the third Tech Meetup (Tech Munch):

Reflection: The personal invitation hand delivered to prospective participants was very effective. Almost all of the people invited did attend. (Not to mention that I offered them lunch as an ice-breaker for the first meetup). The first lunch group decided after the first meeting to make our Tech Munch a pot luck. Everyone brought something to share, food and tech ideas.

January Meetup: 20 participants out of 22 invitees (across 2 lunch periods)

February Meetup: 15 participants (across 2 lunch periods) - some personally delivered invitations some invitations delivered by email and in-box.

March Meetup: 12 participants (first lunch only) - Personally invited those who had not attended the last meeting. Some invitations delivered by email and in-box.

The first lunch group maintained connection and retained almost all of the original members. This group contains sixth grade teachers and one seventh grade teacher.

Additional Feature: The third invitation included a QR code. I found that after teachers received this invitation, the views of the website increased that day as teachers scanned the QR code and visited the site. See artifact 3 for analytics on website visits.

Go to artifact 2