Negotiating the Blogosphere
I’m currently running a workshop about the Beginner’s Guide to Negotiating the Blogosphere at the University of Tasmania New Literacies, Digital Multimedia and Classroom Teaching Conference. You can find the Slideshare below. All of the screenshots of the blogs are hyperlinks. Negotiating the Blogosphere View more presentations from Martin Waller
Skyping with The Wren’s Nest
Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog post about a project I planned and taught which promoted a critical view of literacy through storytelling based on the Brer Rabbit stories. I subsequently adapted to project to embed work with The Wren’s Nest Museum in Atlanta, the birthplace museum of Joel Chandler Harris who collected the stories. [...]
UKLA Conference 2011
I will be speaking at the upcoming UKLA International Conference in Chester on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th July 2011. I will be running a workshop on the way I have used Twitter in the Primary Classroom as well as for professional development. In addition I will also be part of a symposium panel presenting [...]
How do you inspire writers?
I’ve been asked to run a workshop about how to inspire writers and help raise writing attainment across the primary-phase as part of a PD day at my school in a couple of weeks. I obviously have my own ideas, views and ways of doing so but I’m really interested to hear what others think. Particularly in [...]
Time for another Changing Horizon…
I have spent today completely re-designing this website. When I say re-designing I actually mean finding a decent template and then modifying it. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time as I had become unhappy with the dark theme that I had installed previously. Most of the blogs that [...]
No fate but what we make…
In recent months there has been a lot of concern and ambiguity over the current educational context, particularly in England. The introduction of free schools, academies and abolishment of BECTA have caused debate within the educational sector. We no longer have a new primary curriculum and the Primary National Strategies are practically no longer acknowledged. We are currently in [...]
Using Twitter in the Primary Classroom
My article about the use of Twitter in Orange Class (@ClassroomTweets) was recently published in English 4-11. I have changed some of the ways in which we use Twitter even within the short time between writing and publication of the article. I plan on writing another more up-to-date reflection on how we have been using [...]
Google Teacher Academy UK – A New Literacies Perspective
When I first started my career in education I considered myself a technologist. I was interested in anything digital and used technology in my everyday life. I also loved teaching ICT. However as my time in the classroom and my increasing research work moved on I became more focused on the literacy-based view of technology [...]
Perceptions of Literacy – A fixed point
As part of my MA in New Literacy Studies I have been researching perceptions of literacy in relation the context of the original National Literacy Strategy. I will of course write a more in-depth post about my findings in due course but here is an initial report of what I discovered: Perceptions of Literacy Study [...]
A developing storm…
I have always criticised the current government for the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in Primary Schools and it’s narrow conception of literacy in society. I have always felt (and I’m not alone) that it reflected a certain ‘tradition’ of literacy and failed to adapt towards changing times. In 2006 I was pleased that [...]