ICT Swap Shop

Hello everyone :D Hope you're all finding it a little bit easier/quieter now a chunk of your students have disappeared :)

Anyway, I've been speaking with some of the guys from Edugeek and also from our local LA (everyone knows Tony and Tracey already) regarding a bit of an idea which I would like to share with you all now.

I am setting up an "ICT Swap Shop". Very similar to the For Sale forum already on EG and with hints of Freegle/Freecycle thrown in. I will however be keeping it much more local for the time being e.g. the EMBC catchment area or anyone else close by (i.e. bedfordshire/milton keynes). This has been brought up before on Edugeek but that seemed to die a death, and that was 5 years ago.

The idea is, we're all down on budget and "Making Do" is probably at the top of our lists rather than planning huge updates.

So, if you have a piles of stuff you want rid of, either just taken off your hands for nothing, for sale, or if there's something you'd like in return, then you can use the forum which is being set up and/or a mailing list (which has already been created).

We'll keep things in the same sort of style as the existing forum - so tag everything/subject headers with [OFFER] [WANTED] [SWAP] [FORSALE] [SOLD] etc.
The idea of it being local is so we don't have to worry about postage. We don't want to trip up over school's own finance systems unless we really need to, and especially as eBay is a minefield for that reason alone, this seems a good solution.

I've been asked a few questions already about this:

1. Does it have to be ICT Related? : No, not really. Perhaps it should just be a Swap Shop - if it helps eachother out then why the hell not. Filing cabinets, stationary, teachers, support staff, anything is swappable! (Ok, the last two were a joke!)

2. Does it have to be local? As mentioned, being local means we can pick it up/deliver it ourselves. However perhaps schools/techies in other schools may like to do something similar for their own area.


This will be in 2 parts: a mailing list and a forum on here. When the forum is live, the mailing list will merely be where notifications from the forum are sent. Until the forum is live, the mailing list can/will serve as the main platform very much like Freegle/Freecycle.

If you'd like to be in on this, PM me your email address and I'll add you to the ML and send you the mailing list address. Hopefully forum is live soon as it means everyone will be able to see what's available and may provide a little more incentive.

Please do not provide any personal information or email addresses in here or the new forum as you'll no doubt just get spammed.

Any questions feel free to ask me in here.

Also feel free to ask me anything regarding this setup if you want to do the same for your own local area. It takes next to none of your time, will/can cost you nothing if you've already got sensible stuff in place and no doubt EG will be able to help out too.

Sounds like an outstanding idea and one that I'm sure if nurtured and developed further could be a real success story.

And I hope you don't mind standing up at the next meeting to talk about it? (Must go and update the agenda!)

If I'm allowed to go then of course I will :)

By the way, if anyone has any suggestions or additions please feel absolutely free to throw them my way :)

Just thought I would pass on that we use anygoodtoyou.com for our stuff. Not limited to schools but we havent had any problems getting rid of older / surplus stuff.

Cheers, always good to see other alternatives too. I will stress this is a local thing for the time being and there is no worry about if you want to charge for something (some things are just too good to be given away for nothing!) or swap etc.

Update on this, the forum is now live at :
Northants ICT Swap Shop

I will stress although it is Northants by name, I don't think many would begrudge opening this up to other schools nearby.