•  S1 pupils read poems to the P7’s in Glow Meet and there was a question and answer session. The  teacher then provided a session on how to write poetry.
• A High School maths dept. set monthly puzzles for the P7’s. This gave the teachers valuable insight into the levels that the P7’s were working at.
• A P.E. dept. had a huge amount of questions asked about their subject and it gave them an insight as to how the P7’s were feeling.
• The English Dept. gave the P7’s the task of writing a hallowe’en story. The feeder primary school children held back until the last minute to post their stories because they didn’t want their ideas to be ‘hijacked’.

Our local Authority has just recently signed up for GLOW, so it’s too early to be thinking about using it as a vehicle to support the changeover from primary to secondary. 

I have, however, been pondering the use of online spaces to aid the transition process in some curricular areas:

•  The first one is a link between some Primary 6 children and the Art Department at their local High School. It’s hoped that senior pupils will be involved, too.

 Evelyn is going to showcase the children’s artwork on the blog, and we’re hoping that the primary 6 children will use the class blog and perhaps their online wiki spaces to discuss their artwork. The children in this particular class used these spaces last session with Cassie, their probationer teacher. The aim is to get feedback from High School in the form of comments.

•  The second idea is to create a link with the same set of pupils and the maths department of the High School. I’m hoping to work with the class teacher,  another teacher who has recently been seconded to promote CfE and numeracy across the curriculum and a teacher from the High School maths department.

I intend to re-invent the Carronshore Maths blog  that I set up a while ago and the associated wikis. The Carronshore maths blog isn’t an edublogs supporter blog, though, so I’ll be moving it to primaryblogger to get rid of any adverts ….. and to get access to akismet spam blocker …. and get lots more space, too :-)

I’ve made a ‘help slideshow’ of how to export blog data from edublogs to primaryblogger – it might be of help to someone …

• in place before I came in to post
• developed to meet the needs of particular schools
• added by drawing on tools and activities I had used previously in my own classroom practice
• devised as a direct result of having heard of their existance via my twitter network.

Like last session, I plan to prepare CPD activities (just one of a number of remits) by introducing teachers to the available online tools I learn about via twitter. Courses on using tools such as Xtranormal or GoAnimate  were  well received last session – and I would not have known of their existence if it hadn’t been for the sharing culture I’ve become accustomed to by following my fellow ‘twitterers’.  More and more useful free online tools are becoming available at such a fast pace that it’s hard to keep up. Next session, I have some new ideas planned – but this post will concentrate on just one :

Blogging with Classes

The best find I’ve discovered for next session is a new blog host to recommend to teachers here. I came across it via an email a colleague at work received. When I took up this secondment post, I had been using edublogs for a couple of years. There were little annoying things like the slowness, and the occasional unexpected ‘down-times’ .. but it was free and it was under the umbrella of  ’education’ so it served my purpose. I’d also used eduBuzz to host a blog that I wanted to set up to compliment our photaday project adventure – and this led me to have the confidence to set up pupil individual blogs thanks to David Gilmour’s expertise

The following year, I managed to successfully set up individual pupil blogs via edublogs. At the time, they recommended using learnerblogs for pupils. The blogs were set up in such a way that I had equal administrative rights on each pupil blog, and comments needed to be moderated before appearing on a blog. This set-up worked well for a while. During the course of the year, however, learnerblogs were no longer supported by edublogs and advertisements began appearing on the pupils’ blogs. Annoying spam comments also began to surface on a few of the blogs.

One weekend, however, I noticed a disturbing comment on the class blog. It was from one of the primary 7 pupils. Monica wrote:

Hey i really enjoyed Crucial Crew it was great fun. Please would you visit my blog as someone has left a comment i dissaprove of. I dont knoe who it is. It is quite rude.
Bye x

When I investigated her blog, I was horrified to find that the comment was extremely offensive … so much so, that I immediately deleted her blog  – a decision made in haste. I spent the rest of the weekend setting up edublog accounts for the children and, on the Monday, I demonstrated to the class how to export all the information from their learnerblog accounts and import it in to their new edublogs one. I also explained how to activate the Akismet plugin and gave them a necessary API Key to enable it to work.

All went well after that, and I successfully completed a case study on my experience of giving the children in my class their own online space – and when I started my secondment post, I had no problem recommending using edublogs as a free blogging platform for other teachers in the Local Authority. The recommendation was short lived, however, when inapproriate adverts began appearing on the edublogs class blogs. The only solution was to sign up to be an edublogs supporter. It doesn’t cost a lot, really, to make a blog ad-free, and you can add 30 more blogs (a class set?) to that account so that they’re ad-free, too.

But there’s a catch ….. being ad-free is all they’re entitled to. There’s no option on these blogs to add any plugins – so Monica’s ‘extremely offensive’ spam comment could be repeated again and again … much more disturbing than just an annoying advert!!

And then it happened .. PrimaryBlogger to the rescue!!

I’ve already moved the Carronshore edublogs class blog over to Carronshore primaryblogger.

Cassie and primary 5L/W did a fantastic job of keeping it going last session. Next session, Evelyn W – our school art specialist (and my Chartered Teacher buddy), will use it to allow the Carronshore pupils to display and discuss their artwork.

 I plan on providing three twighlight sessions:

• A ‘taster’ session to introduce participants to the world of blogging with classes
• An introductory session on how to set up a class blog
• A third session to explore activities and available tools that can be used to take class blogging further

I’ve also (very quickly and easily) set up some ‘training blogs’ that can be used during twighlight sessions. These are shown in the screenshot below. Everyone will sign in to the main falkirkcpd blog, then scroll to their allocated blog on the dashboard. I’ve set 10 up, with the idea that participants can work through activities in pairs.

I’m off now to work on ideas for giving children space on a wiki so that they can build up their own ePortfolio. Thanks to Jaye for introducing me to the concept …. via twitter of course