Thursday, April 11, 2013

Blogging 101.

Blogging is such a great way to inspire your writers to publish and to share all that wonderful digital content you are creating with your parents and wider community.

Here is a guide to beginning Blogging that I presented at Learning at Schools in Whangarei and New Plymouth recently.

Blogs can be used across the curriculum to provide a window to the classroom, connect learning to home and family, create authentic audiences for writing, offer a space for reflection… and more!

Are you…

seeing other teachers blogging but not sure how to get started yourself?
looking for a way to share all the digital content your students are creating?
wanting to increase the learning conversations between home and school?
new to blogging but are not sure where to go next?


This workshop aims to provide stories, examples, tips and advice on how to harness the power of blogging and integrate it with effective learning.


Please use this resource and give me some feedback via the comments below. 


Engaging reluctant writers using e-learning tools.

Recently I presented at the Learning at Schools roadshow in Whangarei and New Plymouth.

It was exciting to see so many teachers keen to learn new skills and familiarise themselves with new tools to add to their teaching toolbox.

I introduced my presentation with the story of my own early teaching years struggling with reluctant writers, often boys, who would do anything to avoid writing, and also of my own son's reluctance to write. I shared how e-learning had changed that in my classroom, had brought fun into our writing time and allowed the children to express themselves in a range of ways, to see themselves as writers and authors and to experience success.

I made a deliberate decision to create a resource for each presentation that would provide the participants with a take-away resource to revisit when they had time, hopefully sooner rather than later, but one that would be able to give them the confidence to have a go at using these tools once back in their own classrooms.

I have already had some great feedback from my sessions and hope that teachers will continue to feed back to me how they have found the resources useful - or challenging!

Each time I present I learn so much, nothing is more humbling than standing in front of a room of your teaching peers (including your own form one teacher!!)

Please use this resource in your own classrooms to engage those reluctant writers and give them back the joy of writing.

And drop back in and leave me feedback : )