Many apologies for the lack of blogging over the past week. It has been our half Term break this past week, hence the weird silence from Wales. Partly due to the fact that I wasn't in wales for 2 days this week I have been visiting my daughter who is in college 286 miles away in Carlisle Cumbria. So at 4pm yesterday Thursday 2nd I was stood on Hadrian's Wall, which for those who don't know was the wall which Emperor Hadrian (Roman) had built to show the edge of the Roman Empire - to the north being Savage Scots !!!! ( many apologies to Ewan, David Muir and David Noble ) It was bleak but beautiful up there as the sun went down on a crisp sunny autumn day. My journey home accompanied by my youngest daughter Laura ( 16 on Wednesday as she keeps reminding me!!!) was bleak and not very beautiful as we were delayed at Preston ( for 25 minutes)while a slightly 'worse for wear' gentleman was removed from the train - thus putting us all late for our connecting trains - we arrived back at home at 1.30 am instead of the expected 11.30 pm - journey time 6 1/2 hours ( car journey up at a steady 70!!! 5 1/2 hours ) - and they say 'let the train take the strain'.
Anyhow enough of my travel woes to business : I listened to the recording of Ewan's Fireside Chat the other evening and was very impressed and actually inted to try to join this evening's first chat of the final 24hours we'll see. Ewan's presentation I thought gave a welcome British feel to the conference as he made valid points as to why we should use web 2.0 tools in our classrooms - interesting also in his final few questions about the possible burn out of podcasters and bloggers ( wil we all continue to be as enthused as we are now when this technology becomes the norm rather than the exception - I'm certainly not sure on that one at all, I can only see at present the support of colleagues around the globe supporting us and vice versa as we push forward into the unknown.
Talking of pushing into the unknown, and the paranormal Halloween night 31st Oct was an interesting one. I avoided 'trick or treating' even though prepared with chocolate money!!! and was skyping, when I received a ping from Ewan who was at the Language Show in Olympia, at the very same moment Allanah King a podcasting buddy skyped me from her classroom in North Island New Zealand ( I could hear her pupils in the background ) trying to carry on parallel conversations is not a strong suit of mine and spelling/punctuation certainly disappear when trying to IM in a hurry - we were chatting for about 10 minutes before it got too confusing - but to be talking from wales to someone in London and a different person in New Zealand at the same time is one of the aspects of web 2.0 that really excites me a great deal - and thinking of how we can harness this for our pupils is also a taxing problem ( Allanah has had a go - by recording skype conversations and saving them to podcast).
I had a brief skype chat with David Noble ( Booruch) this morning, this time he was in class in Scotland - I gave him details of Allanah's podcast feed on Podomatic - so that he can have a look and listen to the great things happening in New Zealand. As a result this teacher certainly feels much more part of a community than I did when I began blogging a few months ago.
As Judy O'Connell would say ' It's a small world after all!!!' Which was also a great presentation , view it if you can - Wow now at 1.40 am there is only 20 minutes to the 'Fireside Chat'
Bye for now



Technorati Tags: k12online06 k12online