Category Archives: ideas

Developing blog writing

If the OLL blog is your first ever blog, you may be wondering what you should be writing on blog posts. The temptation is to write as a teacher, but we’d like to persuade you to not do that at first. If you decide to have a “learning” blog, create a new one. But your first blog can be about something that is of interest to you. Here are some ideas to get you started with some interesting blog posts:

  • have a diary of things/places in Edinburgh that you have visited. Each day, write a blog post with a photo, and why the place you visited is inspiring to you.
  • browse other blogs on a particular theme, and then write a blog post of your favourite ones. As an example, here’s a blog post from someone who has looked at blogs about food: https://www.plated.com/morsel/our-15-favorite-food-blogs/
  • create blog posts that have a running idea, for example “three things …”. Here’s an example: https://angelachick.com/blogs/three-good-things
  • choose a hobby or interest that you have and write blog posts about that. For example, do you like drinking tea? Are there good shops to buy tea in Edinburgh – visit them and write about them. Did you have a tea party and invite friends? What is the most popular kind of tea amongst your friends (create a poll on a blog post to find out https://en.support.wordpress.com/forms/polls/ )
  • think about who is reading your blog, and write for them. If you think of yourself as a teacher, you’ll write in “teacher talk”. But if you’re talking to friends, then you’ll develop a different kind of tone. How about family and friends back home (assuming Scotland is not your home!) – you could write about your adventures in Scotland with little personal details that you know they’ll really like. Write for them!

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Creating dynamic learning materials

The range of possibilities for creating learning materials online that are interesting, motivating and accessible, keeps changing as more ideas and technologies are harnessed for education. You might be interested in ways to create infographics and animated images – so have a look at Genial.ly.

Nik Peachey has give an introduction to what you might do with Genial.ly

Augmented reality and education

The same trends seem to keep appearing – new technology is first used by the entertainment / gaming industry (they have lots of money); then some businesses take ideas on board to keep ahead of their competitors; then education sees the potential and starts to consider how ideas in the new technology could be harnessed for learning. As far as I can see, the same thing has happened with AR. So what’s the difference between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality?

This blog post has some useful ideas, as well as an info-graphic to visually explain the trends and ideas associated with AR:

https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2017/10/how-will-ar-transform-education-infographic

Student blogs – some thoughts on using them productively

When setting up student blogs, it can be tempting to consider them to be simply an online version of what you would ask students to do in the classroom. However, there is much more potential! In this article, Kathleen Morris considers how to really make use of the potential of blogs:

Different approaches to using student blogs and digital portfolios

Some very useful ideas!