Terry’s quasi religious fervour about blogging got me thinking what a normal staffroom would make of the term ‘blogvangelist’ when coming across it for the first time which led me on to the even more buttock-clenchingly embarrassing thought of how teachers might receive a blogvangelist in their midst. Surely with the same enthusiasm and deference reserved for OFSTED Inspectors

I’ve always been uneasy with the term because for me it conjures up an image of someone bringing good news about something quite life-transforming. From a blogvangelist I would expect something that will quite literally shake my teaching practice to the core, tranforming it into something quite wonderful that will ignite my students into amazing academic achivements that can be taken to the ends of the earth.

The reality is quite different though. The blogvangelist preaches his or her blogging Sermon on the Mount, inspiring great faith for educational revival but quickly moving on to the next group of willing listeners.

… And the teacher is left with a blog or two, a few reams of digital paper and a digital pen – the educational equivalent of a few loaves and fishes – and is expected to improve the lot of the audience-starved masses in the classroom. Unfortunately blogs are just tools and have no transforming power in themselves.

However, put a blog in the hands of creative and innovative teachers and then pupils can feel like they are walking on water, celebrating their achievements and collaborating to the ends of the world. The creative teacher has always been the key for me in providing the magic for educational blogging, not the blog itself. The technology plays a role, as do our students, but the engine for change is the innovative teacher.

I don’t think the term ‘blogvangelism’ adequately reflects the creative slog that is required from teachers to make blogs an effective tool in schools. Perhaps I’m a ‘creativeteachersmakeblogginglookeasyvangelist’

Just a quick 3 minute podcast in Dutch and English in response to John Johnston’s brilliant podcasting day spent at his school’s partner school in the Netherlands. Great stuff. My Dutch is thoroughly awful though and listening to it may be one of the most soul-destroying things I have done since the last soul-destroying thing I did

DeRank.mp3 – 800 KB – 3 mins

I’ve been busy over at my NaaceBlog gathering ideas for my blogging session at the 2006 Naace Conference. I thought I would ask my eight- and ten-year-old sons about their blogging and what they thought about moderation and other such issues.
The interview can be downloaded below. It’s about 2 MB and 12 minutes long and features me at my most inarticulate. It was impromtu after all. They make some interesting points though. It is interesting that my ten year is more worried about giving out his personal details for fear of receiving junk email rather than cyber-stalkers. I like his views on dealing with naughtiness on blogs – namely talking to the criminal about how they can learn from the naughty things they have done on their blog – as well as severely punishing them

Kids Blogging Interview

The Simpsomaker via James

The SchoolBlogs server has been around for years – well since 2001 then. In edublogging terms that is a fair while. It has seen many thousands of weblog sites created – perhaps getting on for ten thousand. Few made the light of day at the chalkface because the server creaked and groaned almost from the beginning and it was deemed too slow and unreliable for classroom life.

For me though it was the foundation of most of my early blogging work with students and my tentative steps to forge communication and collaboration with like-minded webloggers. The term edublogger was as yet uncoined. Along with SchoolBlogs.com, it was home to my early class weblogs and to my ten year old students’ attempts at managing their own fully-functional blogs. People said they wouldn’t be able to do it but SchoolBlogs and I proved the doubters wrong. Our school soon began exploring blogs for every class and parents created blogs and contributed to their children’s blogs. Although we later moved to a sharper server – all the pioneering work of my own experiences happened on the SchoolBlogs server. It was a totally free service and I took it at face value, knowing I would get what I paid for

I often wonder why I didn’t back up all my sites as I made them. The ‘download a site’ function was easy to use but I never got round to it. When the SchoolBlogs server went down hard I always knew it would reappear. This time it looks as though it might be the end. The company that physically hosts the server in the Netherlands is going bust and although there is some talk of shipping it to a retirement data-farm in the US, this option seems increasingly unlikely.

It was Ewan’s experience of accidentally deleting his blog and the accompanying embuggerance that brought me to the realisation that my stuff was probably lost. Unlike him though, I cannot bear the thought of trawling through the years to try and reconstruct a portfolio. I’ll just have to put up with the link rot.

I did however, use the Wayback Machine to find some key memories. Along the way I found some interesting ones – like my commentary and advice to Will Richardson back in 2002 before he was the Will Richardson that we all know and love today.

I’m the eternal optimist though. Deus ex machina – Ewan and I will wake up tomorrow and everything will be as it was