Learning@School

Blogging not only allows you to reflect on your own thinking, it helps you to connect with the thoughts of others. Blogging at Learning@School Conferences has grown from strength to strength. Twitter has added to this connection as teachers across the globe and nation connect using the microblogging platform.

One delegate who has been in the NZ Twitter network this year mentioned that because of the connections through Twitter she now felt really connected and less lonely while attending the conference. She has a ready group of people with whom she feels comfortable and can also carry out extended conversations long after the conference is over. These connections extend the learning and support us as we head back into normal daily life trying to incorporate the extensive professional development just undertaken.

Blogging has also created a new breed of creature loosely termed the ‘blogebrity’. In the image above Wes Fryer is taking the place as the international blogebrity for this year’s Learning@School (clicking on the image will take you to the original on Flickr which is annotated).

That's going straight to the Pool Room!

This is cross posted over at “The Bloggers’ Cafe”

In light of the conversations that have been happening lately here and here about how the blogosphere seems to be distinctly American in flavour, I am going to add a bit of antipodean flavour to this post.

In my research into Podcasting this year I have been thinking about what it is that makes the biggest difference to student learning.  Obviously giving students the ability to hear their own voice is empowering.  Also having an expectation that it will be the student’s voice and not the teacher’s is empowering.  But the most empowering factor of all has to be the global audience.

This is where my strange title comes in.  Those people from my part of the world will be cognisant of Darryl Kerrigan and the ‘Castle’ (an iconic Australian movie).  For Darryl the highest place of honour for anything is for it to be put in his ‘pool room’.  You know you have pleased Darryl and produced something worthy if he puts it in his pool room.  Wes Fryer has been talking lately about his ‘Fridge’.  The highest place of honour for a piece of work produced at school and brought home is to be placed proudly on the fridge.  This is indeed a place of honour in a house of three children like mine.  The fridge has limited space! 

Students can now publish their work to the world, not just to the teacher, or the classroom, or the ravenous hordes stampeding the fridge at the 3:30pm “I’m starving mum” ritual.  I understood this, or thought I did, until I heard a podcast by Dr Tim Tyson.  He was talking about what he asked his students when they first ventured into publishing on the web:

What do you have to say that the world needs to hear?

What a powerful question!  It even made me tremble when I started on this blog post.  What do I have to say that the world needs to hear?  So I’m sending that question out to all of you…

What do you have to say that the world needs to hear?

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