Signing on to #twp15

Fools rush in, foolish fools sign up at the last minute.

I’ve just signed up for Teaching with WordPress

This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:

open education, open pedagogy and design

WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning

examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes

plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other

Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.

If I get through 10% of the above I’ll be doing well. The course is organised by Christina Hendricks who I’ve met on etmooc and ds106.
I’ve not started a new blog for the course as I hope anything I post will be relevant to this blog (which I hope focuses on learning).

The course is obviously based in higher ed, but I’ve learnt a lot fro reading HE blogs over the past few years and I don’t think there are any of the learning objective that are not applicable to primary and secondary education.

The course has a Blog Hub where hopefully my post categorised as teachingWP will end up. (this aggregation of learners blogs to a course hub is something I am very excited about, having seen it in action a few times. I recently ran a 10 week blogging bootcamp for Scottish schools using the same technique.

A Brief Introduction

For anyone who ended up here from a #twp15 tweet or the blog hub.

I am a primary teacher by trade, currently working as an ict staff development officer in North Lanarkshire (121 primaries) and seconded to the Scottish Government as a product owner for Glow Blogs.

Glow blogs is a blogging system for Scottish schools. it consists of 33 instances of WordPress. More information on glow blogs on the Help Blog. I guess one of my goals for this course is to improve that help site.

I started blogging with my pupils in Sandaig Primary on Sandaig otters in 2004 using pivot (not wordpress), and organised various other blogs.

This blog started off on pivot in 2005 and I move to WordPress last year, although I used WP elsewhere for several sites. Two of the more interesting ones being ScotEdublogs, an aggregation of Scots Educational Blogs and Edutalk. I have a DS106 blog, the 106 drop in.

My main technical excitements about blogging are RSS and syndication/aggregation. I am interested in giving pupils purpose through audience.

Now we will see if this gets to the mothership.