Hello there and welcome to the Primary Teaching Bloggers Ireland first ever blog hop! You may have noticed an influx of Irish primary school teachers filling up your Facebook news feeds of late. Well, we’ve decided to get together and help one another to share our ideas and resources and to help you easily find resources specifically for the Irish classroom.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your teaching experience:
Anseo.net is run by two teachers – Simon and Rozz Lewis. Simon is the principal of Carlow Educate Together and Rozz is a teacher in Portlaoise Educate Together. Both of us have over 15 years of teaching experience and have been blogging on Anseo.net since 2005. As well as blogging, we’re both into creative writing: Rozz is the short story expert and blogs on http://www.rozz.ie and Simon is a poet and writes at http://www.simonlewis.ie.
Wha
t class level are your resources/ideas aimed at?
We tend to blog in general about primary education on all sorts of topics. One of our key aspirations is to ask difficult questions and be honest about our opinions. We have been blogging about technology in schools since the days before Interactive Whiteboards came on stream. We have been trying to encourage teachers to share their resources in all sorts of ways since Anseo.net first opened. We give our opinions on any matters regarding education such as equality, union matters and other contentious stuff. We also have been providing lesson ideas and resources to all age groups.
What made you want to start blogging?
Anseo.net started its web site in 2005 and moved to a blog format in 2007. We weren’t the first teachers to blog but we certainly were one of the first. The reason to blog was because we found it much easier to work with than the old way of creating web sites. Educationally, the reason we created Anseo was to encourage teachers to share their resources. It went through a number of changes, including becoming a “Facebook-style” web site for schools to connect with each other. By about 2008, we decided to stick with blogging about education. At our peak we had over 2 million people reading our articles, particularly with the advent of Interactive Whiteboards. We’ve since diversified to other topics and enjoy challenging the system!
Would you advise other Irish teachers to start a blog?
If you’ve something to say then why not? If you’ve something to share, then go for it! A class blog is always a really nice idea to start off with and it’s easier to do than ever before. We’ve written several guides on blogging over the years.
What’s your favourite free resource that you have shared?
We’ve shared so many things over the last ten years but the most popular still seem to be a load of Gaeilge posters we made back in 2009. We now share our resources on our sister site, Mash.ie.
What’s your favourite paid resource that you have shared?
We sell resources on our sister site, Mash.ie. I like our vocabulary packs, which we’re building up all the time.
To join in the blog hop go to this post from A Crucial Week and you’re only a few steps to being part of the community! This is a great initiative and well worth taking part.
