Longhair me. 1:365
Found this photo in my guitar box. Only one I am aware of when I had long hair many moons ago. Scanned and first of my 365 photos for the year, following Tom Barrett's lead. Happy New Year everyone!
Archived entries for personal
MA: Me & my Pen Portrait
I qualified as a Business Studies and Economics teacher in 1995 following a conversation on an aeroplane with a former musician turned teacher turned businessman nearing retirement. The PGCE course was disappointing – the first lesson I taught was given 9.5 out of 10 and then it was busy people without the time to talk teaching – but I did okay and, unsure of where to move next, I signed up to a supply teaching agency in London. In teaching practice my mentor had identified a talent for classroom management so I was keen to see the capital’s challenging inner-city and requested to work in failing schools. Continue reading…
daibarnes.info
After I managed to kill daibarnes.com wordpress blog (subscribers please be kind enough to find my new feed here) I set about thinking what I wanted to achieve with my website and blog.
1. Somewhere to find me online
2. For any seeker to know what I use and connect to it
3. To point people I work with (in school, online and elsewhere) to somewhere
4. To collate my work, whatever that may be
And so is born http://daibarnes.info
daibarnes.com as an URL never really floated my boat. I looked at a few things: daqibarnes.co.uk, daibarnes.me.uk, daibarnes.org. In the end it seemed all the others were something else. Not me. As a portal/splash/tag page I thought daibarnes.info had more mileage.
Then what to include??? Big question. Keep it simple but make it for the target audience. Who are they then?
Teachers. Educators. Consultants. Technicians.
What do they want? Well nothing in particular from me so it’s a matter of asking what might they like to see?
Clean and simple. Lot’s of white space.
Directional. Clear tags on everything.
Things they might recognise. Blog. Twitter. YouTube.
I created it using KompoZer, an open source WYSIWYG web editor akin to dreamweaver. Not the same as DW but worked okay and quite easy to work out what I needed to do what I wanted.
I haven’t done everything I want to yet.
1. It needs a photo of me (probably). I’d rather use one of my children (cos I like them and they are what I have been doing for more than ten years) but as a rule of thumb I don’t put them publicly on the web.
2. I am looking to write a teacher start site. This might be a collation of blog posts. It might be a website. It will be somewhere teachers can go who are interested in working online. Interested in the evidence that computers are a benefit to education (rather than just being told they are). Interested in finding straight forward info on using a tool in the classroom.
But where it is will do for now.
