It was whilst trying to track down obscure information on the internet (with about a 99% success rate - there are still some areas where nobody seems to have added their specialist knowledge to the information superhighway) that I came across a growing number of teacher's blogs. Blog is short for web log, which in plain old English means a diary. You can sign up to a website that will provide you with a frame and some web space, so that all you need to do is type away your thoughts, feelings, actions and news, and then post it up for anyone and everyone to read.
In a way, this website is a bit like a blog, except I don't want you
to know who I am or where I work, for obvious reasons: to protect myself, my job, my employers
and everyone else at my school. It's not easy: I do find myself biting my tongue at times,
both on here and at work. I just hope the teachers who have set up blogs realise the full
implications of what they're doing. Some of them are trainee teachers who haven't yet realised
how nosey and technology-savvy some of the kids can be. At one school I worked in, I was
told by the pupils that another member of staff had his own website. He had given them the address.
When I looked it up for myself, I was shocked at how much information was there about his
outside life as a biker, devotee of an obscure religion, and tattoo addict. Teachers may be all
or any of those things, but in the classroom surely we are above all teachers, donning a
metaphorical mortar board to hide our punkish hairstyles.
Putting up your personal life on a website is one thing: there are so many websites out
there that anyone's personal site can be quite hard to track down. Giving the address to your
pupils, though, is a huge gamble. It's like giving them the keys to your personal life and
telling them to help themselves to all the ammunition you've laid out for them. Not only that,
but as a teacher it's going to be difficult to write a diary of your life without mentioning
your colleagues or the pupils you teach. Even changing the details or names is still not
enough to disguise your versions of incidents that really happened. So if a pupil starts
reading your account of what stupid things they got up to in class that day, they are
probably not going to be too pleased.
Kids are already way ahead of most of us when it comes to utilising technology to forge on with their evil ways. How long after the invention of text messaging did the first child start to be bullied in this way, receiving threatening or abusive messages on their mobile phone? There are websites set up by 14 and 15 year olds where pupils can post rumours and abusive messages about their classmates, and the law still has to catch up with regulating this type of publishing.
My advice to teacher bloggers then, is proceed with caution. But don't stop: I think people should know what goes on in schools across the country, the best and the worst bits, and even the mundane.
added 3/10/04
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