Beehives

As part of my summer holiday I'm in West Sussex, UK building beehives from reclaimed wood - so green! I decided to write a blog about it, partly to keep a record for myself, partly to let other people know about it and partly as an example of how a blog could be used to for a school project. Senior infants won't be building beehives, but it would be a great way to record the activities in a science project. The children can write, take photos and upload movies to the blog.

But how would using a blog be different to creating a website? For what actvities would it be better to use one than the other?

Planning the ICT BEd4 course

This is my first blog post and I was wondering where to start:

• what topics should I blog about?


• what do I name my blog?


• do I include personal stuff or make it all work?


• could I make different blogs for fun stuff, teaching and research and link them?


• will anybody care?

It all came about because I have been asked to teach the ICT course for the BEd4s in the next academic year (09/10). (Crikey 2010 - I'll be so old!)

I've been playing around with a few ideas of what I will do with the class (probably the only people ever to read this). The course needs to be dragged into 2010, kicking and screaming. Do teachers really need to learn HTML and Dreamweaver when there are great sites like Wordpress which do the messy technical stuff for you and let you get on with creating? How will they use it with their class? I don't see 2nd class creating a website from raw HTML code, but they could do it easily with the content creation tools that are currently available.

The hardest thing is probably working out which theme you'll use!

So I'm thinking about teaching a little on web design principles, podcasting, using digital cameras, blogging, virtual worlds, film making, interactive whiteboards, presentation tools and.....

But learning how to use a technology is only the start and can be learnt on any course, without a focus on education. I want my students to think about how they would use this technology in the classroom. What is it worth to them as teachers and to their students as learners?

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Now I have created my first blog post I realise that they are likely to become streams of consciousness. Hopefully I will be able to use this to keep track of some of my ideas but I've always been rubbish at keeping journals - will this be any different? The real test will be to see if I remember about it after my holiday!

(just found out how to edit the post and added a pic!)