Sartz’s Blog

I have just finished listening to the Ed Tech Crew’s latest podcast where they interviewed Chris Betcher. The Interview was on Interactive Whiteboards, but thats not what I wanted to write about. For me Chris always interviews well and has a common sense approach to ICT for “real” teachers that I find refreshing. The interview got me thinking about how we use ICT as educators, and then I surprised myself by having an irresistible urge to write about it on my Blog. Now being a bit of a Newb to Blogs this came as a bit of a revelation. How does a Science teacher who has always hated English make the transition from “I don’t wanna write” to “Hmm think I might publish this on my blog”.

Now normally I would just remind myself that I am a Geek and thats what Geeks do. BUT, during the last few weeks, I have been working with Year 7 students and now whenever I see them they tell me something new about their blogs, they are accessing each others blogs from home, their parents are leaving comments, the principal is leaving comments for the kids and 7D is a buzz in “Blogdom” as they put it. So I might be a Geek and terribly uncool but surely this group of Year 7 students can’t all be Geeks surely some of them are cool. Maybe Blogs are the “Killer App”, the Holy Grail, the tool which teachers, students and parents can all use, common ground for all.

Is it really common ground for all though? The answer at least IMHO is yes, Yes, YES. We can all participate in blogs at least once we have conquered our initial fear of “what if someone reads this?” Having the confidence to actually post on a Blog is a big thing. In fact this is probably my first real Blog entry where I have just, well rambled on really. But now that I am in the groove theres no stopping me. I have moved on from the “Jeez I hope no-one reads this” to “WooHoo 3 people read my post”, who knows maybe this post could even get 4 readers. Make sure you leave a comment so I know you visited.

We often talk about Web 2.0 engaging students, but I think that there is at least as much engagement on the part of the teacher. Admittedly I have only really worked closely with one teacher so far (will be expanding my empire soon though) and admittedly she was pretty engaged to start with but the journey which she has taken over the past 2 months has been incredible. She started as a self confessed ICT “noob”and in a very short period of time has progressed to running 3 Blogs and moderating 25 student blogs. From someone who didn’t know the difference between a widget and an RSS feed, to someone who just talks about Twitter as if its the communication tool of choice for everyone (It is isn’t it!)

Blogs Rock, no discussion needed, I just “luv’s em to pieces”.

Before I could even blink the holidays are over and week 1 has finished in Term 2. My holidays were great, although a little chilly as we were camping at Bright and Echuca, but we were lucky to get lovely sunny days on the whole. Needless to say we spent the week fishing for trout and touring the lovely green countryside.

This week I was lucky enough to be invited to take a Year 7 class in Swan Hill to get them started on their very own blogs. The kids were great and really embraced being able to publish their work to an authentic online audience. By the end of 3 lessons we had established the students blogs and had some very serious discussions about cyberbullying and what it might mean to them. By 8.00 that night the students were still publishing to their blogs and several parents were contributing as well. I am really looking forward to seeing what these students will produce over the next few months. Well done guys a really enjoyable day.

The next day was a quick trip down to Bendigo to meet with the other coaches and pick up a brand spankin’ new laptop. During the trip to and from Bendigo I caught up with the news that Al Uptons (A well known educational blogger in South Australia) blog had been shut down by the South Australian Ed Dept. It would appear that in someones opinion he was publishing to much personal information about his students. This is more than a little worrying as this guy has been blogging with considerable success for 5 years with his kids. The news has made it onto the international radio arena. It is well worth taking a look at his website as it is a good example of some of the problems which educators will face when using blogs.

I also journeyed out to Sea Lake for a day of reporting with MarkBook this week and had a great day working with the staff out there. I also discovered Twitter and Flock this week, Twitter is an addictive little “chat” program which can be implanted into blogs and wikispaces and Flock is a brand new browser from Mozilla which is geared up to make blogging, twitter, facebook, etc much easier. As the start up screen says in a social networking browser and well worth a look if you are a bit addicted to Web 2.0 stuff.