Reading Writing Responding

In a post a few months ago I mused on the idea of providing time for teachers to tinker and explore . My feelings were that like the students we teach, we too all have areas of interests that we never quite get a chance to unpack. I was reminded of this again recently by +Edna Sackson who spoke about enlivening a professional development day by empowering the voices of the staff at her school and giving them a chance to present, rather than simply bringing in outside providers. Although I have experienced this to some degree in regards to ICT at my school, where we ran a session where various staff provided different sessions, I have never really heard of it been offered as a whole school initiative. I was therefore left wondering, why don't more staff share and collaborate, whether online or off? ... A point of collaboration that I have been involved in this year was the development of a conference presentation with +Steve Brophy . As teachers we often talk abo...

creative commons licensed (BY-NC) flickr photo by mrkrndvs: http://flickr.com/photos/aaron_davis/14425906657 It is only a few weeks until the inaugural DLTV conference.  +Steve Brophy  and I will be presenting a session on listening to other voices in the classroom. Here is the blurb for those interested: One of the biggest challenges in education today is how to empower everyone and give a voice to every learner, this means moving beyond listening to those who seek to be heard and finding ways to capture every voice in and out of the classroom. From collaborating on a document to using a learning response system to reflect on a unit of work, this session will look at not only how we can use various web 2.0 tools to capture the different voices in and out of the classroom, but also how these tools can be used to provoke and prompt further ongoing dialogue. Presenting our thoughts and reflections from a wide range of settings and scenarios, both Primary and Secondary, w...

cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by mrkrndvs: http://flickr.com/photos/113562593@N07/13558173444 In Episode 70 of RU Connected , +Lois Smethurst  and  +Jenny Ashby  discussed the place of blogging in school. Both outlined how they had been setting up blogs in the classroom as a great way to collaborate, but also as a way to connect with the wider community, whether this be parents or other schools and students. What I found most interesting though was when the conversation turned from the student to the teacher. Jenny explained about how she had introduced Quadblogging to her staff. I had always heard of Quadblogging been used as a structured way to make links with other classes and other schools, however I had never heard of quadblogging been used as a means for teachers to connect and collaborate. This all reminded me about an idea that I posed in a post last year, titled ' Sharing the Load of Blogging .' My thought was that in creating a collective sc...

Tom Whitby stated in a recent blog post addressing Connected Educator Month that: "Being connected is not an add-on or a luxury for educators: it has become a necessity". I could not agree more, there are so many benefits to being connected with the wider world that were not possible in the past. The question that constantly comes up though is why are there not more people connecting? Why are there not more people sharing their ideas with the wider world? In a previous blog I wrote about what I perceive as being some of the benefits of blogging. However, what is often missed in these discussions is why more teachers do not jump on board. Some reasons that come to mind are that teachers do not see any direct benefit for them and their teaching. They do not really use the internet 'like that'. They connect enough with the people that really  matter and they are the teachers in their team. The biggest difficulty though, in my view, is finding ...