#TMGeogIcons - Post #1 - All the stuff will appear here...

So this weekend I was at the University of Birmingham, doing a teacher keynote / highlight spot at the first running of an event called Teachmeet Geography Icons.
It follows the successful Teachmeet History Icons. I first signed up as a presenter at the actual 'Teachmeety' bit, which is lots of short presentations by teachers usually, and which lasts for 5 minutes or so per person.
 I shared my presentation in the previous post.

My first Teachmeet was in 2008 in Glasgow, hosted by Ewan McIntosh, and held at the SECC: 'Armadillo' building. I remember the presentation that Ollie Bray gave while going up the escalator in the foyer. 

One of the things that I mentioned was the role of TES Resources in the potential 'theft' of resources from teachers.
Michael Shaw from TES Resources was asked to respond.
Here is the text of some tweets that he sent me in advance of the event - where he outlined what TES Resources are going to do to reduce the problems that have been happening.

Michael Shaw – Director, TES Resources

Thanks for the excellent question. It frustrates me more than anyone when we find resources on TES that are plagiarised or infringe copyright. So here are a few recent things we’ve been doing.

We’ve toughened up our takedown policies, and made it clear that we will now not just ban uploaders we catch, we’ll also be ready to extract payments from their balances to make it clear plagiarism doesn’t pay.

There are real consequences for uploaders who do copy materials (as it happens, we banned a geography teacher very recently). Some teachers have then lost their jobs when their schools have been informed.

We’ve introduced a new TES Author’s Code spelling out more simply our Ts&Cs on this - and added that we want authors to be actively involved in reporting others they think are damaging the reputation of the community.

We’re also developing further tech and data work to spot material that has been uploaded previously, to help us intervene earlier. And the new content team we’re setting up this summer will be exploring other ways to work with teacher subject experts that should help flag them.

But - and here’s the caveat - we’re not psychic (nor have secret access to every teacher's hard drive). I’ve adjudicated in a handful of cases where the complaints involved teachers whose material was copied by teachers they’d taught alongside in the same school.

However, the advantage we have over things like schools' VLEs, private Dropbox folders, and private sharing via WhatsApp groups is all the resources on TES are out in the open. So if they are copied, that can be spotted, and the uploader dealt with.

Hope that helps! Thank you for inviting me to respond.

There are also some questions that I wanted the delegates to answer.
I set up some Mentimeter Polls, but realised at lunchtime that I'd set them up too early, and so they'd expired - I'll wake them up again and insert them into the document below.

Here's the questions that I asked folks to fill in. Please contribute if you can, even if you weren't at the event...