Greedy for blogs!

In the last year at work/ie.school, we’ve formed at least three new professional learning groups that extend beyond our one school and take in other local schools with similar goals and projects. Inevitably, these networks mean even more after-school committee meetings, but the value of the results these groups can produce, means it’s usually well work the time invested.

On Friday, I found myself volunteering to create another blog for the teachers, teacher-librarians and consultants involved in two of the groups – this one a little more in-house in theme, purpose and audience/participants, so I won’t be promoting the URL far and wide at this point, although if it takes off it may well find a niche beyond its original brief. It’s only very early days yet.

Essentially, it’s a blog about our school (and other schools in our learning support group)’s quest to select, purchase and efficiently utilise interactive whiteboards (IWBs) in our school programs. I had suggested to the network that involving ourselves in some group projects would be a great way to support each other, proactively on several learning journeys with the IWBs. Me and my big mouth. (A new wiki activity just wasn’t enough!)

As my third blog (fourth if I count helping out with the Wilfrid rap blog last term), I was astounded how quickly I could go to Edublogs, throw together a few pieces of already-created information and have a slick-looking set of posts, attachments, links and models of previous examples in about an hour, with a few hours of after-work tinkering to get the presentation looking user-friendly.

It’s empowering!