Transformation Teachers Programme

I’ve been trying a different method of getting the students to post on the Gothic – up until now, I’ve set tasks on the class blog and asked students to respond on their own blogs.  This was effective for wider reading ‘portfolios’ but a bit of a faff for students to go in and out of each other’s blogs and post comments.  So as we’re all now studying the same text as a class, I’ve been posting a task on the main page and asking them to reply in a comment.  I did it once and they all said it was much more helpful – we got them up on the whiteboard and discussed them at the start of the lesson but wouldn’t have needed to. 

 So I’ve done it again and this time I’m trying to encourage them to ask questions and respond to each other’s comments – that way the later commenters can’t just be lazy and copy ideas from others – they have to engage with them.  And the early posters should also be posing some questions for them.  We’ll see if it works – watch this space!

Today I did a short (well, possibly not short enough – I think I over-ran a bit!) presentation on my experiences on the TTP, my action research on blogs and what directions I’m now taking to introduce colleagues in school to the potential of blogging.  It was a really interesting day, with some fascinating discussions on people’s different experiences of using ICT in education and people’s ‘critical incidents’ in changing their thinking about technologies, or inspiring them on the road to using technologies.  I was really interested to see what David Townsend was doing at Greensward school with integrated use of ICT and genuine personalised learning platforms as part of that.

For anyone reading this from the course, I’ve added more links to blogs on the right – mine and colleagues’.  If you go to Sue Kambalu’s blog, it also has a whole wealth of links, both in her blogroll and on this post.  Do post a comment on here if you have any questions about blogging, how to use it with students, etc.

I think the presentation will be available on the MirandaNet site shortly, though I’m not sure where.  I’m going to attempt to attach it to this post as well, though I haven’t attached any files before, so it may not work!

What Works Where PowerPoint

I’m also making a belated new year’s resolution to post on this blog more often about what I’ve been doing.  Here’s hoping that doesn’t go the way of other resolutions I made this year!

Phew!  I’ve spent so much time preparing and admisistering my new student blogs, I haven’t had time to blog about them – though I’ve wanted to as it’s been such an interesting process.  I now have 2 blogs up and running: http://thegothic.edublogs.org and http://themonologue.edublogs.org.  These are for A level students, and each student has set up their own blog, which has a link from the main blog in the sidebar.  Setting up the blogs initially was frustrating, as edublogs were doing a big upgrade and that meant that the server was often down just when I wanted to have a lesson with the laptops where everyone set up their blog together!  But we got them going, and most student were excited about them, though it was interesting to find a couple of students who seemed to get very frustrated with the technology very quickly.  One amazed me by saying she didn’t use Myspace or anything, and only read emails on hotmail, didn’t send them.  She was totally put off by the whole process, but has now done a couple of good posts and seems more confident.  I’m definitely glad I’ve used this period to get it set up and to start setting tasks, as I’m confident they’ll all know what they’re doing by the summer break.

A couple of interesting observations from reading and commenting on student blog tasks this weekend:

• the process of ‘marking’ work so publicly is really interesting, as it makes me really reflect on how I mark.  It’s a very different process and I find that, rather than correcting work, I’m ‘discussing’ it – as if I was discussing and developing an idea with a student in the classroom.  In that sense, the feedback is more discursive and collaborative – more of a sharing of ideas rather than a judgement.  This is because it’s very ‘public’ and I want to post comments that students will be happy to have on their blogs for others to see.  That doesn’t mean I don’t correct mistakes where I feel they’re glaring – but it does mean I think more carefully about that.  So it has the added effect of making my marking more positive.
• This discursive element means that ideally students will have a record of a sharing of opinions when they come to look back on these for revision – soemthing that usually gets lost in the classroom, unless students have very good memories. This potentially makes the blogs quite powerful tools for revision.
• I’ve put a big stress on the importance of comments.  Some students aren’t there yet, but this is developing and I think has the potential to be the most important aspect.  Many started with comments of the ‘yeah lol, really love ur blogin keep it up’ variety!  Most are now progressing to more specific comments – one from this weekend says, “i like the idea of the secret garden too and i never thought of beauty and the beast, you’re actualy right.”  Not earth-shattering but more specific in that it picks up on a detail in the post.  The best comments are already managing to be positive and specific in a more detailed way – for example, “Interesting analysis! Good point about the personification of Medusa’s thoughts, I didn’t pick up on this when I was analysing. I agree with the fact that Duffy is very creative in the way that she writes, i like her too.” Similarly, from another student, “This is a really good analysis! I really like your point about the rhyming in Eurydice and I actually don’t think it’s far-fetched. I agree, I think that Duffy’s creativity is great and the way she puts interesting twists on things is unique.”  I’ll keep posting about whether the quality of these comments continues to improve as I think it’s the hardest element to get right but potentially the most powerful.

I’ve been playing with my blog some more, and have the following questions for anyone that knows how to answer them:

1. I’ve belatedly added categories, but can’t find a way to attach previous posts to them, short of going to each one, clicking edit, waiting 3 million years for it to load up, then attaching it.  Is there an easier way?

2. I want to add links, for example to other people’s blogs, but also to flickr and podbean etc.  I went into ‘widgets’ and added links to the di