As a lot of my time nowadays is taken up being CEO of AppsEvents, I present less now at summits and bootcamps then I used to. I still love to present each year though, mostly about my main areas of knowledge and interest….which is anything ‘techy’ and focussed on school IT staff.
One ‘off-topic’ session I have often ran as a closing session on day two of the summits is about entrepreneurship and how it relates mainly to Educators. I’ve decided to retire this session and merge it into a different one so I thought I would post it here for posterity 🙂
My basic premise is that entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial attitude generally is good for teachers, good for the schools they work at and good for society in general. Often educators who work in the fairly hierarchical and traditional workplace of a school have missed the huge changes in the ease of starting a business, mainly due to the huge range of web tools available and the possibilities to partner with other individuals and outsource tasks.
I only recommend one book in the presentation and that is ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferriss. Despite the gimmicky title it is the one book that opened my mind to how to build an organisation, and I used many of the philosophies to build AppsEvents into a distributed team running 300+ events a year quite literally across the world.
Some common entrepreneurial routes for teachers are coaching, training and developing online courses…. both for students and teachers. but I know teachers who have developed their own software products and even teachers with manufacturing businesses! It honestly amazes me the things some Educators manage to run when they look to automate and outsource all or part of the running of their business.
A question that sometimes gets asked in my session is “should teachers be working on projects outside of their job” and my opinion is a huge YES. Any business begins as an ‘evenings and weekends’ project and it always requires sacrifice. Your friends are meeting up on Thursday for a drink and this is the time you are locked away working on your project.
Teacher workload is always another objection to taking on a side project and while I hugely sympathise with this, I find when you dig into things it often comes down to effective time management. I know teachers who are single parents with three children who do this so I know it is possible….if not always easy.
So here is the presentation. If you have any questions please message me at dan@appsevents.com I’d love to jump on a hangout with you and give you any advice I can.
