Wednesday, August 23, 2006

PD session on Blogging [for teachers, not students]

Hello blessed fellow educators - this morning you had another session on blogging. Thank you for coming and to those of you who showed an interest and asked interesting questions or gave feedback.

By joining Blogger you can comment here on ideas to help me provide useful information for you and for the other teachers who attend the miniconference in September.

I will appreciate any constructive feedback. I feel I'm doing okay at blogging, but professional development sessions are not my cup of tea. As some of you know, this sort of thing is listed as amongst my worst nightmares. However, with your support I am finding it easier.
It gave me a great confidence boost after the first session to hear from Michelle, Hailey, Haami, Maria, Lacreice, Frances, Sharon and co., that they really enjoyed it and wanted to try it out with their classes. i know some of you hav etried it our with mixed success. Similarly today it was refreshing that Blair had thought of a use for blogging in relation to his specialty area of sports at school.

I think challenging things and new ideas like blogging are a perfect time for us to demonstrate the professionalism that we have indentified as being part of our shared vision.
It is time to be open to new ideas. Educational paradigms are changing.

Cheers!

3 comments:

MrWoody said...

thank you madam - this is mOSt appreciated
8>)

LMcC said...

I DO know how much it freaks you out to put yourself up in front of others Mr Woody so it is good to see you working on your own learning anxieties while also encouraging others to try something new.
I will just repeat the (hopefully) constructive feedback I gave you afterwards and maybe others will add their feedback so you can make some improvements to it for the mini conference.
- use a mouse so you don't have the problem with random access to places you don't want to be
- don't assume they will know the structure of the blog e.g. this is my initial post and I can access the comment to that post by clicking here, and this is what the comments look like, this is how I go back to the initial posting etc.
- once they understand the structure of the blog they will understand how you are navigating
- don't do any unnecessary scrolling
- explain what you are doing as you are doing it e.g. if I scroll down here there is a post about... - it is quite hard to keep up if you don't know where the presenter is going or why.
- your posts and your kids comments are very relevant and motivating - they show a very valid conversation and the level of buy-in from your students.

You're doing great things.

MrWoody said...

thank you triwoman - i have also set up a blog for peachgrove staff to air n share. we will share a password so we can all post. we will have to work out how to make it members only though.