Well, who would have thought I’d still be writing a post here after all this time. Yes, ten years. Ten years of putting thought to keyboard and recording all sorts of crazy things over the past 3,654 days.
This was the first post I wrote on here…
Not exactly a thought provoking start, but it was the beginning of my blogging adventure. And over the last few weeks I've been looking through all those posts that have been written over the last ten years.
I smiled as I read the posts about my time on secondment at Nottingham Trent University and working on some great Digital Literacy Projects back in 2003, and then I winced whilst recalling the after effects of a Heart attack in 2009 and the slow process of getting back on my feet again.
I have looked back at the posts I wrote about the development of ICT at my current school and laughed when I remembered being called an idiot at our decision to go it alone with a blogging based solution rather than an expensive, unusable VLE (Oh, how many schools have ditched their VLE in favour of a blog in the four years since I wrote that?!)
I chuckled at the reminder of the problems we had being an early iPad adopter. Remember when it was a nightmare trying to get an iPad to work behind a proxy using its original OS? Oh boy. We do!
I was reminded too of many of the online tools and resources that have been and gone. The lifetime of a product in this digital age is so incredibly short. I had blogged about Amplify, Etherpad (the original, pre-Google shutdown version), Embeditin, Sumodrive, ExtraNormal, Google Video, SimplyfyMedia, BubbleShare, and Joost for example. All of them have been and gone over the last ten years.
But for every product that failed there have been others that have gone from strength to strength. Take Wikipedia in 2004, Google Earth in 2005, Animoto, Odiogo and Scratch back in 2007, BlockPosters and Woices in 2008, Storybird and TimeGlider in 2009, Zooburst in 2010, Photosynth, Silent Film Maker (now called Vintagio) and Aurasma in 2011 to name but thirteen!
However the one outstanding product of the last ten years (in my opinion) was one that I blogged about back in 2007. It was a strange idea that the BBC announced in which they thought that people would want to "catch up" with TV programmes on their laptops. I mean - who'd want to do that. And who came up with the name "iPlayer". It would never catch on, would it‽
There's loads more I've put on here too. Some of it mundane, some of it funny, some of it a bit of a rant, but all together it puts together a fascinating record of the last ten years of my life.
As I said at the start of this visit down memory lane; who would have thought I’d still be writing here after all this time.
Thank you Typepad for providing a way to promote the amazing work our pupils do. I’ve used this site to explain the breathtaking Epic Citadel Project and the jaw dropping Kingdom project but most of all, I used my positive experience of Typepad to set up the school site using the service in 2007. And we haven’t looked back since.
So that's ten years.
Ten years of blogging.
Ten years of Typepad.
(Clipart created by Bev Evans)
Thank you for these first 10 years of blogging, and here’s to the next 10.