“Blue sky thinking”

Thanks Frank for tagging me to participate in the meme passion quilt. It’s the first time I’ve been ‘tagged’ in one of these things and I appreciate it

The picture I chose is a photo I took at Glastonbury Festival some years ago, I got lucky lying by the Jazz stage with an old digital camera. I chose it as it encapsulates by passion for sharing the bigger picture with my pupils. Something that is increasingly easy to forget to do with the institutional pressures of so many key exam classes this year. So thanks for reminding me of this Frank!

I’ll tag these 5 educators who’s blogs have inspired me: kwhobbes, coolcatteacher, tombarrett, dougbellshaw, jonesieboy

Here are the rules:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

…it looks like I should be taking a role in expanding the use of ICT across the curriculum. I’m going to do this in conjunction with a member of the IT teaching department. I plan to focus on collecting together good practice that already takes place within the school and also in encouraging the use of mainly free web2.0 technologies wherever appropriate. I would like to focus on improving literacy through reading and writing on the web and improving pupil’s enjoyment of school by bringing things a little up to date!

All of this is in the brainstorming stage at the moment so we’ll see where it leads for next year.

Things have been a little quiet on the blogging front as the last term wound up and a well earned rest was had over Easter.

Hopefully once settled in my new school I will throw myself back into it.  The success we started to have with the Maths blog at my last school has given me plenty of food for thought.  Initial reactions were great but keeping up the momentum was hard.  I think that more input from pupils is key and I’ll be thinking how best to do this over the next few weeks.  I’m leaning towards individual class blogs with a designated blogger each lesson, these could then feed into a wider department blog.  This may be something best started in September but we’ll see.

I’m most excited about the responsibility and the opportunities that lie ahead. Once settled in I shall hopefully get some of the school blogging and take it from there! As myself and some of my former colleagues start spreading around different schools I can also see some other ideas forming for sharing our experience and resources. Some kind of Maths resources wiki springs to mind, we’ll see what takes shape…..