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The first Blog entry! The challenge!

Mark J Tennant

Mark Tennant

Tuesday 21 February 2006

Well, what a weekend. Sitting down to an enjoyable curry on Friday night, beeper goes off! Cue 28 hours of scrabbling around through farmland looking for a missing person - not exactly rockface , but it often isn't! While leaving the curry was a pain, the real problem was the huge everest-proportioned pile of marking I had intended to do before going for a quick pint or five in the Black Swan. Ah well, I will volunteer for these things.

And that leads me to what you're reading now! Volunteering for 'The Weblog'. Blogs. Web. What the. Did I really sign up to this? How drunk was I? Can I get out? No! oh sh...

No, seriously. The aim of this weblog will be to share information about how I go about bringing myself into the 21st century and integrate ICT into my teaching and learning in the classroom. Sounds daft coming from a Computing teacher, I know, but seriously: ICT resources have been seen (and used) as a bolt-on to classroom practice for the past 10 years. I am as guilty as the next person of treating it this way. I've been bemoaning this problem since I became a teacher, but done little positive about it. Probably too busy playing with my rescue team mates to notice the quiet revolution going on in Scottish education.

And this is what makes it interesting - teachers of any subject getting in on the act, and showing how ICT should be used. I can only applaud Ollie Bray's GEOCAST project - click on it and see for yourself. What is Computing in East Lothian doing along these lines? Nothing yet, but here's the challenge...

I have decided that, within the next year, I will commit myself to developing an online portal for Computing students in Dunbar Grammar School - and possibly the whole of East Lothian. This should be an all-encompassing site covering revision notes, online assessment, access to discussion forums, multimedia content and more!

That is where the 21st century part comes in. Come next year, I intend to have implemented this. Watch this space. Or better yet, if you are a computing teacher, get in touch. Let's show people how to use the very technology we are supposed to be experts in! Anything else is just scratching the surface of what ICT can do.

Comments

ON-line portal

David

Sunday 26 February 2006

Hi Mark, we could maybe host that on-line portal in the same way as Exc-el... there's some slack in the existing contract, probably enough to get a prototype up and running. We'd need to register a domain for it, though, if we didn't want to make it part of Exc-el...

First Post

Ollie Bray