Olly Lewis introduces you to the LearnLiveUAE community and recent conference.

LearnLiveUAE is a weekly show that I co-founded with long time friend and all round edtech legend, Mark Anderson. The show focuses on sharing teaching, learning and leadership debate and professional learning opportunities with a view to supporting schools in and around the UAE region in areas that are relevant and important to those leaders, teachers, schools and ultimately the children within them.

We started our shows with Season 1 back on May 4th (yes that was intentional) 2020 and quickly discovered there was a real appetite for this kind of sharing on a regular basis.

We quickly grew our audience and participation levels and to date have had more than 700 hours of our content viewed in the last month alone. 

Whilst we love the show and its impact, both Mark and I wanted to hold a bigger event; something which would capture the imagination, inspiration and involvement of lots of different educators in the region and so the LearnLiveUAE conference was born.

With more than 7 hours of professional learning with a laser focus on teaching, learning and leadership, we had more than 1500 live participants across our YouTube and Periscope channels on the day and had a superb lineup of educators and leaders from the region and beyond. 

Our opening keynote from the Principal of the British School of Muscat, Kai Vacher, set the tone perfectly for all of the fantastic sessions that followed. 

One of the aspects we are most proud of with the conference was the breadth and diversity of not just our speakers but the diverse nature of the content being shared. From Morgan Whitfield’s brilliant session exploring how to create diversity in leadership to Bayan Almousa’s session on enriching Islamic education online – we featured a rich tapestry of voices from the region to Global Edtech’s co-founder, Ronan Mc Nicholl sharing about his career and things to consider post teaching in the UAE. There was so much brilliant professional learning and sharing at the event! 

Post-event the big job was to take the 7 hours of content and break them down into a playlist of individual videos for everyone to watch. Whilst a labour of love, it has been a great way for us to watch back all 20 sessions including our three brilliant keynotes. Alongside Kai’s brilliant opening session we were lucky to secure Al Kingsley and popular author and consultant, Mary Myatt, to join us for the event. 

To learn more about LearnLiveUAE please visit our website at learnliveuae.com, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/learnliveuae and why not check out our playlist of awesome sessions from the conference on its bespoke playlist here: