Thoughts on blogging

I am hugely enlivened by all the grouchy postings, I felt that I was alone in feeling like a blog luddite. Actually I’m not against using them at all, I really do think they have a place in education, at least for the present, but I found posting myself very difficult to do and found I had little motivation to do so without a specific teaching purpose.

One reason I’ve been a bit sluggish is that I knew I was leaving my school so I got ahead of myself and started my students blogging at a number of levels, AS A2 and Year 10, and because I’ve left, that remains in the air as unfinished business. I know I want to set up a blogging system at my new school, but again that is work not yet in progress. As it stood I struggled to find much to say on my blog without a subject, concrete information that needed to be delivered, a syllabus and student responses.

I’ve been reading Andrew Burn and thinking about theories of deep learning, I’m not in a posiition to know whether the blogging journeys I sent my students on resulted in deeper engagement than the standard issue note taking progress through a set text. The early signs were good, particularly as this was a ‘first’ at our school for many of them, and they responded in the best cases with a raft of contextualising materials as well as a lively and open response to the novel.

The Moodle system at my school allowed me to create highly visual contextualising schemes of work, I found this enormously satisfying. One of the tasks we were set on an earlier MA module was to create a visual image, or images, to express a theory, and this started me off on an attempt to create highly visual contextualising and analytical materials. Having done this seemed to leave me with less reason to blog. I know from discussion with other MA students that their Moodle system was very dull and unfriendly looking, and this had fuelled her desire to create a good looking blog.

And finally…I will be creating a bog for my new school, I want it to look flashy and be very interactive. I think it will probably be most useful for As and A2 students. I want to emulate the way Long Road use their blog, to this end the department are filling in a questionnaire for me, which I hope will help me with practical issues, and idealogical reasoning. 

 So not a blog luddite, but a bit of a refusnik on a personal level, I find it hard to believe that anyone really wants to read or cares about my personal musings. When I’ve got a serious educational purpose, I propose to go to town, meanwhile I’m going to copy this onto my blog…