Learning, Teaching and ICT

My local authority are now keen to promote blogging with pupils. I wrote about this in a previous post, and some recent events have indicated some ways that they intend to take this forward.

1. Our ICT support team have been visiting some schools in order to make a video about good uses of ICT. On Tuesday of last week, it was my turn. I didn’t really know what to expect and, apart from looking out a ‘posh frock’, I didn’t have anything prepared. Malcolm and Jane turned up with some fancy looking cameras and asked me just to talk about my use of blogs and wikis with the class. I spoke for maybe 20 mins or so, referring to the blogs and wikis shown in the whiteboard beside me. It will all get edited down to about a 2 minute slot in the finished video. I’ve included most of what my ‘ramblings’ consisted of here:

• I began by talking about our set up generally, referring to the main class blog and the various pages that take visitors to our individual blogs, a wikispace we shared with AllStars in Australia, our pbwikis and our links to the children from last year’s class
• I explained that the class blog was where we posted general news about the things we’ve been getting up to, as well as a place to share what the pupils have been writing about in their individual blogs
• This session, I’ve tried to give the children a sense of ownership over their blogs. I didn’t want to use them as an ICT time activity, where they’d be asked to write a post about what they’ve been up to. Instead, I wanted to give them a space where they could have a voice in a supported online environment
• Safety is very important, a page containing our ‘blogging rules’ is embeded in each individual blog
• The children have personalised their blogs by choosing their own themes and creating avatars using online sites such as weeworld or voki
• Using programmes such as photostory3 along with sites such as photobucket can make their posts come alive! In the example below, the children are reading from, or describing, their favourite books 

[kml_flashembed movie="http://i130.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vid130.photobucket.com/albums/p258/carronshore/book1.flv" width="224" height="180" wmode="transparent" /]

• Links with home are strengthened by using oportunities such as this one. The children took home their mp3′s and found an older person in their family to interview so that they could experience a sense of ‘the past’ before beginning our WW2 topic. In an earlier topic on writing our autobiographies, the children interviewed parents about their early years
• Learning has become more ‘child led’. For example, read this post to learn how the posts on the children’s individual blogs led us into our ‘world of work’ series of interviews. The children have been learning to devise ‘open questions’ for our visitors. There are also opportunities for follow-up report writing and thank-you letters
• Miss Law was with is for almost 10 weeks and she summed up what blogging with the class it meant to her. She wrote: Before joining 7V I would never have dreamed of having a blog but it’s been great. I know I haven’t written many posts, as I have not had the time, but I’ve loved reading everyone elses. It has allowed me to get to know the class really well.

 ………… and I could have went on… and on… and on

2. I’ve been asked to provide some CPD courses on blogging next month. There will be 3 twighlight sessions beginning on the 30th April. This is new territory for me, but I know there’s lots of help out there. For example, posts such as this one will be very useful. The new Open Source CPD wiki set up by John will also be a great help … and a great resource for any interested teachers who sign up for the blogging sessions. I know there’s lots more out there, too (and if anyone has any advice … get in touch!)

Last weekend, I made the decision to move the class individual blogs away from learnerblogs over to edublogs. Recently there was an announcement in the edublogs support blog:

‘Here’s some pretty big news… Edublogs.org is now open only for teachers but also for students of all descriptions.

Previously we’ve hosted three other sites – uniblogs.org, learnerblogs.org and eslblogs.org for students but we decided a few weeks ago that this is both overly complex and limits what teachers can do with their students through their blog on Edublogs.org.

Uniblogs.org, Learnerblogs.org and Eslblogs.org will remain in operation indefinitely but we won’t be allowing new signups to them ……..”

It may have been a coincidence, but around about the same time, the pupils’ learnerblogs started receiving some spam comments. I’d set the blogs up using the ‘gmail+’ trick described in this previous post. The comments get sent to my email address, and the children moderate them themselves. Last Friday, however, a comment appeared on the class blog from a pupil to say that an inappropriate comment was awaiting moderation. The conversations can be viewed here. The pupils know that I can also log in to their blogs as a co-administrator.

 I had just finished reading the terrible news about Al Upton’s class blogs when all this was taking place. I made a decision to close down the pupil’s blog (at least I copied and pasted all her posts before taking the ‘one way trip’!). I also erased another pupil’s blog where there had been a previous spam comment noticed. It was a rushed decision and the next morning I decided to create new edublogs for the pupils. This was quite a simple job using the new blog and user creator.

Last Monday, we spent our computer time exporting all information from the learnerblogs accounts and importing it into the new edublogs accounts. It was a simple process and the children managed to do this themselves. They left a short goodbye message on their old blogs and provided a link to their new blogs.

Our next job is to activate the ‘Akismet’ spam key required to deal with spam comments. I’ve had this installed in the class blog and have had over 1000 comments deleted as spam……. and I still need to replace links on the class blog.

The best things to come out of the experience was the fact that all the children made it quite clear how much the appreciate the fact that they have their own blog

 In a previous post, I wrote about the children’s online identities:-

In her email to me, Jackie’s thoughts included:

•  the idea of exploring the area of gendered representations of identity

She was referring to the children’s use of ‘weemees‘ to represent themselves.

This weekend I came across a book edited by David Buckingham entitled: Youth, Identity and Digital Media via this website. In the section Introducing Identity, David Buckingham adds his contribution. I’ve incuded ‘snipits’ here:

• Identity is an ambiguous and slippery term. It has been used—and perhaps overused—in many different contexts and for many different purposes, particularly in recent years.
• Susannah Stern’s discussion of young people’s online authorship of blogs and home pages suggests that this activity can provide important opportunities for self-reflection and self-realization, and for expressing some of the conflicts and crises that characterize this period. Some of the young people whom she discusses explicitly see adolescence as an “in-between stage,” in which they are consciously seeking future directions in their lives.
• The extent to which all social interaction is a kind of performance. ……… The issue of performance is also very relevant to the ways in which young people construct identities, for example, via the use of avatars, e-mail signatures, IM nicknames, and (in a more elaborate way) in personal homepages and blogs.

The children in p7v enjoyed creating vokis. Some have embeded them in their sidebars. I’ve included an example here.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://vhss-a.oddcast.com/voki/voki_player.swf?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fvhss-d.oddcast.com%2Fphp%2Fvoki%2Fgetvoki%2Fchsm%3Dcb899af27745f54718f5743d8cf462c9%26sc%3D34031" width="150" height="200" wmode="transparent" /]

Another example can be seen on Fraser’s Blog

Below is an example of a 3D avatar some of the pupils have been playing around with.

More from David Buckingham’s contribution:

• Rebekah Willett, for example, looks at how girls’ online play with dressing up dolls raises questions about body image …
•  Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell also address questions of gender and ethnicity, looking at how the markers of positive identities can be quite subtly coded in young people’s online expressions…….. 

• Simply keeping pace with the range of young people’s engagements with digital media is an increasingly daunting task.  
• Even so, our hope for this book is that the theme of identity will provide a useful lens through which to view particular aspects of young people’s relations with digital media more clearly.

I believe that having the freedom to personalise their own blogs is an important motivational factor for the pupils in my class. Recently, I decided to move the children’s individual blogs away from ‘learnerblogs’ and over to ‘edublogs’. This was a safety decision (I’ll put on a post to explain the reasoning behind this decision soon!). I contemplated reducing their set roles from administrator to editor until I discovered that this would mean that they would no longer have access to the different themes available.

Customising their own spaces has allowed them to share their online identity with their audience. Courtney recently posted to her new blog (she uses ‘text’ speech in her blog). I’ve included part of it here:

‘……I would like to say soz to everyone who Read’s ma blog for not doin task a week but ma other pages are @ da side now not da top We have just moved blog so I’m a bit higglty pigglty write Now…………’

Denying them the opportunity to put their own stamp on their new blogs was not an option  

Miss Law has been with us for almost 10 weeks. She added a post to her blog today. She said:

This week was a really funny week. Wednesday was horrible and then Thursday was really strange as well. It reminded me of things when I was at school. I hope it made everyone realise how much effort is put into making each day at school as enjoyable as possible!

 I’ve just been on my google reader and Russell’s post made me laugh. If I knew how to put a link to it I would.

Here’s the link to Russell’s blog post..  RUSSELL’S POST

His post made me smile, too.

The ‘horrible Wednesday’ referred to by Miss Law was one of those days that we’ve all experienced. Things had got out of hand in the classroom and they quickly deteriorated into a place where nobody wanted to be! Miss Law had planned some ’active learning’ activities and P7V were just not in the mood to ‘engage’.

I interviened and devised the ‘strange Thursday’ mentioned in Miss Law’s post…..text books, silence, hands up to speak - no voices allowed! It was a very strange and boring experience for all involved

By Friday, we had all agreed that this was not the way we wanted our class to be. We wanted to go back to the usual interactive classroom ethos.

The moment that the agreement was reached, Russell’s first request was, ‘Can I go and post something on my blog?’- he doesn’t blog very often!  He wrote

celebrate good times come on!!! 

YES!!!        We are back doing co-operative learning    YES!!!

We were sitting right there in front of him …. but he chose to express this thought online via his blog.

More reflection soon