Personal update: My New Job and the way forward

I have a day job! Yus!

I’m starting work on the 4th at a small(ish) IT company providing a help desk service to a variety of clients – many of who are in Education. The aim is to get some IT cred in this role and then to move the clients into the LMS/PD area where I will be more useful. The firm is providing heaps of training (including certs) and the possibility of a ‘sandbox’ facility for me to mess around with. I’m really stoked about this role and to my new employer: a very sincere thanks.

This blog has opened far more doors for me than I could have imagined, and I’ve decided to see how far it can be pushed. I have a stack of ideas for posts, so please hassle me if you don’t see some more interesting (and more international) content here. Some of my ideas:

• moodle theme disasters – a user contributed “what not to wear” series of moodle sites. Show me your ugliest moodle site and we’ll discuss what went wrong.
• moodle setup tricks – moodle2 offers different themes for each device – i.e.: it can look different on a computer/tablet/mobile. This is very cool, and I haven’t found too many people that know about it or use it.
• LMS pedagogy – don’t use your LMS as a website. Programme it to do the teaching for you.
• More Mac tricks
• Backup for teachers (time machine, Dropbox…)
• iPads for ECE (early childhood education)
• Blogging for teachers
• More Excel
• Outlook/email – setup and etiquette
• iPhones – how to get the best out of them as a teacher. The survey I did a few months ago showed that heaps of teachers own an iPhone but don’t use it at school.
• What drives teachers to use the ‘other’ tools? Your IT department have spent ages creating great tools (google docs, mahara, moodle), yet you use tumblr, edmodo, Facebook… I hope this post will be a two-sided discussion.
• Guest posts – please let me know if you’d like to contribute (I’ve already had one in the past and someone else asked me last night).
• bootcamp thoughts (this is where you run windows on a mac) – why? how? benefits?

Excited much?

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