Please help us save our GLobalStudent blogs!

Tweet from my student flurogreen whilst in Melbourne at the Listen2Learners event.

@murcha Globalstudent was the beginning of technology for me! Love it so much! Please don’t delete it!

Please note:- At this stage the post on globalstudent blogs moving has been removed as further discussions and research takes place. The power of online networking, twitter, blogging and collaboration has borne pressure to reconsider. Let us hope the final decision is a favourable one.

So, if you would like to support its continuity, go to the current  post at global student and tell your story with student blogging.

Taking it back a step:- I was both shocked and dismayed to read this post yesterday on the globalstudent blog that the blogs were moving house to global teacher. There are 18,500 bloggers registered on global student – a huge connected and powerful learning/sharing community lost! There had been talk that the #ultranet would stop this global networking and pull us back into the  ‘walled garden’. Now, it is threatened reality! If you are a blogger anywhere in the world, we need your support to keep this platform going and explain why open blogging is vital! Please add a comment back on this post Globalstudent is moving house. We need your help to save us and show that a global network supports them.

This has been one of the greatest innovative introductions by our Department of Education over the last three years. Blogging with students has taken our school on an amazing journey into the power of technology, empowering both staff and students  in their  teaching and learning. Students have had an authentic audience that was both adult and student in nature, had their work showcased globally and developed the blogs into eportfolios. Positive digital footprints were being formed – soon to disappear!

The post assures us that if students move over to global teacher blogs , it will be a reasonably smooth transition, but will the formatting change, will they lose their precious links, their movies, the images of work that they are proud of – all those positive and sharing comments? How can they share their digital footprint with future employers, scholarships they apply for and universities they want to attend? How can they now be googled well?  We have 80% of our students to move from grade 4 up to year 12! This will be time consuming and add to our already overloaded commitment to the ultranet and its implementation.

Our school blog, that staff, parents, students and the wider community are so proud of, is a global student blog. My students proudly have their link to the globalstudent blog within their ultranet space. It makes the perfect complement – internal for private type blogs, external for blogging to others.

Blogging is THE 21st century literacy – it can encompass it all. See my post on this. I know that having two blogging platforms is confusing, but if students become globalteachers won’t that add to the confusion, should we all be globalstudents (rather than globalteachers), as I constantly refer to myself as a learner? Could extra money, go into employing the administrator for extra days per week, to keep both these blog campuses running?

It is hoped that we all have time to discuss this change, the procedures required and that we all can have a say in it. Technology and blogging has brought power to education but best of all, it has brought power to the people. Please #Listen2Learners!

This plea has made it to the Educational Daily The online network is a powerful one!