Motivation
A desire to share what I was learning with the other staff at the school and to get past my fear of the big wide digital world out there and use it for something practical. It has been great because I have had to keep up the practice of uploading things so I don’t forget how to.
Intended goals / outcomes
My intended goal was to get teachers using their IWBs more and then to get them using them more interactively. Whilst we succeeded in increasing their usage, the interactivity issue still needs more work. I also wanted teachers to be able to access my IWB hints from home, which they couldn’t do before now as we didn’t have network access at home. This means teachers can read things in their own time and can remind themselves of a skill when they need it i.e. as they are trying to create a flipchart at home.
Description of the activity
My activity was not student based as I don’t have a class. Rather it was simply the setting up of this blog, which teachers can use to access the IWB hints which I have written or to find links to interesting websites/articles/other blogs/wikis etc. I want to build this into a really useful resource for all our staff to access, as a way of encouraging them to discover more interesting ways to use their IWB than just a glorified data projector.
Use of Online / Web 2 resources & tools
I used wordpress to create the blog, as well as creating a box.net account to enable flipcharts and files to be added to the blog. This took me all year to master but I am finally there. When our diigo updates come in, I look through them and upload the most useful sites to the blog, then I regularly send an email to remind the staff that it is there. The blog is found at http://kanga1.wordpress.com
Anecdotes from Design / Implementation
Whilst not all of the staff are utilising this site, those that are seem to be finding it useful. I have had positive feedback from a number of people. Having said that, I have a number of staff who won’t even try it because it is new and scary and they don’t feel they need to change old habits. I have stopped adding my IWB hints to our school network, so they can only access them from the blog. This has upset a couple of people, one of whom asked me to email her the hints so she could add them on to the network “…. because quite a lot of recent ones are missing.” When I pointed out that that was the whole point of the blog, she was a bit miffed and didn’t see why we had to do it differently.
Final Reflection
When I started this process, I had no idea what a blog was, let alone a wiki or a tag or a word cloud etc etc etc. Pageflakes sounded like something that happened when silver fish had got into the library. The learning curve has been huge and it took me until the last session to start to understand what Tom was talking about. I still need to reinvestigate a lot of the things we did early on because I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t get any of it. I am not a digital native, I am definitely a digital immigrant and so I am learning the lingo of this brave new world but I still struggle with the translations. I want to learn more about podcasts, nings, webquests and using look to learn but I know they will come as I ‘play’ more and gain confidence. I do have some staff who are ready and eager to push through but most are not ready for that next step.
