It has taken a little while, but I’ve finally got round to creating a blog. Why? It’s a fantastic way to reflect on activities, projects and ideas. In the busy and bustling life of a teacher, it’s all to easy to focus on getting the admin done and ensuring everything is up to date within your roles of responsibility. This can often mean pushing aside the consideration of our teaching and learning, putting less and less time into the most important part of our jobs as teachers: teaching.
Having a blog will hopefully give me an opportunity to spend time reflecting on my teaching, allowing me to improve my teaching and my students learning. It might also be a bit of a catalyst to make me spend some time reading other blogs, which I don’t do at all unless an interesting link to one appears on Twitter.
I was given the impetus for creating this blog by Daniel Needlestone (@nstone), who is a colleague of mine, after he ran a course in school on blogging. If I was to think of any names that have inspired me in my teaching my immediate thoughts always turn to Twitter, and in particular to Tom Barrett (@tombarrett). Despite being a primary school teacher he has provided a remarkable amount of useful content for any number type of teacher; in particular his Interesting Ways series which allows people to collaborate online about the range of ways that we use some great technology. Another name that springs to mind is Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) who tweets and blogs some very wise words! He also collaborated with Stuart Ridout (@stuartridout) to produce an amazing free e-book called Move Me On which contained a massive collection of helpful tweets from a number of different educators; a great example of Twitter’s ability to connect educators and how the internet can be used for collaborative projects.
These are just a few people and things that spring to mind – there are plenty of people that have been on great help to me on Twitter and I can’t thank them enough. Let the blogging commence…