Category: Blogging

5 things you may not know about me

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So Doug Belshaw tagged me in with this ‘5 things about me’ meme. (To be honest since I have been blogging I have learned loads of new words! Meme being one of them. But Google Bomb is my favourite.)

  1. Takamine EGS430SC I enjoy playing the guitar. I decided a couple of years back that although I never had any musical tuition as a child, one of my ambitions was to be able to play the guitar. So for about a year I had acoustic guitar lessons with a guy in the local shop to where I work. It was great fun and I got what I wanted – just to be able to play the music I enjoy, strumming away to Oasis and Stereophonics – now I can pick up the guitar and play most songs I like if I have the chords.
  2. I am a “Crunchy Nut” Nut – I love cereal as a supper or snack in the evening at about 8.30pm / 9pm – you can’t beat it with some full fat milk.
    Ludicrously Tasty
  3. I passed my driving test earlier this year. Surprisingly to just about everyone I know at the beginning of this year I could not drive. For some families it is just part of being 17 and you drive the family runabout – it was never part of my latter teenage years so it passed me by. My wife decided enough was enough and booked me a whole raft of lessons. I can remember back in February getting into the driving seat for the first time on a Lucky mascot for Rach in her new career as a driving instructorwindy night, with my driving instructor Simon, feeling pretty scared to be honest. I had my driving test during the first England game of the World Cup when they played Paraguay on the 10th June, so the roads were completely quiet 🙂 lucky me – and I passed.
  4. IMG 0062I became a dad for the first time this year. At about 10.30pm on April 28th my little angel George was born at home, he is quite simply amazing. Enough said.
  5. I love to cook. Yes although confession number 2 may suggest a fairly simple pallete I nearly didn’t go to university to stick at a summer job in a restaurant as a second chef – and I still love to be cooking something for the family today. For some reason when I cook I am totally engrossed and it helps me to relax.

Well confession time is over – hopefully you now know a little more about me than what you may glean from my ramblings about work.

Now who gets tagged – well…

Working with Carronshore

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Yesterday there was a little bit of a spark in the air as children from Carronshorehelped us with our poetry on our wikispace. Nothing was particularly planned, we just followed up a comment on the class blog after asking for some contributions.

The children from Carronshore wrote their “If I were and If you were” poetry contributions on our wikispace as we also added our “Sick” poem rhyming couplets as we had done on post it notes in class.

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It would have been really nice to have worked on something in real time or use Skype and/or messaging to chat as we worked. Let me know if anyone would like to do more of this.
Just is a great reminder how simple technology can help create great collaborative opportunities between children from different parts of the world.

Early Years Classroom Blogs

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I am putting together a list of early years classroom blogs – please help to contribute any you know, doesn’t have to be in the UK just of ages 4-7 :

  • Room One’s Blog – Class blog by year 2/3 students at Mapua School in New Zealand.
  • Interactive Chatting Teddies a collaborative blogging project in Argyll Scotland involving children in P1-3 (ages 4-8 ) and their teddy bears

INSET on Blogging

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Last week I completed my penultimate workshop for this term on classroom blogging. I changed the day to later in the week and had a great turn out, I always like to think of it in terms of the year groups I am reaching with this training and I managed Foundation stage right through to Year 6 so every year group was represented.

I just wanted to raise their awareness of what edublogging is all about – have a look at my class blog as one example and give them some next steps. The response was great and very, very positive – I hope that this continues and is not dampened by Christmas too much. I am still aiming to get more class blogs up and running at school. I am just pleased with the great response!

I now need a list of early years blogs to help exemplifiy to some colleagues- so if anyone has a handy list somewhere, that would be helpful!

Flickr up next – later this week.

NAACE Primary Conference March 2007

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Today I have been confirming the details of a session on blogging that I have been asked to present at the NAACE Primary Community Conference in March of 2007. It is great that people are reading this blog and offering me such great opportunities and I am pleased to help.

So I will be in Swansea presenting really about my blogging story so far – I don’t have all the answers and I still feel very much the novice – but hopefully I can explain some of the successful work we have done in my class.

Why not see if you can make it I would like to put some faces to names! Why not book up here – there is even a barn dance!