Following up on ‘suggesting a website’

Back in this post I reported on the feedback I’d had from my Twitter PLN on websites they would include in a weekly etips newsletter. Both Doug and Damian left excellent comments on the post, which I started replying to there. But the comment quickly grew so I thought I’d add it as a seperate post, as it hopefully puts some context on what we’re trying to achieve.

Thanks to you both. Actually, when I sent out the tweet I was thinking much more along the ‘web 1’ style ideas – classtools.net, things like that. I think that probably means that I see things like delicious and GR as something other than websites when I’m not thinking about it, but that’s something for another day.

I’d already planned on doing one on Delicious, and I will also do one about wikis as well. I suspect I will do GR and Twitter at some point, but not in the first few weeks.

To give the whole thing some context, one of my roles in the school is to support staff ICT development. This year the whole school (teaching and non-teaching) need to identify one ICT based objective as part of our Performance Management. The blog is one way of getting ideas ‘out there’, but like Doug, I have got some time to go round and offer 1:1 support to staff who request it (nowhere near as much time as Doug, but four hours a fortnight is better than nothing!).

I’ve been very open from day one that the emails are not things that we expect to see implemented in every classroom, but ‘food for thought’. Nor will every one be of use to everyone. We wrote the support for the PM documentation to take into account that there were different levels of existing practice in schools, and I hope that will be reflected in the emails / blog. That’s why week one’s tip is a fairly simple one about zooming in on a projector, while one week will be about Twitter – those people for whom it is not relevant will hopefully just hit delete, get something from a future week, but know that there will be one or two people around the school who WILL know about it if and whenever they are ready to use that tool.