If you’re reading this, the chances are you’re already pretty sold on the potential of new web technologies in education. But how did that happen?

At last week’s Scottish Learning Festival I enjoyed hearing from John Johnston, at his talk Audience, Purpose and Conversation: the World Wide Display Wall, about how he got hooked. His engagement with new web tools led to the Sandaig Primary blog, now one of the best primary sites.

Sandaig has the longest running primary pupil blog in Scotland and is recognised nationally and internationally as an example of good practice. link

He described how, after getting every child in the school to write a 3-line poem for a competition, he’d decided to try publishing the poems on the web. There wasn’t a grand plan behind it, it was simply an experiment.

It was when the comments started to come in that things really took off. He told us how the students received a comment from the States, in which the authors were asked if they’d mind a play being made from the poems. That then led to the play being performed, and the school being sent some of the materials to enable them to stage it - a huge dose of positive feedback.

There were similar stories at TeachMeet07, where teachers like Lee Carson implored people visiting school blogs to leave comments.

We know that hearing stories like this at the Scottish Learning Festival can inspire individual teachers to try these things. But for the full benefits to be realised we need to find ways of making it possible for the much larger numbers who couldn’t attend to have other opportunities to be inspired.

At last night’s eduBuzz Open Meeting in East Lothian there was some lively discussion on this. We’ve learned that often teachers can be initially enthusiastic about web publishing when they see how easy it is, but that doesn’t mean they’ll build it into their classroom practice in the long term. Sometimes technical glitches can be off-putting, for example, or lack of support.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know where we could all take things.

You might also be interested in Katie Farrell’s take on the Learning Festival and TeachMeet07: how can we stop preaching to the converted?

Categories: Digital Literacy, Leadership, ScotLearnFest07, Social Media, TeachMeet07