The nature of an interactive blog (Beta Version)

At the end of Ewan’s course I took a look at myself and then reassessed what my ICT practice was and what I needed to do to change it. I consider myself savvy ICT teacher, but after a bit of reflection it was I who was savvy, but not my practice, I was not really transferring this passion and knowledge to my students or to other teachers. Additionally I had a blog that was null and void; it had long ago become home to tumble weeds and not much else.

This Blog became my personal challenge from Ewan’s course and I believe that it is now a successful, interactive record of the learning that is happening within my classroom. My next challenge is to make it more student driven, although I am not at the stage of allowing them publishing rights, like I have here.

Peruse the blog linked below and then see the stages of my development that got me to the point that it is now at.

http://mrdyerhfs.blogspot.com/

Stages of my development

1. See what was out there, look at models of a successful blog and plan how I wanted mine to look.
http://edte.ch/blog/
http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/teacherblogs/

2. Find new and exciting tools that would make my blog seem different, exciting and modern. Researching Web 2.0 tools (never new that there were Web 1.0 tools before this cluster) and investigated how to incorporate them.
http://www.wordle.net/
http://answergarden.ch/

3. Blog every day, if a child wrote a story of had a success it went onto the blog and that helped me transfer thinking from it being my blog to it being our blog. Movies, stories, poems, brainstorms… all had a place on the blog.

4. I made it necessary to visit the blog to access certain things… I did not hand out the homework sheet, but placed it on Google Docs and put a link to it on the blog. This gave parents a reason to give my blog a go again and when they got there they found out that it was again being used. Homework tasks were created for the blog such as…
-Photo Competitions
-Word Gardens
-Google Earth Challenges
…and where programmes were needed I provided links to the necessary download sites (Pivot Stick and Google Earth) and even found tutorials for parents to watch to explain how to download and install the required programmes.

5. I changed my morning news on Wednesday to be ‘Thinking and Inspiration News’, where we watch a clip, such as Tinker School on TED and then record our discussions in a format that suits, like a Wordle or PMI.

It has become a bit of an obsession, but it is a good obsession, and I am able to see a shift in thinking in the eyes of the parents of the students I teach.

It is a bit strange sharing this reflective posting with you all, but I hope that something I have written here is interesting or thought provoking or maybe a something new for someone to adapt to their own blog.

Lunch time is over, so back to the class

See you all next week

Luke