An excellent blogging platform

Welcome to Beyond the Pier. This is a wordpress.org blog  I have set up to gather resources and post thoughts on all things  related to language, education and technology.  I will shortly embark upon teacher training (known as a Postgraduate Certificate of Education or PGCE) in London and I hope to use this space as a way of documenting and sharing my experiences.

With it being a secondary level PGCE in French that I will study, the intention is to focus on how the recent leaps and bounds in technology and web 2.0 can be used to improve and supplement the teaching of languages.  However, I also hope to post more generally on technology in the classroom and how it can be used to facilitate and streamline a teacher’s day-to-day work.  There should also be a sprinkling of tidbits related to, among other things, language, media, cinema and music.

Language itself is sharing

I am a firm believer in the ideology of sharing ideas and resources for the greater and individual good, much like grounding principles of open source software.  With the emergence of web 2.0 and the plethora of social networking, publishing tools and online applications at our fingertips, it has never been easier to be a part of a specific, targeted communication and sharing, irrespective of boundaries.  (Click here for an excellent Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009)

As a result, teachers shouldn’t have to completely reinvent the wheel on a daily basis, especially in terms of tedious or mundane preparation/administration tasks that have been done countless times before.  By letting technology and the sharing of resources take over some of this burden, hopefully teachers should be free to use their time where it is better spent: improving and developing lessons, stimulating interest among students, analysing what works and what doesn’t in their lessons and developing/embracing new teaching techniques and technologies to name a few areas.  Think of it as something akin to Google’s “20 percent time” that allows their engineers a day a week “to work on what they’re really passionate about”.  Well, maybe 20% is wishful thinking…

To give a brief example, last year as a Maths teacher in an international school in Norway, I used Thatquiz.org to automatically generate simple exercises and test students online.  This saved me a LOT time, was better formatted, gave a more organised overview of how the students faired and saved a few trees in the process.  The site is completely free and epitomizes the usefulness of technology working well in education.  It is along these lines that this blog hopes to tread, albeit with a more linguistic slant.

On a finishing note, I am also writing the blog as a way of practising my rather rusty and neglected writing skills.  It’s a long, long time since I worked with English in this way and I must say I’m finding the process very useful for reflecting upon opinions and formulating and organising my ideas  – something that should prove useful for a teacher when you are asking the same things of your students!