Learning, Teaching and ICT

 This week I’ve received a number of emails from teachers asking for advice about how to help the  children feel more involved in a class blog that has been set up.

Windsor Park is a school in our Local Authority. It’s a school for deaf children. I was really impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the staff there. After just a recent short introduction of how they might use a class blog with the children, they’re already ‘up and running’!

Check out their blogs … and leave them a comment if you have the time (I know they’ll appreciate the sense of audience that a simple comment can bring!)

There are only two classes in the school. You can find them here:

Room 1

… and here:

 Room 2

The two blogs are ad-free - a big  thankyou to  Sinclair  who offered to rescue any  Edublogs blogs here in danger of being exposed to inappropriate advertising  :-) 

Other teachers who’ve been in touch have been Mrs W. We spent some time setting up wikispaces for the children in her class. There are links to them on one of her blog pages here :

Carronshore 7wn

… But what about giving children their own blog space? Cassie  has decided to go down this road slowly, by inviting the children to earn their online space. Have a look :

Carronshore 5lw

My own experience of giving children a voice by giving them an online space was the topic of my M.Ed dissertation. There’s a link to it in my old Edublogs blog :

http://mvass.edublogs.org/2008/08/07/some-chartered-teacher-thoughts/

At the time of writing the dissertation, I blogged about some thoughts I had about what I felt was a recipe for success for giving children a ‘safe’ online voice. I wrote:

“It’s very important to me that our community is a safe one. …  but I also want the children to have the freedom to have their own space and not feel that there’s a ‘Big Brother’ culture present.

So here’s what I’ve done to try to create that balance:

• First I created a Class Blog so that I could give the pupils an audience for their work
• Very soon after creating the class blog, I realised that it was important to allow access to the children’s own work so I created a wikispace for the class to post their writing
• This didn’t work well, because if we all logged on and edited the space at the same time, problems occured (a ’someone else is editing this space’ message)
• I wanted the children to have their own blogs, but still have control over how they were used. I discovered that East Lothian could help me set up individual blogs . These children have now moved on to High School.
• I’ve now managed to set up our own individual blogs without the help of East Lothian. ……  I discovered the ‘Gmail+’ trick. For example, If you have a ‘yourname@Gmail’ account, it’s possible to create lots of new blogs using that same e-mail address. You can do this by creating new blogs with a ‘yourname+student1@gmail’ , ‘yourname+student2@gmail’ etc.
• One advantage is that, although the pupils have admin rights, the teacher can also login to the blogs at any time.
• Another advantage is that any comments appear in the teacher’s Gmail account – even although the children can moderate them, the teacher has a record of what has appeared
• It’s quite easy to keep track of what is being posted on the children’s blogs by using ‘google reader’, or something similar
• I’ve since discovered that Wikispaces will set up separate username and passwords for students if you email them the information required.

Of course giving children their own online space with Edublogs is no longer an option due to recent changes in policy :-(

http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=7445

A few of us in this Authority have planned to meet with some teachers tomorrow evening to help to share ideas of how we’ve given children ‘a voice’. The idea to hold the meeting grew from our involvement in a Pupil Participation event by LTS in Stirling Management Centre.

I was also inspired to write this post by the latest edtechroundup agenda because my own input to the pupil participation event will focus on my experience of how technology can help to give pupils …. and parents…. a voice.

If I manage to ‘pop in’ to the flashmeeting and learn from others …. I’ll be sure to blog about it here

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.