As part of a longer article to published in the next edition of Primary Focus, Jim Fanning provides his blog of a two-day flexible learning course. Is this the way of the future?

This article will explore the use of blogs and other tools to support student teachers in writing reflective journals. The main context for this is the school (or college) experience of trainee teachers on the one year secondary PGCE. Blogs are also used in the first year professional studies module in the School of Education's BA Joint Honours programme. The approach and lessons learned are equally applicable to students on other programmes, and at other levels.

Julie Cooper is the Chair of Governors at Gloucester Road Primary School in Cheltenham. Her role was primarily a mother and parent governor until the school went into Special Measures when she decided that rather than take her children out of school she would take action to help get the school out of trouble.

In 1988, while teaching a professional development course for teachers concerning the use of telecommunications in education, I had an experience that changed me irrevocably. I had just finished describing the expectations for the final project, when a student raised her hand and asked if she could produce a video instead of writing a paper. The question caught me totally off guard. As I paused, mouth agape, I could feel old thinking and new paradigms chafing against each other like psychic tectonic plates. Watching a video was easy enough - but evaluating it as a school assignment? In the end, I told her that I would be happy to accept a video. In reality I was troubled by the fact that my print-based education had not prepared me for that moment or for the many moments like it that were sure to come.

Jim Fanning provides a picture of flexible learning at the Tideway School.

When a student is caught red-handed in school for 'tagging' his own graffiti work around Honywood School he is automatically excluded. For one teacher, however, it was the starting point of encouraging students to develop e-facilitation skills and higher order reading and writing skills.

James Canton in the English department has been particularly keen to develop different styles of teaching and learning. He has found using Frog has allowed him to begin to embed the facilities that will hopefully become the norm within each subject area. James has set up several forums using Frog which have explored a range of strategies to elicit students' views on different subjects whilst also encouraging them to read and respond both synchronously and asynchronously (ie. live and responding immediately to posts and also having time to think carefully about responding). One project involved picking up on a real incident in school where a student had been caught and consequently excluded for writing graffiti around the school and 'tagging' his work. Tagging is a fairly recent 'cult' activity grown out of using graffiti to mark gang territory and is often, but not exclusively, associated with deprived areas and issues relating to abuse of drugs and alcohol as well as bullying, racism and homophobia.