Introduction to the Blog Author

Hi my name is Shelanna Sturgess (nee Macdonald).

 I am an art educator at Durban Girls High School,

 who has been experimenting with online education since 2011. 

 You can view my Visual Arts classroom blog at:

 studio2-41.blogspot.com 

In 2009, I returned to my former High School (Durban Girls High School), as a young art student intent on understanding the world of teaching.  Part of our third year of the Durban University of Technology's Fine Art Course included a month’s work experience at a location of our choice. I was excited about the opportunity to continue exploring the art-making opportunities that DGHS's art studio had to offer. I will also excited to work with high school art teacher Neith Moore, who is a highly accomplished Visual Arts and Design Educator. Mrs Moore has an deep love for sharing knowledge and exploring new ideas and the art studio seems to acquire new disciplines each year. I thoroughly enjoyed my work experience and realised that a month is far too short a time to glean all the wisdom that Neith Moore and the staff at DGHS had to offer. Thus I was delighted to return to DGHS as an art educator in 2010. Since then I have spent a lot of time eavesdropping on Mrs Moore's lessons and rushing in to share information with my classes.

Mrs Moore loves to start new things so she began experimenting with an educational website in 2011. Her passion for education is infectious and her experiments generally have amazing results, so I found myself joining in the online world when Neith migrated from the website to a blog. Thus we having been using blogs as online classrooms since the end of 2011/ beginning of 2012.  

We have since began experimenting with Google Apps For Education (GAFE) and are hoping that some more teachers will join us so that we can add lots more content to our GAFE site and hopefully launch it soon at Durban Girls High School.

I had no idea how much I would enjoy blogging and I have since created a blog for my life orientation classes (dghslife.blogspot.com ) as well as blog showcasing some of my Tech art work (shelannakhethiwe.blogspot.com).  

This blog (ictschoolexperiment.blogspot.com) is the next in my online journey.... I have so enjoyed teaching online that I decided to register for my MTech in Fine Arts with a focus on Visual Arts Education. Part of my writing and practical work explores creating online educational resources. Some of the other teachers at this school as well as friends at other universities have asked for help with setting up their online classrooms. Thus this will blog will document some of the things we have learnt about working online, as well as tutorials on various aspect of online education. I will also include some articles and reviews on online education that I am reading for my MTECH studies.

When I am not exploring art or education, I love cooking so one day I may start a food blog about how we sometimes turn my parents house into a restaurant and enjoy all the deliciousness of friends and inventing recipes...but for now I think I'll stick to education...

Photos Courtesy of Shena Macdonald (my darling mother)