I need your ideas
Earlier this year, a fellow teacher convinced me to put forward a proposal for a paper to be presented at the ALEA conference in Hobart in July at Wrest Point. This conference involves literacy and English teachers from all levels of schooling. I have just been advised that the proposal was accepted, so I will have a one hour workshop to run on the topic:
Blogging safely in the big wide world
What do you think should be the main points I put forward in this workshop?
I would like it to be a practical workshop but am not sure if there is wifi capability at the venue (will check it out this weekend), so will firstly use an off line powerpoint presentation, and hopefully bring some students from my class last year to also participate.
I would like to include other ways of communicating online with examples such as skype, flatclassroom and 1001tales. Do you know any links to other great examples of collaboration across the world?
Yesterday I sent out a tweet about this and received some links from Anne Mirtschin and John Pearce.
As blogging often is seen as negative, I would like the conference participants to actually get in there and start writing comments on blogs belonging to students to find out how easy it can be to get started. Do you have any resources for how to make blogging more positive for ‘unsure about technology’ teachers?
If you have any links for AUP policies regarding blogging, nings and wikis, that might also be handy to use at this workshop.
The reason my fellow teacher convinced me to write the proposal was that I am currently running a student blogging challenge with about 800 students and classes from 13 countries of the world participating. I ran a similar event in third term last year and had a similar response. From the first challenge, students asked for a blog to be created and run by their classes and teachers. Thus was born ‘Bringing us together’.
