A couple of people have asked about the thinking behind the Primary 7 Writing Blog . I’m aware that you often read of ideas but there’s not enough detail to really evaluate whether the same idea would work in your own context so I’ve tried to include all the relevant practical details.

Earlier this year I played about with different blogging software to see how easy it was to use and to get an idea about how it might be used by children. I’d seen John Johnson’s work at Sandaig and was impressed. However, I’m an ICT Development Officer, not a class teacher, so I wouldn’t be able to do what John had done with a class. I wanted something that would have genuine educational benefit and wouldn’t just be using new technology for its ‘wow factor’ alone. I was sure that kids would enjoy blogging and that some teachers might enjoy exposing their pupils to something new and motivating, but I wanted something more than just a motivational activity. I’m not denying the importance of motivating pupils but the motivation must be to do something worthwhile. As I think one of the key things that education can do for kids is to improve self-esteeem, I wanted some sort of blogging activity that would make the kids feel good about themselves and, hopefully, encourage them to improve. I wasn’t sure at this stage what I wanted them to improve.

There are two aspect of blogging that I think are useful in schools - being able to publish content quickly and easily to a worldwide audience and the ease of the worldwide audience commenting on the content. Thinking about this led me to the current project - to improve children’s writing skills through blogging.

I contacted local primary schools to ask if their primary 7 classes would like to take part. Eight schools, with varied catchments, joined the project. I had a brief meeting with each of the P7 classes and explained that the blog would let them publish their writing for all the world to see. The main difference was that (unlike work displayed on a web site) others would comment on the work. However, as we were just a few local schools, it was unlikely that anyone outside would find our writing for a while so we were going to comment on each other’s work. So anyone in the class could submit a piece of work and/or comment on other people’s work. I emphasised to the class teachers that commenting was as important as publishing. After this brief introduction, I spent about 20 minutes with a small group of pupils who learned how to blog and comment and would pass on these skills.

The project would run for four weeks to see how well it worked. The teachers and pupils were left with instructions on how to use the blog. All the materials can be downloaded here. (You’ll see from the instructions that I used different blogging software at the time. After attending a Masterclass course on new technology, I could see the WordPress was a more flexible system than the one I was using so I moved all the blogs onto that system.)

The four week period was bedevilled with problems. Most schools were closed for 2 or 3 days because of heavy snow, schools were closed because of a strike by local authority workers and our aberNET site which hosted the blogs was running very slowly because of server problems. Despite all that, we had 44 posts, 168 comments from nearly 100 different contributors and over 2000 views of the posts. I felt this showed that this kind of project could work. I was particularly pleased with the number of comments. It was important that everyone who posted received a comment so if there were any without comments after a couple of days of publication, I added a comment myself.

So that’s as far as we’ve gone at the time of writing but what next? I’ll do a brief eveluation (based on the MIICE materials) to see how the teachers and pupils found the project. Then I’ll move on to the next stage which is to see if the sense of audience which blogging provides can actually lead to an improvement in writing.

So far, almost all the posts have been examples of work which already existed and weren’t created especially for the blog. I want now to go back to the schools and try to encourage them to improve on what they’ve already done, taking into account comments which have been made. While few children are likely to do this as noone like going back to a piece of work and revising it, i hope that the children will realise that it is worth spending some time proof reading and perhaps using peer evaluation to ensure that what they post is a refelction of the best that they can do. Now that the project is up and running. other schools may be encouraged to join in or at least start commenting. I also hope to encourage kids to look at the different types of comment which have been made and to develop comments beyond the ‘I liked your story’ level.

Exactly how I’ll do this I’m not sure but I’ll keep you posted.