As any reader of this blog will know- I’ve spent a long time away from it and not made many contributions of late. One of the main reasons for this is a desire to get into debates/discussions on various issues. Unless you have a very well known blog or one with lots of bells and whistles with stuff for other teachers to use - you tend not to get a lot of replies!

I’m not the most technically gifted individual so I think there’s no way to compete with great sites like English Classroom 2.0 with its great array of embedded videos, forum for readers to paricipate in etc. Sometimes I also wonder whether I have the discipline to write as frequently and as well as someone like Alex Case.

Perhaps that’s why I thought I’d take a bit of a sabbatical as it were and spend time on Dave’s where you often get instant responses to your posts.

In the end I think I prefer the relative anonymity of the personal blog for many reasons! One of these is that a large number of posters on Dave’s are flamers and respond to well-intentioned posts/questions with invective and hateful/hurtful put-downs! Being a rather sensitive chap, I have to say this got to me after a while!

Another whinge is the organisation of the site. It does get very boring searching for that interesting post in the haystack of posts on issues which have been dealt with many times before. The vast majority of posts these days are on stuff like immigration rules and contracts etc and it seems there’s no way to get people to search for previous posts on these topics. They just keep reappearing again and again…

Still there are about a dozen or so good contributors out there which do make the Job related discussion board worth having a look at from time to time. Daves is  also a good place to get answers to questions you may have, providing you get at least one person to bite before your post disappears off the front page and off into obscurity…

Anyway - it was an interesting experience while it lasted but I’m glad to be home on my wee blog…