Global Teacher grew from a seed that was planted in 2005 by Sandy Phillips, the former manager of the Victorian Education Channel (now Connect), Mary Manning, head of the State Library Association and Heather Blakey, former English Teacher and the webmaster of the Soul Food Cafe.
Global Teacher, built as a campus of Edublogs, began life as a research project. The aim was to create a Web 2.0 community and provide a managed virtual learning space where teachers could learn about the potential of Web 2.0, exchange ideas, engage their students using a host of internet freeware and then publish the results within blog containers.
Global Teacher began as a simple default blog, like the one seen above, and has since morphed into a directory that, amongst many other things, houses links to web based freeware and resources, along with links to school, classroom, teacher and student blogs. These days it is like a front door to a virtual education centre. Today a stable of columnists help to keep presenting bright ITC ideas that will stimulate and help colleagues engage students. Their articles and suggestions can be viewed in the central column. The concept of having columnists also provides a model that can be applied with different groups.
Global Student was created at the same time as Global Teacher. The logic of the time was that Global Teacher would act as a virtual staffroom while Global Student would provide space for Global Classrooms and student blogs, containers which would act as digital portfolios of work completed in this environment.
The story of Global Teacher and Global Student’s evolution spans three years and is a testimony to the potential of building Web 2.0 collectives, a social network which enable teachers, students and parents to communicate with each other, and with people from all over the world, via computer.
This blog takes you on the journey to see how Global Teacher and Global Student moved from being simple default pages to becoming a vibrant social network comprising of thousands of doorways which, when opened, enable world visitors to glimpse the diverse ways blogs can be used in an educational setting in different parts of Victoria, in different parts of the world. It examines the key factors that contribute to its success and explores how a computer system enables people to establish communication and build relationships with people all over the world.
Today there are over seven thousand blogs living in Global Teacher and over twelve thousand five hundred blogs living in Global Student. This is not taking into account the thousands of teacher and student blogs that are housed at Edublogs and WordPress, systems teachers chose when Blogger was first shut off in schools for safety reasons.
Not all of the blogs that are created become highly active but a vast percentage have been fully utilized and contain exemplary examples of good teaching and learning. Whatever! The fact remains that almost twenty thousand users have seen the possibility of what can happen in these virtual learning environments.
Global Teacher has attracted an audience of almost a million in the few years that it has existed. With more and more teachers and students arriving and using this site it has become a very important gathering place for those seeking inspiration in Web 2.0 technology.
Heather Blakey, an artistic midwife, is the webmaster of the Soul Food Cafe. Heather, who is passionate about education, is at the forefront of Education in Victoria, delivering the concept of team blogging to the educational sector. Heather says that teaching is her life and believes that it is essential to keep abreast of current communication trends within the digital landscape. Heather is now using programs like Blogger, WordPress and Squidoo to provide online mentoring, build niche communities and provide support for people from all walks of life.