I must start this blog by saying I have nothing against blogging (would be a bit ridiculous of me given that I am doing it now) and, in fact, I find many blogs very useful/interesting/funny/cute etc etc and read a lot of them a week. I write my own too occasionally!

In the interests of good balance I will also be including many of my favourite blogs at the bottom of the post as I have a great many people to thank for their exciting and useful blogs which have served me well in 2011.

However, that said, I am concerned by the sudden rise in blogging numbers and here are my reasons why.

1) Not everyone can write in an interesting way. Now I am not saying I am an expert either but some people in life, I am afraid, are dull. Putting their words online makes them no more interest I am sorry to say. Some other people are very interesting in person but blog in a very dull way. In real life their hand gestures and body language makes for a great story which just does not translate online with strangers.

2) Not everyone has anything to say. Most of the blogs I read are by or for teachers. The vast majority, therefore, are grounded in fact or, at the vey least, an educated opinion. They are usually written in a professional way – aside from those who deliberately hide their true identity to allow them to speak freely and openly. But there are also those people who have nothing specific to say, teachers or not, and who do not focus their blogs in any way – the “online diary” type of writing. These posts consist of telling us about their bus journey to a hilarious (if you were there) incident. Now if you have a fantastic writing style (refer to point 1) you can get away with this and we will all happily read your day-to-day mishaps in much the same way as we watch a stand-up comedian and laugh along, not because the content is hilarious but because the delivery is. If you do not have this writing gift then please keep your diary private. Do not spam me on Twitter asking for my comments as the only thing I am tempted to write is “Thank you for wasting my time please shush.” And that just wouldn’t be very nice of me. Also who am I to judge your life? So please don’t ask me to.

3) How many blogs can you really expect/be expected to read in a week? This point refers more to the idea that blogging “has” to be done by everyone. I have read a few blogs like this lately and observed conversations on Twitter between teachers who are all desperate to get all of their colleagues and students blogging daily. I am all for showing them blogging and giving them the opportunity to try. But if you badger them to do it – especially those who are reluctant – you are more than likely creating more blogs than anyone will be able to read. In one fail swoop you will be robbing them of  the very “global audience” you wanted to give them in the first place.  Because we just don’t have time to read and comment on every person’s life do we? Again this can be organised well such as with @DeputyMitchell’s Quadblogging – where each school is placed in a group of 4 to comment on each other’s blogs regularly. This gives a guranteed audience and comments to at least give a proper taste of blogging and gives the children the motivation to improve their writing (see point 4) . But force adults into blogging non stop and they will be effectively shouting into an empty room or just being the equivalent of the person who stands and talks next to you at the bus stop when you aren’t listening and don’t want to as you have your own life to get on with.

4) There has to be a purpose. I don’t blog very often as you can see from my list of posts. This is because I only blog when I start to feel the need. I don’t open a blog and then stare at in it much the same way as I stared at the blank paper in my first General Studies ‘A’ level mock exam. (I quit the ‘A’ level as I had nothing to say about any of the given question prompts). I fear that those forced into (you can call it coerced or encouraged if you like but for any non-believer it is likely to be a force with a smile added) blogging will do just that. Open a blog because they are “supposed to” with nothing to say and then either make something up or talk about something dull (ref point 2). Children especially, I feel, need a purpose for their writing when blogging as even some children’s blogs I have been asked to comment on have nothing to say. I am all for encouragement of course but any child who has ever been taught by me knows that I will never celebrate average work/minimum expectations and I am not about to start – if you want a sticker/comment from me then you better be prepared to earn it! ( Update: This is not to say I do not appreciate that the post may be little Johnny’s best work. But if you tell me this is a blog from a Year 6 child I will expect Year 6 level work, not 3 lines about their trip to the supermarket with not an adjective in sight. If this is his best work as he has Special Educational Needs then by all means celebrate it with him and the school but me putting a comment on should not make it more valuable to him – he should feel proud because it is his best work and the same applies to Gifted and Talented children too – celebrate the best work but often I don’t believe this is the case with many of the blogs forwarded to me. If you are unsure ask yourselves this first – if they had written the same on paper would you have been as happy? )

5) Spamming. I mentioned this earlier but spamming has become no longer the job of desperate businesses or virus hackers alone. Teachers, I am afraid, have taken to Twitter as a way of pushing blogs (their own or their students’)  in our faces 24/7. And as ICT professionals we feel the need to encourage this. Why? Well because we want them all using it don’t we? Well no, actually I don’t want them ALL using it anymore than I want them ALL using Microsoft only or Windows only. I want them to know about it. To know how to do it. To make a choice as to when to use it. To know why they are using it. But I don’t want them ALL to do it ALL the time.

6) It isn’t the ONLY way. I am a bit naughty writing this post because my biggest push in education has been for the Getting Into Literacy programme. I believe firmly that ICT as a tool for encouraging literacy is key. So of COURSE I love blogging! But I also love film making, podcasting, Games Based Learning, digital storytelling and much much more. And each one has to fit the purpose. For children who cannot write very well then a podcast is every bit as powerful as a blog. A film made well is fantastically powerful and has global audience in places like YouTube. Films have been going viral long before blogs haven’t they? Give the children/adults the choice of blogging, please please do, but please do not force it upon them as in YOU MUST BE SOCIAL NETWORKING AND BLOGGING OR YOU CANNOT ENTER SOCIETY. This is as wrong as the forcing upon us of SATs tests and league tables. One size DOES NOT fit all.

With the contented sigh of someone who has gotten something off her chest I will leave it there for now but may add others as they spring up! My final message is this:

Blogging is exciting and great when it has purpose and a global audience and an element of sharing (comments etc) but if it becomes something we just “do” because we “should” then it becomes as exciting as writing a hundred Christmas cards – We know some people will like it a bit but we also know that they will be in the bin soon and our hard work will have been a waste. Make it meaningful, make it interesting and make sure you want to do it.

And on that note here are some of my favourite  blogs:

http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/

http://www.timrylands.com/

http://heathfieldcps.net/

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/

This week I worked with the Year 6 blog group on a blog about the Japanese Tsunami. Their Unit of Inquiry is tourism so we found facts via Google about the Tsunami that they thought would affect tourism in Japan.

Their blog is here

http://southrise.primaryblogger.co.uk/2011/03/21/tsunami-blog-year-6-have-their-say/

It is a group blog – some sections are facts copied from websites and wikis but the rest is written by the boys from their perspective while trying to conjure up as much empathy as a Year 6 child with no experience of these situations can. I am so proud of them for the different ways they approached it. They worked in pairs but each pair had a different take on the task which made it very rewarding.

At the end of the session they each wordled (wordle.net) their blog before editing and emailing to me. They tried to change words which came up often to give a more varied writing style. In some cases though the words given are the only available.

Today I wordled the whole blog – and the result has really touched me. Here it is

Year 6 Tsunami Blog wordled

I hope you find it as special as I do. I don’t think any further explanation is required!

It is March which means in a couple of weeks time the borough will have very few staff left. Now many of those staff leaving I have never had any involvement with but it is still a shame for them and their families as they try and find new jobs and maybe have to move.

For me the biggest losses are in ICT of course. We are losing the Greenwich CLC services and facilities which is a MASSIVE shame. There is so much for the CLC to be proud of over the last few years. I, for one, have learnt loads there and use the resources and facilities to turn my school into an ICT-led school. We have borrowed Nintendo DSis – which led to me buying 16 from the school budget. We have borrowed MacBooks and webcams and worked on Animation Projects and myself and other teachers used the RTC element to learn about Animation for ourselves – and had one of the best days of my teaching career in terms of professional development.

I also learnt there how to use and teach Comic Life which is now used throughout the school by all teachers from Nursery to Year 6.

Also my Fronter support and ICT Coordinator meetings will be coming to an end which should be fine for me as I pre-empted this by going on the Intermediate and Advanced Administrator courses to ensure I could deal with 99.9% of issues for myself. I worry, however, for those who have only just started their Fronter journey and those who have struggled on the way but might be ready for a boost from outside. I hope these schools will team up with confident schools. I volunteer my help whenever I can and am hoping to organise some training and meetings for the Greenwich borough ICT Coordinators but we all have our own full time jobs to do as well so unless I am funded part time for this then it will only ever be tokenistic I am afraid as much as I want to do more.

I will continue to add teacher resources to the Getting Into Literacy website in a bid to provide some distant training for those not able to visit.

But I think the key point is that we must all collaborate. We must share our good practice and we must have an open mind about all other schools as they can all teach us something. Please get in touch if you want to help support collaboration across Greenwich and across London – and even further afield. Our communities must grow in order to keep ourselves ahead of the game.

As a starter here is a walkthrough of our Fronter use for those who are interested in ideas for how to use and implement Fronter at their school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og7LZZcD3Dk

As he is sadly moving on but did amazing work I would also like to highlight the website of Stuart Swann (Greenwich CLC Manager) www.adventuresinradicallearning.com – if you have any interest in Handheld and Games-Based Learning his site is well worth a read.

Oh what a week!

We had Ofsted this week. The call came Monday morning at 9am. A staff meeting was called for 10am.

I then spent the next two days (til about 2am each night) updating the Ofsted Room on Fronter (our VLE) . I created the room last year as a practice for when Ofsted came so all I had to do was move folders and information with the most up-to-date information – timetables, planning, policies, action plans, performance management reviews etc etc. And yet still it was VERY stressful.

By Tuesday lunchtime most of the work was there so the Ofsted lead inspector was given the login details so she could have a rifle through before the BIG DAY on Wednesday.

Then I got to work with the Borough advisor organising and printing data analysis from the Pupil Tracker. I sorted the tracking reaults by SEN, Free School Meals, boys, girls, EAL and EMA. And I produced some of the prettiest graphs ever made on Excel. I wish it was not confidential information cos I would love to share! I will at some point do a version with made up figures just so you can see! (I am a geek and I love me so I do not care if you find that too much)

Then Wednesday arrived and I did more pretty printing – colour-coded timetables this time. And the inspectors arrived and the rest is history – the report however is the future so my lips are sealed until moderation etc. Now I have said before that our results are not too high up the league tables – that is no secret. So we all know that the Ofsted criteria means our attainment provides a limiting judgement on us so I will just leave that hanging there for now.

Over the next two days I didn’t see much of the inspectors. They didn’t come to see me – as I guessed they wouldn’t after being introduced on the first day and they said they recognised me from the Teaching Award photo. The true benefit of winning awards is people don’t tend to question your impact or ability as much. Will probably wear off soon though!

What I was REALLY pleased to hear was that the children during their interview with the inspectors spoke at length of their in-depth e-safety knowledge and awareness and said that I don’t block all the sites I teach them how to use them properly which went down as a positive

I eagerly await the full report from Ofsted and hope that there is a good mention in there for the ICT side of things! But also from a whole-school point of view I think we all have a lot to be proud of. The school is virtually unrecognisable from the one I walked into as a supply teacher 3 and a half years ago. I think our headteacher has worked miracles and the children love being at the school.

The key for me is that the children are so keen to learn and that makes every day in my job so worthwhile.

This week I have been mostly analysing data. It has something to do with a very special phone call. I won’t say who called. They may wish to remain anonymous for a couple more days – we shall see…

Anyway I have been looking through the photos, videos and podcasts from the Paris groups and am feeling nostalgic – last week was such a simpler time!

With the blog group this week we put all their previous posts – both those online and those still on my email – through wordle.net and identify the words they used the most. They then used this to analyse their own vocabulary uses. Then they edited their previous posts and resent them to me with adaptations – for example where they used the same word a lot they have tried to use more variety. Where they had no higher level vocabulary they have tried to add a few more WOW words.

Due to my own data analysis we need to carry on with this tomorrow.

We will also be having a blog group focussing on how the Japanese Tsunami may affect the Tourism Industry in Japan – as their Unit of Inquiry is focussing on World Trade.

I know this may seem like a heartless way to look at the Tsunami but actually I hope it may bring a very real human element to this disaster for them and not just focus on the many horrific deaths and injuries.

Our thoughts will be with all involved in the Japanese disaster, their families and the rescue workers searching for and saving lives.

Well it’s been a very tiring week. I accompanied a school trip to Paris. 20 children from Years 5 and 6 Monday to Friday. We were linking with a school in Paris as part of a film making project and the trip was part funded by the British Council.

The children got the opportunity to go with the French children to a professional recording studio to record the songs for the soundtrack of the film – which will be filmed in London when the Paris children visit us in June.

To listen to the songs click here http://podcast.lgfl.org.uk/channels/2032920South-Rise-Podcast-Club.xml

So we set off at 6.30am on Monday and we visited all the major sites. The children were desperate to visit the Eiffel Tower of course and we got a chance to go up to the top which I am sure they will remember forever.

We then stayed and watched the lights come on and they got very excited!

Throughout the week I asked Roshaan, my roving reporter, to create some podcasts using the Digital Voice Recorder so that we would remember what we did each day.

The podcasts are not ready to upload yet but I did start listening through to them last night and found an absolute gem.

On the first day we were sat at St. Pancras International waiting for the Eurostar. I asked Roshaan to interview some children to find out what they were looking forward to about going to Paris.I listened back to this conversation:

Roshaan: I am now interviewing Jack. Jack what do you want to do in the future?

Jack: Have a flying car

Roshaan: Oh, I meant this week in Paris

I love this conversation for two reasons. First of all for Roshaan asking about the future meaning this week but Jack straight away thinking about the long term future.

Secondly I love Jack’s answer. Not only did he not give a career answer (“be a doctor” etc) but his answer is soooo fast that it is clear he has thought carefully about this before!

Later this week I will upload the videos from the week to our school YouTube channel and add the rest of the podcasts and also the children will be making a video about their week in Paris for you all to enjoy!

I will also be adding more teacher resources I promise!

That’s right it is half term again. It felt like it took a long while to get here but that’s a 7 week term for you. Why is it we feel all terms should be 6 weeks and therefore as soon as it gets to 6 weeks and 1 day the whole school seems more tense? That last week is always hard!

This half term has been a busy one for me. I read through and uplaoded the best blogs from the Year 6 boys group – find it here http://southrise.primaryblogger.co.uk/2011/02/16/the-deforestation-additions/

What has amazed me so far in the project is that the blogs coming from the children who you do not normally notice. Their behaviour is fine so they do not get in trouble much and they are middle ability children – nothing we get too excited about but nothing to worry about either. Those children have not necessarily been chosen in those best of bits so do not feel I am writing about these children personally. But it is more the engagement and excitement level from them that has amazed me. They normally just keep their head down and do not say much but it is these children who are offering me more and more work than I have asked for. It is these children who desperately want to prove to me that they are “worthy” of their place in the group. And they are more than worthy. They are exemplary. They are stars.

This is exactly the reason I wanted to start the blog group – to prove their worth to themselves and to the world. Yet still I am astounded. Not by their ability, I have never doubted that. But by their attitudes. And I don’t mean behavioural in the normal school sense. But their attitudes in a workplace sense. They turned in front of my eyes from schoolboys to employees in a workplace. That may seem a little odd but that’s the best way to describe it.

They have taken a challenge and they have stepped up and grabbed it with both hands and run with it. They grew taller when I explained the project. They got down to work and they did their best. They speak to me now not as sulky kids but as reasonable and reasoned adults. They ask mature questions and offer exceptional ideas. They support each other as a team whilst all doing their individual tasks.

I am very proud of them. I should say they were never sulky kids much to me anyway but their general downtrodden attitude in the run up to SATs is, I am sure, mirrored in schools all over the country. The SATs are not personal to them. They gain nothing from the SATs apart from one person judging them and chucking out a level which will mean nothing to them for the rest of their lives. Quick show of hands – who of all my 20-something readers knows what their Year 6 SATs results were? And another show of hands for those who feel it made any impact on their lives? Hello? You still there?

Hmmm… well anyway I hope that the enthusiasm continues. And not just up until the SATs. I hope they are blogging until they retire. Then I hope they podcast every minute from their retirement home!

I hope they use blogs to show their worth to themselves and not just to teachers and peers. I hope everyone sees how hard they work.

But hope is getting me nowhere on my own. I owe my job to these children and I love my job so I thank every one of them!

Also this week the first girl’s online novel blog is up. That one you will find here http://gemclubdiary.primaryblogger.co.uk/

These girls are in my after school podcast club on a Friday and will be podcasting each chapter as it is finished as well as blogging each one for your comments. Please do give feedback – they want to improve their writing every week. This first half of chapter one and the character profiles already have me intrigued so I hope it intrigues you too!

The rest of the podcast club have made a range of things still to be editted – an advert, a 7-times table song, a football poem, a Literacy WOW words video and an agony aunt style radio show.

Many great things are happening at South Rise and I could not be more excited about starting back to work next week!

It has been a while since my last post and I apologise. School and wedding plans have both been full throttle.

However I had to write today as I am very excited about the next stage of Getting Into Literacy and some other projects at school.

Yesterday I started a blog group for students – not a great example myself given that I have ignored you all for weeks oops! Sorry! But yesterday I took 30 Year 6 boys of mixed ability out of their Literacy lessons and informed them that every Monday they get an hour away from the girls to prove what excellent writers they are! The excitement was overwhelming. They all kept thanking me and being far more polite than normal. (The girls, I must say, were also slightly grateful for an “hour off” every Monday but we won’t read too much into that)

I asked the boys to start the blog by just introducing themselves a little bit. We only had 20 minutes by the time I had explained blogs and the point of the project (and of course learning objectives, success criteria and all those very important things) so they had to hurry to get the computers fired up and think of some interesting things to say.

The boys’ abilities are varying. They range from a 2A to a 4A in terms of QCA testing but also represent a great cross section of the country and certainly this area of London in terms of backgrounds and experiences. I hope you can spot this in their introduction blog http://southrise.primaryblogger.co.uk/2011/02/07/the-first-additions-warts-and-all/

Not all boys were able to contribute this week as some had trouble logging into their newly-created email addresses but everything is now fixed so next week I will update with those who are missing from this week so you know who you will be reading week after week!

I have also been doing some exciting Numeracy work this week. Some children have made some training videos to show other children how to solve various maths problems. I cannot take credit for the idea I am afraid – it came from a Mr Marcos who teaches at a secondary school in America and runs the website www.MathTrain.tv and who inspired me at the TechSmith stand at BETT.

But the idea has spawned other ideas. My after-school podcasting group on a Friday are now splitting themselves into task forces. Some will be making maths song podcasts, some will be making more maths videos, others will be doing more DJ podcast work (interviews/poems/songs/adverts) and some will be making Literacy training videos including how to structure different poems etc.

I am very excited and I hope you are too!

Well it is turning into quite a week. And it’s only Monday. On Thursday I collected the Hand Held Learning pack from the CLC. We are borrowing it for a term to test with Year 5 mostly but I am sure I will let everyone have a go.

Included in the pack are:

32 iPod Touches, 2 iPads, a Macbook Pro, camera attachments and microphones and a billion apps (I may have exaggerated somewhere in this list).

I collected them Thursday and set up the internet passwords and so on. Friday afternoon I had 5 staff away for Enrichment so as well as arranging for other classes to be covered I took a class myself and guess what I gave them? That’s right – iPod touches. You should have heard them when I showed them one.

They suddenly became the best behaved class in the world – as happens when you introduce games to the class despite common misconceptions.

I gave them a very simple task – have a look at all the installed apps and pick your favourite for education. By the end of the hour they had found word games, maths games, science games and much more – one girl was sat reading a book on the iPod ignoring everything around her. I took photos and they are all engrossed – some chatting and sharing tips with neighbours other just transfixed.

I now have the whole pack on charge ready to hand over (somewhat relunctantly) to Year 5 for a study in the use of Handheld Technology.

Which leads me nicely into talking about the Learning Without Frontiers dinner and awards presentation tonight. I am a finalist in the Hero Innovator category for my use of Nintendo DSis in school. I am not expecting to win by a long short – the two contenders I am up against are people who work or have contacts with many, many schools and universities and huge followings on Twitter. But I am very pleased and honoured to be a finalist alongside such greats in the business.

Then tomorrow night I am off for dinner again – this time to meet the TechSmith team I will be working alongside at BETT 2011 this week. I will be presenting on Educating the Educators a few times a day.

Then Friday is the big day for me where I am also doing my Getting Into Literacy seminar. I have tried to avoid Powerpoint but it has risen mighty as my comfort zone area of the presentation. Hoping to show some level of multi-media savvy during the talk though – fingers crossed!

See you all there hopefully – come and say hello!

I awoke this morning with a feeling of anticipation. Today marks the one week countdown to the BETT show seminar for Getting Into Literacy. Will I be faced with a sea of faces or two at the back and lots of empty seats at the front? Who knows? Do I really want to know? Will it make a difference if I do?

Too many questions for 7am on a morning which looks like it is the middle of the night. Who turned the sun off?

So I hit the ground running today. Have burned 60 copies of Nativity plays onto DVDs for eager parents last night my brain felt a little fried so I started the day reading blog posts from other schools – always eager to “borrow” ideas and find new web link ideas.

I am starting Blogs a bit more seriously at the school at the moment and so have been looking at appropriate blogging sites for Primary children. I am hoping our boys especially will find the blog posts an exciting way to express themselves. Despite trawling through endless libraries it seems that the best books for boys are still fact books – fiction seems much more geared towards girls. So getting boys into Literacy is one of my main focusses this year.

I am buying the 100 Classic Books Collection for the Nintendo DSis and hope that reading them via technology may trick them into thinking that all the books are exciting!

Blog posts are the next step for writing. We haev some very imaginative boys at our school when they get the spark but giving them the spark in the first place is what many teachers struggle with in the day-to-day Literacy lessons. (I will not go too much into a political rant here but SATs have a lot to answer for on this point – boys will NEVER EVER want to work towards a test. Most girls won’t either but are generally more eager to please the teacher even when aged 11)

So Getting Into Literacy will focus on some ideas for getting boys into Literacy over the coming months – watch this space for studies and results from what works and what doesn’t at South Rise!

In terms of BETT I am really starting to get focussed planning the seminar. I am also making presentations for my time on the TechSmith stand for the rest of the 4 days. 10 minute slots on “Educating the Educators” as featured in ICT Matters this month.

I hope I will be imparting much wisdom so please come along and be part of the sea of (hopefully smiling) faces.

7 days to go!