Blogs & Teachers – A Beginner’s Guide

Writer and teacher Douglas Blane introduces us to a few top education and teacher-orientated blogs that will help teachers develop their practice with inspired and fresh thinking.

Cool in Shades – Start with These Recommendations

Rambling is the danger. Not the kind you do with a woolly hat on, in the company of well-wrapped wanderers at the weekend. I’m talking about verbal rambling.

Being released from writing to a specified length for the newspapers, which is what I mostly do, feels like being freed from the stays of a whalebone corset. At least I imagine it does. I have no personal experience. No really, I don’t.

A blog post could go on forever and some do. So I’ll need self-discipline. A thousand more words. No more rambling. “We’d like you to write a piece on the value of blogs in education, together with a few recommended blogs,” was the brief from the nice people at the Scottish Book Trust.

So here we go. Any list of educationally valuable blogs has to start with the East Lothian gang of four – Ollie Bray, David Gilmour, Don Ledingham, Ewan McIntosh – whose influence on Scottish teachers’ use of  ICT has been immense.

These guys are all still blogging and still worth listening to. But they’re also well known, no longer at the chalkface and don’t need me to sell them. So let’s look beyond the obvious.

Dipping in – Two Very Good Teachers to Follow

Neil Winton and Dave Terron, both of whom I first met on Twitter, are two teachers whose blogs I enjoy. Neil is principal teacher of English at Perth Academy, “a relatively new PT with lots of ideas and a large department.”

Articulate, reflective, socially committed, Neil’s blog is called “If you don’t like change you're going to like irrelevance even less.” Here’s an extract: “Why does everything we do have to have a purpose and what message is this giving our children?

“In recent weeks I’ve been so focused on getting pupils ready for folios and exams that I’ve forgotten why I was able to become a teacher in the first place. I love reading.”

And more recently, reflecting on the inspection his school has just been through:  “If we are going to truly understand the learning experience for our pupils we need to be reminded what it’s like to be the one trying to please.”

Too true. So dip in and enjoy, as I do. Neil also looks kinda cool in shades, I think. http://nwinton.wordpress.com/

Dave Terron’s avatar looks more than a little disturbing. What kind of teacher, you wonder, needs a club, a gas-mask and combat fatigues?

Well certainly not Elgin Academy’s English teacher, to judge by his blog posts. But Dave is a former soldier with a fascinating CV, which includes spells in troublespots like Iraq, Belfast and Gordonstoun Academy – hence the aggressive-looking avatar.

I’m going visit him in school soon to sit in on a lesson, chat with his students and find out what a soldier with ICT expertise – such as managing the military intelligence system in Belfast during the Troubles – can bring to kids in a classroom.

Dave’s blog and twitter comments make him sound like one of the good guys, with an enlightened outlook on life and education. So I’m looking forward to the visit and to writing it up for Times Educational Supplement.

Here’s an extract from Dave’s blog, a nice feature of which is past posts collected into categories – CPD, Glow, Curriculum for Excellence, etc. “If a pilot has to do a check flight every six months why can’t teachers? We are human and we slip into bad habits.

“Regular observations by people from outwith your department are good for you and good for them, as they might pick up good practice in return. I pinched several ideas this term alone from watching other teachers.”

And here’s one about a class discussion of classrooms: “We have to squeeze into a small box, contrary to what’s best for us as humans. I took notes from the excellent ‘Donald Clark – Plan B’ and used this as a starter. Good discussion followed. We’ll finish next week and decide how we’ll change the classroom to cater for the problems, and improve how we all fit in.”

Read more at http://www.daveterron.com

Worldwide Wall – Why Blogs Matter

So what exactly is the value of writing and reading blogs? Well it depends who’s doing it. To a teacher they’re a great way of clarifying our thinking – about pedagogy, the curriculum, new technologies – and letting off some of the steam that builds up when bureaucracy and lack of resources get in our way.

Once a blog has created an online community it also becomes a great way of getting feedback and ideas from colleagues around the country. It exemplifies what teachers always tell me when I ask what’s the best kind of CPD – “The kind delivered by other teachers.”

Good for Kids Too

The value and potential of blogs written by children is different, and probably even greater. Blogs and podcasts might seem revolutionary, says primary teacher and ICT development officer with North Lanarkshire, John Johnston – one of the pioneers of children’s blogging.

But they’re also a natural extension of what good primary teachers have always done. “We display children's work to help them realise it's important and to generate feedback. We’re now doing it on a much bigger wall.

“You’re always trying to set tasks that feel real to kids. If they're doing a podcast and they know it's going to be listened to and commented on by people from Bangkok to the United States, it can't get much more real than that."

But blogging is just writing surely? So won’t the huge numbers of children who struggle now to express themselves on paper, be just as disadvantaged by the more modern medium? Action research on children’s blogging by Margaret Vass for her master’s degree suggests not.

Blogs do not privilege the written word, the former primary teacher –  now ICT curriculum support officer for Falkirk – discovered. Boys in particular were keen to upload images, sound and video to their blogs, and took great pleasure in demonstrating their skills with Web 2.0 tools, and video and audio equipment. Children were highly motivated to "design and furnish" their new web pages, seeing them as expressions of their own personalities.

One of the most interesting findings – and pointers to the future – was the "fusion of online and offline worlds" that took place when children were given their own blogs. The deep insights these provided into individual pupils led, through class discussions, to important changes in the delivery and content of the curriculum, Margaret says.

"Children’s informal online voices began to influence their formal offline learning programme. I wasn't expecting that."

In recent months Margaret has been exploring a fertile idea that grew from her research and reading on children’s blogs, an idea that seems to have immense potential for the new curriculum – ePortfolios.

“While on secondment I’ve only been able to play around with the idea and I’m looking forward to trialling it for real when I return to the classroom in August,” she writes. “I’ve been very encouraged by the motivation shown by the children I’ve helped set one up for so far.”

Wider world – How to Get Started with Blogs

Well that’s about it for now. Just a toe in the Web 2.0 water really. But the great thing about new technologies for teaching is that there are now so many friendly teachers and learners afloat that it’s easy to start with a toe and, with their help, end up swimming the Channel.

One last suggestion to anyone interested in blogging and Web 2.0 for learning. Get on to Twitter. Start by following a couple of teachers you know or have heard of – such as Michael and Lucy, the Scottish Book Trust’s Online Teachers in Residence.

See who they’re following, read their blogs, comment on them and gradually build up your own online community. Do it organically. Take your time. Don’t feel confined to Scotland, Britain, Europe or even the world. There’s a great big learning universe out there.

Feel free to ramble.

Additional Tip:

Step by Step by Sandaig

Blogging is easy to set up but hard to establish in a classroom, says John Johnston. Here's how:

• read some blogs at ScotEduBlogs;
• test blogging software;
• play with features; learn to upload images, audio and video;
• start a whole-class blog as a shared reading exercise;
• comment on other school blogs;
• set the tone; devise blogging rules;
• organise a rota of pairs of pupils posting;
• create short-term blogs for poetry competitions, school trips, etc;
• keep it going.

Read this article for more details

Writer and teacher Douglas Blane is a regular contributor to Times Educational Supplement

You can follow him on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/ddblane

Or read his excellent news and Science resources website here: www.realscience.org.uk