Back Again.
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.
