I am excited to let you all know that I have decided to move my blog to a self hosted Wordpress platform. With the amazing help from Doug Belshaw and his constant nudging, I have made the switch, which was effortless really, to give me more flexibility for my work and ideas.

The new blog is called edte.ch

To James, Sue and everyone at Edublogs – I just want to extend my warmest thanks and appreciation for looking after me and my blog for the best part of 3 years. Your help and dedication in supporting teachers and students in blogging is amazing and I owe a great deal to the platform you helped create.

To you the reader, I would be most grateful if you would help get the message to people in any way you can (cross post this message on your blog or Twitter) about changing their subscription details to the new blog. I will post in both places for a short while to give time for people to change but hope to switch completely soon.

This blog will remain but it won’t be updated – it has had nearly 100,000 visits in the last 3 years or so which is amazing and I appreciate that many people have linked to posts here. It won’t suddenly disappear.

This is an exciting time for me and it has been fun to shape my new space, I hope you like it, however I am a little anxious about the move as you can imagine. Please help and encourage other readers along to the new blog. If you pay a visit please let me know what you think.

I have recently confirmed that in mid November I will be travelling to Doha, Qatar to be part of the World Innovations Summit for Education, hosted by Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.

According to the conference information the,

WISE Forum is a “by invitation only” event that will bring together 1,000 leading education figures from all disciplines, levels, supports and media coming from more than 50 countries and representing the 5 continents.

Earlier this year I was invited to an event in London by the organisers but was unable to attend. So I was thrilled to receive one of only a thousand invites for the summit. I would like to think that I will attend the conference as one of the representatives for UK education and will have the opportunity to meet with some equally passionate people from around the world.

As I understand it the invite was as a result of someone reading my blog and I suppose it is a small reward for me and this space and the time and effort I have put in over the last 3 years.

I was sceptical whether I would be able to have the time away from school, but understood that you don’t get many opportunities like this either. With the support of my family and headteacher I have decided to go.

I have signed up for a range of interesting workshops and breakout sessions across the three days.

• Day 1 – Education and Community Development / Technology and E-learning.
• Day 2 – Globalisation of Education: Preparing Students for a Global Economy and Society / Increasing Access Through Technology.
• Day 3 – Tomorrow’s Education / Innovation and New Pedagogical Trends.

I think that I will enjoy many of these and feel that with my experiences I would also be able to contribute substantially to the discussions that take place.

It has been mentioned that Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, is attending. If I get the chance to talk with him I will be sure to explain how transformational Twitter has become for teacher’s professional development across the world. Saying that, let’s hope the whole conference gets that already. If they don’t you can guess who will be banging that particular drum.