What to do with a Leap Year?

Of course, that’s a silly title; for 365 days, this year’s like any other, the days may differ but the total is the same. What makes this year special is today, Wednesday 29th February, so let’s make it matter.

15 Chromebooks arrived late yesterday afternoon from the ISAG4L project I am running (here’s a sliderocket of my presentation to BETT 2012 about that, with many thanks to Dave Orchard of Canbury School for the work!) with Google support to bolster the Claires Court junior pupils efforts to grow the Weblogs and take our reputation for hands-on-learning that next step. That means we have across the organisation up to 250 machines available to go to the ‘Hub’ at any one time, some using Windows, others using Ubuntu, still more using Chromebooks, most using Chrome browser and all going to the Cloud through the Hub.

So here’s the challenge for One and All; make this day really different and Blog Feb 29th. It’s important, and for some of our pupils, the first time they will have a world audience!

What is Feb29.net?  The aim of the project is simple – Stripped down blogging to its simplest form to record one special day in time across the globe. As soon as the first country’s time zone enters Feb29th.net the blog will be open to posts. It’s simple, by filling out the form here – http://http://feb29th.net/, you will be creating a blog post on the Feb29th blog.

So go Blog the Leap Year! If you need some help, here’s some tips from the site – http://goo.gl/uEMws.  On the site, you may see I have already posted, but hopefully you won’t, because of the sheer volume of engagement across the Globe, from Tonga in the East to Alaska in the West.

‘So what’s the benefit of Blogging’ I hear you ask? For most, writing for public readership (authoring, journalism or blogging) is all about the audience, attracting their attention, engaging them to their story, even encouraging them to write back! As David Mitchell, Deputy headteacher at Heathfield Primary School in Bolton, founder of this amazing Feb29th project, writes “Blogging is all about the audience. Having a real global audience makes a huge difference to learners of any age. How many times must teachers say “Consider your audience!” expecting their pupils to do something extra special for them? Give a child access to a blog and their audience becomes real”.

Here’s what the Independent Newspaper has to say about @DeputyMitchell and his work – http://goo.gl/B3BVa

Now witnesses to the Claires Court Schools website will have noticed for years our Boys have been blogging, and we’d agree with Mr Mitchell; show boys or girls an audience and they’ll step up to the mark and take to the stage, be that metaphorically as writers or as performers ‘strutting their stuff’. Claires Court’s got talent – but that’s another story -read it here – http://goo.gl/jJtyB!