My colleague and I recently attended a gathering of like minded educators interested in pushing forth the free technology available on the web to the students in our school.
I am an unqualified ICT Teacher, teaching ICT to children age 3 to 8yrs, I have recently finished a three year study on a BA (hons) degree in Research,Learning and Technology. My colleague is the Business Manager of our large school and holds a Masters.
The other educators in the forum ranged from Secondary School Educators, Primary School Educators and Head Teachers of 'outstanding' schools. All in all, a good mixture of experience and qualities.
Apart from having education as a commonality, we all had enthusiasm, foresight, and passion to equip our children with tools for the 21st century.
The discussion was opened by defining the terminology
- store work
- store results
- record science experiments
- store a photograph album
- animations
The benefit of using on-line store space as opposed to a stored file on a school server is , they can be shared and reviewed by peers, parents, and other children from other schools, either in the UK or a partnership school elsewhere.
By sharing work children become
- self motivated
- take ownership
- their appears purposeful
- develop creativity
We all agreed these ideas were a good basis to introduce a S.T into our schools, Several schools in the forum had already introduced an experimental on-line space, we'll discuss that later.
We learnt that a S.T can be a podcast, an msn address, a scrap blog, a website, or a blogspot.
There were so many options, and as I said before some forum members had used several of these ideas successfully, especially 'blogspot' if you are unsure of this term, it's what you're reading now! a sort of on-line diary, a shared area for common interests, like, stamp collecting, beekeeping, discussing Egyptians, or the Roman empire! it's limitless as you can see, it has so many uses.
Immediately my colleague and I liked this idea we could pro-actively see the journey this option could take our students on. We also thought our colleagues would support this idea and help the school take it forward.
Right then...
We liked this idea, we discussed with the forum questions, which might help clarify understanding for our colleagues back in school...
- Can younger children blog?
- How can we enable collaboration?
- How would we enable creativity?
- Does it need to be task orientated?
- Should it be linked to the schools web site?
- How do others manage the 'blogspot'?
- Who is the administrator?
- How can this be embedded into the planning?
- Is this a useful tool for literacy, science, art?
- How do others learn to critically reflect others work?
So many questions!, we hope we haven't missed any glaringly obvious points out.
As I mentioned before several schools have already started a trial of blogging with year 2 students, they had nothing negative to support why children in year 1 couldn't have a go.
When we introduce a blog, this might be done as a class project.
The ICT suite lesson might be used as an introduction to blogging this might include correct language, ethics and peer review. The class might then go on to design their first blog.
The class could design the page together, I might take them through the simple steps as I have done today, obviously with the help of the class Teacher as facilitator. Photos could be downloaded from a camera used in a specific lesson i.e growing. The children may decide to follow the progress of the seeds by using a on-line diary recording each days events. Children could log on at home or in the school library recording their thoughts on the progress of the plants. Others may then wish to comment on what others have written. ( remember spelling is not important!)
Some children may wish to scan pictures they have drawn or painted onto the blog, maybe adding a sentence telling the audience how they created it. Others might like to upload a short video of their friends talking about growing plants.
The creativity is endless!
Many children go on trips locally, children may like to design a blog for others to visit, they might like to add entries about what they did on the trip and what their favorite activity was.
Most parents visit a schools website for information regarding holidays, letters home etc, so linking the blog to an area on the website may be beneficial for the school, as children logging on to access the blog may see an important notice they have missed!
Class Teachers will need to be on board for the whole of this journey as they, of course are the educators!
This idea can only be taken forward with the teachers support, they need to decide together how they can make the change happen.
Teachers need to liaise with the ICT Coordinator who might take on the role of 'blog-master', this would require them to proof read all posts prior to publishing.
Therefor the class teacher is free to design, set tasks and answer blog posts knowing the ICT person is checking for unacceptable use etc.
A possible 'training course' for the children could be implemented as part of their regular ICT lesson, the session could be used to introduce acceptable use and web awareness.
A similar training course could be ran for all educators in the school, this could be implemented during a staff training session. During this session it could be decided which areas of the curriculum would most benefit from this type of interaction.
The educators attending the forum have used blogspots for all subjects, form Science to R.E, many educators used the blog as a way to put closure to the lesson and to introduce the homework linked to the subject. i.e by posting a question or posing a problem.
