In term 3 I began a unit of work with each of the three Year 7 classes that involved using blogs and exploring a small range of web2 tools. Naturally, we started off, after a brief discussion, by watching a CommonCraft video.
Having looked and used, to a small degree, edublogs, wikispaces, ning and blogger, I decided to try 21classes as the blogging tool. I liked the way that 21classes offered an overiding way for the teacher to manage and facilitate the student blogs. As well, it offered a class home page that the student blogs used as the ‘parent’ to the blog. Three months later and while I still like those aspects of 21classes, I find that some of the ways of doing things are a bit clunky eg you have to import a video and then link to it, you can’t embed the video. If I was to repeat this program in 2009, I’d be tempted to look for an alternative that still had a two-tiered structure.
Session 1: In this session we talked about blogs and what web2 might be. We discussed the internet as a social networking tool and the boys gave examples of what they were using at home. Some where on MySpace and Facebook or a web-based multi-player game site. We also emphasised the need to keep personal details off of the blogs and why they needed to do so. Before writing their first post, we talked about the need to introduce themselves to their potential audience. Their task was to use Inspiration to make a mind map of ‘things they were passionate about’, to export their map as an image and then to upload it to their blog. Their first post would include this image and would give a little more detail about one of their passions.
If I was doing this again, I would probably try using mywebspiration or mindomo instead of inspiration to keep in the Web2 theme.
Year 7M class home page. Andrew’s ‘About Me’ post (scroll to bottom of link)
Homework or follow-up work in their classroom was to read some of their classmates’ blogs.
One of the rquirements for running the unit was for the classroom teacher to join in with all the tasks just as if they were a student. This worked really well for a number of weeks. Bill’s blog, Francesca’s blog, Clare’s blog.
