Hopefully this is the first of the many would-be-bloggers in my family… my dad!

He’s the author of Using the Internet in Secondary Schools and (with my stepmother) Supporting Information and Communications Technology: A Handbook for Those Who Assist in Early Years Settings so if you’re into that kind of thing then, heck, you should enjoy it :)

And he’s trying to get kids podcasting … strange similarities anyone :)

Back to podcasting. I’m running a project in Birmingham UK where we are putting computers into family homes and linking them to the Internet (stop screaming its a filtered link - the same as all Birmingham schools get). The area where we are operating is one of the poorest in the UK with home computer access being 1 in 10 before the project began. One aspect of the project is that the parents have to agree to be trained on its use and the training is done by the school and their children. What we are now looking to is building on the community that already exists using the communicating ability of the IT medium. Email seems to be very slow on picking up. The kids use email (hotmail accounts) but the parents are very reluctant users. We were thinking slightly of blogs but to be honest if email sin’t going to catalyse an IT talking community I don’t think blogs would. As the community is also 75% Pakistan or Bangladeshi I would suspect the blog would have to be an audio one. However a weekly podcast from the school built by the pupils could be just the catalyst we need.

Anyway, naturally this is a must subscribe if only because you’ll get to see edublogs getting flamed by the sire of the founder:

I find this very frustrating. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do now? Ive clicked on quite a few buttons and they are fairly incomprehensible. I would like to see some other peoples blogs but I have no idea how to get to them. Isn’t there something about getting feeds from other blogs…how? What about searching .. again all I do is search my own blog. A bit silly.

So here’s the feed. Go subscribe and agree with him about how crud this all is ;)

Now, just to get my sisters, Laura and Tessa blogging (Tess has already got onto suicide girls but I seriously reckon she needs a site of her own!)