Having run the Gamerlearner blog for a couple of years – albeit intermittently – I found more and more often that I wanted to discuss aspects of the use of technology in education that didn’t relate to the use of games. Now maybe people don’t worry about the name of the blog as much as the titles of the posts but somehow it felt that I have reduced my opportunities with the Gamerlearner name.

So here we are – screenface to me represents the place where we work as e-Learning designers or educational technologists or whatever the name of the week is now. Miners used to work at the coalface, teachers taught at the chalkface and now we have moved on to the screenface.

I sat with a teacher this morning and explained some – what I considered – fairly basic steps in the process of adding content to our eLearning repository and she seemed genuinely blown away by how much I knew. She even referred to me as the Yoda of eLearn (the name we have given our eLearning platform built on Moodle, Equella and Adobe Connect). This was nice but it didn’t sit well with me – I would much rather teachers saw our systems as just another tool that they use every day than some slightly mystical entity that only a select few really understand.

This I guess is my goal – for ed tech to be just another (albeit useful) tool that makes teachers’ lives easier and provides more opportunities for learners.