Blogs

I have been finding myself using blogs more and more for inspiration, to find out what teachers are doing, to get an idea of feelings on different topics etc. I get ideas from them and they invariably lead me on to other places and sites where I get more ideas. You've got to stop somewhere but when you are a bit short of insporation I find them really great. Its really why I decided to start to write one aswell, to try to give you a bit of inspiration or the lead to set you off on the path to discovering new things for you.

Here's the train of thoughts/pages that I went along when reasearching for some lessons on climate change, MEDC vs LEDC attitudes and Kyoto. I think I started by search for Climate change Developing Countries Adaptations. This is what I found:

From Power to Poverty is a blog by the UK Oxfam research manager covering lots of aspects of aidwork. He had written a post about how african nations were acting to adapt to climate change. I then searched for other posts of his about cliamte change, from the comments I linbked to another website debating the effects of being sustainable in the North on the South from the IIED. This then led me on to a documentary on Copenhagen from the point of view of developing nations, really interesting.

So much better than all the dry stuff I was getting from official websites which was making me fall asleep and not really telling me what the issues really were (well probably they were but I was bored by then so imaging how bored your studetns might be if they had to read this). I was thinking it would be great to be able to direct students to blogs about the topics they are studying. They can see what views real people have, look at different sides of the arguement and could even engage in it themselves by leaving comments on a blog.

They could start their own class blog if they wanted, give their opinions about what they are studying, post some of their work, see what other people had to say about it. For a blog with loads of ideas about how to use social media in you teaching check out http://daviderogers.blogspot.com/ he's really innovating with it in his lessons, using twitter, facebook, shaerd files etc.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration to go off searching for yourself. It certainly got me reinspired.