Introductions

So where to begin eh? In this case let's begin with the project that kicked this idea off. In 2014 I was approached to write a chapter for a book on gifted education that  would look at practice in both the U.S.A. and Ireland. This chapter was to focus on the online tools and resources available to educators involved in the field of gifted education. I was terrified of course, this was a big project, my family life was busy to say the least and I felt like I was no expert on the topic, or any topic.

To be honest, none of these things changed in any great way over the course of writing the chapter. As part of writing it I started to compile a big old spreadsheet of online resources and I developed three skeleton lesson plans that focussed on different tools and areas of education that I had had contact with in working with CTYI. I realised two things as I worked; 1) that this spreadsheet and these lesson plan skeletons could be useful to other gifted educators; and 2) that trying to publish any kind of definitive list of online resources in a paper format was a fools errand, it was going to be out of date by the time the book was published even if I could somehow trawl all those resources from the depths of the internet. 

This got me thinking; could I make a resource for gifted educators, whom I work with, that provided both a searchable index of online resources and that could provide some skeleton lesson plans to go with those resources? That has been the impetus for putting this blog and site together, a small side project where I will try and keep a list of tagged resources that is easily searchable and create a blog post each week which takes one or some of these resources and presents brief skeleton lesson plan and discussion of how educators in gifted education and hopefully other fields might make use of them. Eventually I'd like this to be a proper database but for now I'll just stick with a viewable Google Sheet.

I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this project, but I feel that if I keep it all relatively simple, commit to a post a week and update my list of resources when I can that I can hopefully make this into something that someone, somewhere may find useful. So here goes.

Oh, one last thing, if you have resource you think is useful or cool that may be of help then please do me a huge favour and pop it into the form below, this will help me compile a list as I go along!