I’ve got myself in a blogging tangle. We’ve created a blog for our Glow mentors and I’m posting on there and on here. If you want to read some thoughts on SETT06, read here.

“There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.” - James Thurber.

Recently I’ve spent more time talking about blogging than actually blogging. We’ve had meetings with ICT co-ordinators and head teachers to update them on developments within the city and blogging was discussed there. I’ve talked to P7 pupils at Muirfield School about their blog. We’ve held meetings with the new Glow (glow? GLOW?) mentors and blogging was discussed there. In fact, we set up a new blog for the mentors to discuss issues surrounding the implementation of SSDN/Glow.

As I’ve been talking about Glow, I’ve been becoming more enthusiastic. The initial sell from LTS was that we’d have a lot of resources to use but I think it will take some time before the resources build up to a useful collection and, anyway, many teachers will reach retirement before they give control of a lesson over to a VLE.

I think the most immediate benefit will be GlowGroups and the various collaborative tools which will allow all sorts of sharing of ideas and expertise throughout Scotland.

It now looks like the various functions of Glow will be phased in rather than all appearing at once. In some ways this will lessen the impact but it should also mean that teachers can get used to one function before moving on to the next.

Let’s have illumination, not glare.

Typically of an educational project, I started with clear ideas, changed them halfway through and didn’t end up with what I expected.

I’d become interested in blogging in the autumn of 2005 when I came across the Sandaig Otters site and reading some posts on the Masterclass forums.

Weblogs, or blogs as they’re more commonly known, are essentially just a list of entries in reverse chronological order, rather like a diary, which is available on the web. The strengths of a blog, compared to a website, are that entries (or posts as they are called) can be put up very quickly and that there is the opportunity for others to comment.

I thought that the ability to comment on pieces of writing could be valuable in the classroom. Blogging could offer an opportunity for children to put examples of their writing on the web and receive comments (hopefully constructive) which would encourage them to continue with, and improve, their writing.

I looked at a variety of different school blogs and one of the obvious problems was that it was quite difficult to find an audience for posts. There are so many sites out there that it is very difficult for bloggers to get regular comments. If, as I believed, comments were one of the most important features of blogging, this was a problem!

I tried out a few different blogging systems on our Authority webspace. All were free and generally easy to set up and use so I was happy that children and teachers would have no technical difficulties.

As I had no regular access to classes myself, I needed a project which would be attractive to teachers and would require no special skills of the participants. If different schools both posted work and commented, the burden of work would be shared. More importantly, this arrangement would provide an immediate audience who could respond to posts so we wouldn’t have to rely on ‘outside’ commentators.

Schools were contacted and Primary 7 classes were invited to take part. I asked for 3 schools to be involved over a 4 week period with the aim of finding whether pupils found the blogging software easy to use and motivating and whether teachers found the idea worthwhile.

In the end, 8 schools asked to participate. I visited them, discussed the idea with teachers and children and left clear written instructions on how to blog. The teacher controlled access and all posts and comments were moderated by me. This ensured that half completed work was no accidentally posted and that no mischievous comments appeared. As it turned out, hardly any moderation was required.

At the end of the 4 week period

• 44 pieces of writing were posted
• 169 comments were made by 92 different people
• the blogs were viewed 2211 times

The blogs can be found here.

I was very happy with the result. The comments were encouraging and the children found them motivating. Teachers were very positive about the experience and some children had begun their own personal blogs.

Here’s an example of a post:

Amy age 11

Haiku

Fuji erupting
Dribbling red spicy liquid
Flickering death sparks.

In normal circumstances, the largest audience for Amy’s work would probably have been her classmates, but, because of the blog, the audience was worldwide. Here is one of the comments she received:

Amy,

This is a lovely haiku. I especially like the last line, “Flickering death sparks.”
I immediately envisioned what a volcanic eruption would look like at night.

Keep up the good work!

M.Deare
Memphis, Tennessee

It was clear that blogging was easy and motivating, but did it improve writing? Much of the work that was posted had been written before the project began so wasn’t influenced by the project. One aspect that did concern me was the lack of proofreading as several posts contained glaring errors. I decided to change the focus of the project and ask classes to concentrate on quality of writing.

Before the second phase began, I attended a Masterclass New Technologies course which gave me lots of new ideas about blogging and how it might be used in the classroom. The contacts made there have proved invaluable.

The software used for the blogs was changed to WordPress, one of the most popular blogging tools and revised advice was sent to schools. Unfortunately, only a couple of schools were able to continue with the project at this time of the term so posts and comments slowed down. Another school joined in after an outline of the project was presented at a seminar at SETT in Aberdeen 2006.

Unfortunately, this class found that there was no longer much of an audience as only a couple of schools remained in the project and they started complaining that they were posting but no-one was commenting. I posted a plea for comments on this blog and this was picked up and echoed on Ewan McIntosh’s popular blog . The comments then flooded in from all over the world. The class were delighted with the response and mapped where all their comments were coming from.

This class decided that blogging was good fun and would be good for their school. As they were about to leave for secondary school, they trained Primary 6 pupils and set up a blog of their own .

By the end of the second phase

• 144 pieces of writing were posted
• 554 comments were made by 209 different people

Despite all the positive outcomes, the aim to improve writing wasn’t achieved. In order to that, there would have to be a much more organised approach to encourage proofreading and give more guidance on how to structure constructive comments. I hope to pursue this, perhaps with secondary pupils.

So what was learned from this project?

• Blogging software is easy to set up and use.
• Children really enjoy receiving comments on their work from strangers.
• Time for blogging can easily be incorporated into the primary classroom.
• Posts and comments can be easily moderated.
• Blogging has the potential to motivate and encourage children’s writing.

A project with no costs, no special resources, which was enjoyed by all the participants and which developed new skills – what more could you want?

More information on the project can be found at

http://www.abernet.org.uk/wp/

http://andywatson.edublogs.org/

Information on blogging and links to school blogs are in a MOODLE course at

http://www.abernet.org.uk/courses/

A list of Scottish education blogs can be found at

http://scotedublogs.wikispaces.com/

The WordPress setup for Muirfield blogs which is hosted on aberNET used to take a long time to start from the login screen - over 2 minutes at times.

I found a simple solution at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/59911 which involved editing one of the WordPress files.

This stops WordPress trying to load in 3 RSS feeds so now everything works as it should.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about internet censorship - see the BBC for an example. This made me think yet again about the censorship of the Internet which schools willingly participate in when they use filtering to block access to unsuitable sites.

I don’t suggest that we stop doing this. In our cultural and legal climate we have little choice and anyway few of us would want children to access some of the darker corners of the web.

However, because we filter we think that everything’s OK. It’s OK until the child goes home and then, in the majority of homes, Internet access is unfiltered and unsupervised and they have to deal with the ‘dark side’ alone.

We have to find a way of protecting children while still educating them in ways of avoiding the worst and dealing with it when it appears.

The new SQA Internet safety qualification  deals with many problematical aspects of internet use such as viruses, spyware, copyright, phishing, etc but does not (and could not) deal with what worries parents most - exposure to pornographic and violent imagery.

Apart from this obvious area, there is a great deal more that children require support with - divulging personal information online, combatting online bullying, separating the true from the fanciful and misleading, etc.

If schools can’t show children how to use the internet efficiently and safely, they will be putting children at risk because of this omission. We need to get to grips with this issue sooner rather than later.

It’s a good morning for connections. I’ve been going through my Bloglines feeds and came across a blog from David Muir which pointed me to a blog written in March by David Warlick. The blog was an introduction to a podcast which I haven’t listened to yet but was a discussion inspired by a short video. This is an 8 minute video set in the year 2014 which describes how web interactivity might affect news and our attitude to news. I enjoyed it and I think it could be used as a good discussion starter with older pupils.

I’m looking forward to listening to the podcast of the discussion but I’m off to battle through the long grass to get the mower from the garage.

I picked up an interesting article “What’s the 1% rule?”  when reading through John Connell’s blog. Essentially, the article states that in general 1% of a group will create content, 10% will interact with it by commenting, etc and the other 89% will just view it. In fact, my own experience with trying to get teachers to contribute resources for aberNET is that I’d be very glad if 1% of users contributed. In the last year the site has had almost 600,000 visits, most of which were made to download resources,  but only a handful of people have volunteered resources.

Despite teachers’ increasing familiarity with the web, faster internet connections and more interactive content being available, they do not seem willing or able to break through the barriers which prevent them from sharing ideas or resources with others. It may be that the mechanisms to make this easy aren’t there yet and that SSDN will help, but I think that the problem is more to do with the attitudes of teachers than the available technology.

Many teachers still feel that they are expected to know most things most of the time. As we can’t, it is easy to feel insecure about our own capabilities. While most teachers know more about most things than most of their pupils, they feel that other teachers will spot their weaknesses. As long as teachers try to be the only source of skills and knowledge in the classroom this attitude will persist.

The connections that SSDN will bring might encourage teachers to see that sharing ideas, thoughts, resources and experiences will benefit everyone.

I hope that we can reach the stage where 1% of teachers contributes and 10% interact.

What is TeachMeet06?

Learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused. This is an informal gathering of those curious about technologies.
Anyone can share cool ideas they have or great ideas they’ve triallled in their classrooms. Join us in person or via Skype.
We want things that have succeeded and which have failed. Whatever it takes to further the knowledge of the education community.

More details 

A few blogs ago I wrote about a school which had complained about lack of comments and the excellent response they had.

This has encouraged the school to start their own blog. The present primary 7 have, in their last week at school, started the Muirfield School blog. They have spoken about the blog at a school assembly and on the last day of the term (tomorrow) they are going to train next year’s primary 7 class how to run the blog so that it will continue after the holiday. the present primary 7 kids hope to make guest appearances on the blog describing their experences when they start secondary school.

A free service at Feedo.com creates HTML to display your blog posts on a web site. It’s simple to use but if you want any extras they have to be paid for. I’ve used it on the fromt page of www.abernet.org.uk.