Michael Matera’s Hive Summit, free professional development | Episode 091

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Michael Matera is an engaging, fun and inspiring nationwide speaker and author, delivering keynotes, workshops and small group professional development to teachers and administration. Additionally, he is a practicing teacher. He ignites both his classroom and professional development audiences with interactive play, passion and purpose-driven learning. He helps us all focus on finding the joy in the journey of life both professionally as well as personally. He is the host and creator of the Hive Summit. As a gamification guru and moonshot thinker, Michael transforms the traditional classroom into a high-energy environment where active student engagement is paramount. Michael is an energetic trainer, who broadly shares his research, teaching methods and technological applications for the advancement of learners, teachers and administrators.  As a consultant, he works with educational institutions and business to define the needs and build solutions that inspire and lead to effective change. Discover his most recent pioneering endeavors by visiting his website, mrmatera.com, listen to his podcast Well Played or have a look on his YouTube channel and remember to connect.

What motivated Michael to start the Hive Summit was his passion to change the world. It all started from a conversation with a friend and quickly realized that setting big goals such as changing the world has a very positive influence on your life. The Hive Summit was something that just made sense as he loves professional development and wanted to build it out so people can come together, and everyone is a valuable member of the hive to make something better.

The hive summit is in its second year, it’s an online virtual conference and its free for anyone to attend if they go to hivesummit.org and register there. You’ll get an email each day of the event with that day’s video. There will be 9 presenters with interviews and articles aimed at giving you practical things that you take and use in your classroom with your students. The videos will be available until August 15. However, there will also be an encore presentation roughly a month after the conference to give people access for those that discovered this late. Then throughout the year, you will receive content aimed at improving lives and improving classrooms, centered around playful and joyful learning.

So far there are roughly 13,000 people signed up for this year and are hoping to get upwards of 20,000 people as The Hive Summit is full of opportunities for the attendees ourselves to interact and share out its positive ideas. Michael spends a lot of time in deciding the speakers for the event, he starts by making a list of presenters he would love to see, in all sorts of different categories, covering different topics. He could fill up The Hive Summit with 9 presenters on gamification but tries to keep things diverse as well.

Michael himself will be presenting at the hive and is excited to be there and share his thoughts around playful learning and finding the joy in life which he thinks is really important for students as well as teachers. Another speaker attending this year is Angela Maiers, an amazing educator who is international an keynote speaker, an author and entrepreneur. She talks about the value of putting value in yourself and empowering us to understand that so that teachers can go and turn around and empower students to have that same idea. Casey Bell, an amazing innovator of using technology in the classroom and is a powerhouse of ideas will be speaking as well as CJ Reynolds who has one of Michael’s personal favorite YouTube channels, an amazing educator and very good guy. Ted Neitzke will also be attending and speaking, he is an administrator, amazing human being and inspiring educator. He also has a podcast called The Smart Thinking podcast which Michael would recommend to anybody. Michelle Ferre who’s YouTube channel is ‘pocket full of the primary’ has an elementary sort of focus and talks through things you need to know as an elementary teacher, about the organization, activities you can do with your students and also shares some of the pressures as well. Lisa Johnson is an author and talks about a range of different things. Speaking about being positively productive, using your time wisely and ways to set goals. Quinn Rollins talks about engaging students using toys, games and comics and is a fascinating character. He also is the author of the book Play Like a Pirate. The final speaker is Dan Tricarico the author of ‘Zen teacher’ and he gives a message about taking care of ourselves and good mental strategy.

What Michael enjoyed most about last year’s event is seeing the meaningful and powerful connections being formed, people were tweeting with each other throughout the day, on Instagram throughout the day and a YouTube live. What Michael saw last year was that the people were genuinely learning with a cause and are excited to see that happen.

As far as gamified experiences in the hive, last year Michael had a breakout that existed throughout the whole conference, so each video had a breakout clue either in the video or on the speaker page. After you unlocked all these clues you ‘broke out of The Hive’ and that will be happening again this year. Trivia will run throughout the event and it will involve a leaderboard. Lastly, more playful than gamified, there will be at least one game night! There are two different games that work with an unlimited number of people! So it will be happening in The Hive.

We asked Michael a random question from the audience, Diana Lynn Perkins asked “what are some ways to keep the narrative going and strong throughout an extended game” and we realized Michael actually knows Diana Lynn! Listen to the amazing answer on the episode.

To find information about the Hive Summit visit Hivesummit.org, it’s free to sign up.

For Michael’s information visit MrMatera.com, you can find links to his podcast and youtube channel.

 

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob