This my first blog page. The fact I have a blog a consequence of my attending the TUANZ2007 conference in Auckland on Friday 30 May 2007 and hearing Miguel Guhlin http://www.mguhlin.net/ talk about the use of blogs in teaching.
I was motivated and stimulated by his talk but not convinced that a blog could be useful to me as a teacher. However I am prepared to "give it a go" (as we say in New Zealand). Here goes.
If I am unsure about the relavence of blogs to me as a teacher, I am very sure that blogs at school are not relevant to my students' learning and rather are inhibitory. It seems over the last few years in every session we have in the computer room, I have had to spend time and energy in stopping the students accessing Bebo and emailing each other. Maybe this is the future of learning but is not appropriate for me now.
I found Miguel's wiki on blogs http://www.budtheteacher.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page most interesting and will investigate these some more. The conference was useful and I learnt some works and acronyms like Moodle, LMS, RSS that will probably become part of my "use vocabulary". In the trade displays I saw some "Clickers", which I had heard about a couple of years ago, I want to see if I can make some of these for my classroom.
Anyway, its dinner time and so I must go. I have enjoyed writing this page and will use it to remind me of the conference and follow up on some of the ideas I got there.
