Tag: blogging

Is it a bad sign?

Back After Seven Years

It’s also been a while since my hair was that colour, or my torso that trim.

It’s been seven years since my last post here in 2018. Life has a way of moving forward, and if you’re curious about what I’ve been up to during this time, you’ll find more details on my sister site, “While You Were Teaching.” Though that site hasn’t had much attention either, it’s been updated more regularly and offers insight into my recent journey.

“While You Were Teaching” serves as my space for engaging with current educational research and thinking through ideas out loud. This site, however, will focus on the practical side of education; resources, websites, and organisations worth knowing about as I discover them. I’ll also share teaching strategies and classroom approaches that have proven effective, though I’ll try to keep any waxing lyrical to a minimum.

The world has transformed dramatically since 2018, with the most striking change being the emergence of AI technology. Yes, I’ll be incorporating AI into my workflow. While the content and ideas remain mine, I’ll use AI to help polish my writing, occasionally generate images, and assist with any coding needs. Despite legitimate concerns about AI, the reality is that I’m a full-time classroom teacher, and time constraints have been the biggest barrier to consistent blogging. AI might finally give me the efficiency I need to post more than once every seven years.

Here’s to more regular updates ahead.

A new platform for an old blog

Blogging is something I would really like to be good at. I’m not and the chances of gaining an audience beyond my friends, family, and a few lost souls are slim. But I do enjoy it and so continue on with my amateur efforts.

Since 2013 I have been using Squarespace for my blog. It’s a fabulous platform for someone who wants to create a good looking blog and not be worried about pesky code.  It’s an intuitive delight to use and their customer service, in my experience,  was always fantastic. That said I wasn’t using it enough to justify the cost, which although not prohibitive is more than this new platform. Not only that but for the price of my Squarespace blog I could put up three blogs by hosting them myself and using WordPress. The problem is I don’t know what I am doing with WordPress beyond the basics so everything takes twice as long as looks half as nice. I am hoping that the more I use it the easier it will become and the better it will look.

So it’s my intention to try and blog here once a week about goings on in my Classroom, or something that has occurred to me while teaching. Blogging does have excellent potential for helping with professional development. There are myriad educational blogs out there that do just that, some of my favourite of which I will be sharing here.

Interview with Sue Waters

Sue hails from Australia and started her professional life as a lecturer. I ‘met’ Sue Waters taking part in an online course about blogging in an educational setting. Sue is a big part of the team at edublogs  who provide blogs for educators. We have been blogging for a long time as Isis Photography so it was interesting to hear about blogging from an educational perspective. Sue was a fountain of information and was kind enough to allow me to ask some questions about who is Sue and what is blogging.  You can read the full interview here. Thank you so much to Sue for being a great sport.