Category Archive

Both Chris Betcher and John Pearce recently blogged about the achievement of reaching the “tipping point” - that is, when the number of comments on your blog meets the number of posts you’ve written. Now both the beforementioned educators are far more proficient and successful bloggers than my humble self, so suffice to say I have much further to go to match their achievement (and writing more and more posts is simply stacking the odds even more against me).

What happens, however, when your blog starts off completely in the opposite direction of most; with more comments than posts. Such is the case with the newly launched blog of UK comedian/actor/author/lover of all things high-tech Stephen Fry. His first uber-post (and I mean uber; the thing is huge! I thought I could write a lot!), Devices and Desires has, at the time of my posting, 161 comments! Now, clearly the gentlemen’s celebrity would help him to attract an audience, but this is a phenomenal start for any blogger.

I take my hat off to him. My congratulations on a successful (if not perhaps a little verbose) start to blogging. I don’t think he’ll ever have to worry about the tipping point that the rest of us will mark the true participatory value of our blogs by.

photo credit: Laura Ward

Well, today I had some more success, despite the multiple interruptions to the usual classroom routine over the past seven days (a third of the day gone three times isn’t always easy to work through).

The simple task involved using the Activstudio software that came with our interactive whiteboard to drop shapes onto the flipchart pages and use the line tools to mark the lines of symmetry.  Some other features of the software also got tested by the students - the bucket fill was used on shapes and backgrounds.   I intended in a way to be a simple diagnostic assessment to see if children could already identify axes of symmetry and how much work would be needed, if any (the recent interruptions have meant there’s less time to properly address our learning in 2D space).

So one maths group got the task done, and quite well.  Yet the mind was still ticking.  “Let’s get this up on the blog”, I thought.  “There must be some kind of export function.”  Sure enough, I found I could export the flipcharts to flash.  A bit more fiddling (needed to get a host for the flash files as they won’t upload to learnerblogs), and we’ve embedded the students’ work into posts on our class blog (post 1, post 2).

So, what have we achieved today?

• We’ve integrated technology into our mathematics lesson
• My students have used our interactive whiteboard for learning
• We have work samples
• We’ve been able to assess what the children know about axes of symmetry
• Our parents can see what their children can do - simple reporting in less than 24 hours!

Now tomorrow, I’ll have to get some of the children to visit the principal to share their work with him and how they’ve used our new interactive whiteboard.  He’s just going to love it!

Here I go again trying to get a move on with maintaining my own blog.  It seems to be the thing I get around to last every time.

The fact is, there are so many things I want to comment somewhere about, that I should simply get straight on to blog to make my thoughts known.

As far as blogs go, I’ve been too busy keeping up with things on my school’s learning technology blog, Technoblog, to worry about my own; and you can see a little gimmic or two that I’ve been trying out on it, like the Clustr map.

Maybe updating posts will be easier with this new tool.  I’m giving it my first go on the Flock web browser.  I was alerted to this new browser by reading a post on Chris Betcher’s Blog.  I’ve also been listening to Chris’ podcast, The Virtual Staffroom, which I would highly recommend.

Anyway, Chris Betcher posted on Flock, which integrates Web 2.0 tools into the browser itself.  Now Firefox had already started this by extensions for del.icio.us and the like.  But with Flock, you’ll find the tools within your browser to post pictures straight up to Flickr.  You can also type up a blog post in a little window, click on the publish button, and up your post goes!  A copy of the post is also then saved on your hard drive.

Well, if you can read this post, then it works!  An interesting experiment… I wonder if we’ll ever see these tools pop up in future versions of Internet Explorer (if they do, it’ll probably be only to Microsoft-owned photo sharing and blogging products)?

P.S. My restart stalled! Silly me tries to publish a post while edublogs is under maintenance.  So you’ll see this up there once they’re up and going again, and when I re-open Flock and publish this post.

Blogged with Flock

Our class blog is continuing with great success. We’re now starting to get a few comments which is really good, especially for those students who need encouragement. I gave some students time the other day to just go back and see that they’d received comments and that someone had read their work.

We’ve also had a quite significant expansion. Our reading groups in the class each have a blog now where I post each week and the students respond in a comment. In the post I give a few questions to help guide the response.

I’m trialling it with the hope that it can take the “reading response” many of us teachers do in readers circle to another level. Effectively, the written reading response is a two-way communication, between the student and the teacher, who serves as their audience. With the blog comment, students can not only respond to me as teacher, but to each other. Some of my students looking for a challenge have already begun reading each other’s comments on the book and posting additional comments in response to what their children are writing. I just need to work with them a little more on structuring this to engender a fuller “on-line conversation”, rather than sticking simply to “I said that too”, “Good idea”, and similar closed responses.

Another challenge all this blogging brings about (even with each student only blogging once a week about their book) is the information overload it’s already creating. I look at the comments at the moment and wonder how I can keep track of all the spelling and grammatical errors that are appearing and address them all. I think a first step is for them to write a comment in a word processor first, spell check it, then copy it into the blog comment. If they were writing a post, they would have access to spell check, but not when they comment. I suppose I’m not so worried about the errors if over the months to come we start to see an improvement. Perhaps it would be good to have an electronic record of students’ progress in re-reading and self-editing their writing.

Anyway, we’ll see how we go. Now we just have to start on the wiki!

Firstly, my apologies for being so long in getting back to the blog.  I had just got this one started when I got caught up in another blog, then another blog, and it all started getting out of control! Read the rest of this entry »