Blimey, it's #blimage!

I'm always looking for new ideas to promote blogging for teachers. For me and countless others, blogging is a very important part of professional practice, and I have written extensively about its benefits for teachers in articles such as 7 reasons teachers should blog and The truth about blogging.

In conversations recently with members of my PLN including Amy Burvall (USA @amyburvall) and Simon Ensor (France @sensor63) another method began to emerge. It's a challenge/game that Amy called #blimage - a confection of Blog-Image. (Yes, we are now in the age of blim!) You send an image or photograph to a colleague with the challenge that they have to write a learning related blog post based on it. Just make sure the images aren't too rude. The permutations are blimmin' endless.

My first challenge came from Amy and my response was published under the title of 'Off the rails'. It made me think hard, because I incorporated the 3 images she sent me into one blog post. Following on from that, Simon sent me another #blimage challenge, which became the post 'Piece by piece.' Subsequently, other bloggers took up the same challenge, and Simon set up a Pinterest board to capture their efforts and aggregate them in one place. The discussion on the blogs and on Twitter is just beginning around these efforts. It's a very creative way to encourage teachers to think about their practice, and get them blogging about these thoughts. So, if you're up to the challenge, and you're at a loose end, let me start you off.

The challenge is this: Use the image above (or another of your own choice), incorporate it into your blog, and write a post about learning based on it. It's OK - the photo is mine and it's licensed under Creative Commons so you can use it with attribution. See what you can make of it! (Then pass an image of your choice on to someone else so they can do their own #blimage challenge).

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Blimey, it's #blimage! by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.