Transformation Teachers Programme

I’ve been trying a different method of getting the students to post on the Gothic – up until now, I’ve set tasks on the class blog and asked students to respond on their own blogs.  This was effective for wider reading ‘portfolios’ but a bit of a faff for students to go in and out of each other’s blogs and post comments.  So as we’re all now studying the same text as a class, I’ve been posting a task on the main page and asking them to reply in a comment.  I did it once and they all said it was much more helpful – we got them up on the whiteboard and discussed them at the start of the lesson but wouldn’t have needed to. 

 So I’ve done it again and this time I’m trying to encourage them to ask questions and respond to each other’s comments – that way the later commenters can’t just be lazy and copy ideas from others – they have to engage with them.  And the early posters should also be posing some questions for them.  We’ll see if it works – watch this space!

Today I did a short (well, possibly not short enough – I think I over-ran a bit!) presentation on my experiences on the TTP, my action research on blogs and what directions I’m now taking to introduce colleagues in school to the potential of blogging.  It was a really interesting day, with some fascinating discussions on people’s different experiences of using ICT in education and people’s ‘critical incidents’ in changing their thinking about technologies, or inspiring them on the road to using technologies.  I was really interested to see what David Townsend was doing at Greensward school with integrated use of ICT and genuine personalised learning platforms as part of that.

For anyone reading this from the course, I’ve added more links to blogs on the right – mine and colleagues’.  If you go to Sue Kambalu’s blog, it also has a whole wealth of links, both in her blogroll and on this post.  Do post a comment on here if you have any questions about blogging, how to use it with students, etc.

I think the presentation will be available on the MirandaNet site shortly, though I’m not sure where.  I’m going to attempt to attach it to this post as well, though I haven’t attached any files before, so it may not work!

What Works Where PowerPoint

I’m also making a belated new year’s resolution to post on this blog more often about what I’ve been doing.  Here’s hoping that doesn’t go the way of other resolutions I made this year!