At least three years ago, everybody seemed to be learning to blog. There were a multitude of people blogging via blogger, wordpress and other platforms and I felt it was my turn to join in too. After looking around, and given my reluctance to divulge my personal information to the web, I decided that a self hosted version of WordPress seemed to be the way to go. Since then I have had a blog of sorts which I have broken, lost and not posted to on a regular basis. However, I will persevere and recognising the merits of blogging I started to bandy about with the concept of building a school server which would allow the pupils to have a blog which they could post to internally within our school network. This blog would allow pupils to build up a personal blog, recording achievements and displaying their work from around the school. I also expected that in time we would be able to theme the site and that they could build their own personal theme learning some HTML, CSS and a little about PHP.
After discussing it with some of my Senior Management Team (SMT) colleagues, the idea of using such a blog as a tool for personal learning planning and as a record of achievement, the idea was sealed and a concept was born. Implementation took me on the following journey…