A while back Rachel Boyd wrote about a video she has posted on teachertube. It’s called ‘Why Let Our Students Blog?’ and it addresses exactly what the title suggests. Now it doesn’t give lots of lengthy evidence into the benefits of blogging - it’s more an introduction probably designed to inspire and enthuse people about them - but it’s worth a watch and it has certainly given me some useful words to use as I think about why I want to get the children at my school blogging.
The video also, for me, brings up a whole load of questions about the use of teachertube! I suppose it will stick around But it makes me cringe slightly. In the same way that godtube made me cringe. If I ever get round to making any videos I’ll stick to youtube.
The time has arrived. I have my commoncraft video ready to display, I have my links all lined up and ready to use, I have the convincing examples of the publishing of work and the assessment of work that blogging allows and I am ready to tell the others at school all about it.
I am delivering an ICT based staff meeting tomorrow and I am going to use some of the time to talk about blogging. The main idea is that we, as a school, start to celebrate the work that our school does. Blogging will, I hope, enable us to regularly publish work - be it art, recounts, stories, poetry, audio etc - to an audience. Even if that audience is just my mum to start with.
At the staff meeting we’re also going to have a go at using Audacity. So I may not even get on to the blog thing! Audacity is, as most people are now aware, great. You can use it for recording and editing sounds. In my degree days I played quite a bit with audio editing software (such as Cool Edit - now Adobe Audition, cubase and the like) but I never used Audacity. Probably because it was free and it’s not really as good as the others. But it is great! It’s free (did I mention that?!) and it’s easy to use.
I’ll show you what can be done with it after the staff meeting tomorrow! I may even show you how my school starts blogging too. But that all depends on how much fun we have with Audacity.
I’ve mentioned the photography club before haven’t I? Well - I help run the photography club at school. I call it a photography club because we go around taking photos. Which is fun. But I don’t manage to teach the children much about taking good pictures. We tend to just cover the basics.
Anyway. I overheard one of the members of the club chatting away to his group while they were transferring the pictures from the camera to the PC. The boy was using his own camera and he said “Oh - I forgot about that picture. I took it with my phone and then transferred it to my camera so I could bring it in.” Just a passing comment. He thought nothing of it.
How many teaching staff would have been able to say that? It kind of goes a bit of the way to demonstrate how different things are now. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying all the staff at a school should be able to do that. I’m not suggesting we run loads of staff meetings on bluetooth and the latest mobile handset. But it is important that we think about these things. I need a better idea of what the children in my class are capable of and what they actually enjoy doing.
On Thursday this week I think I am doing a staff meeting. As I am the ICT Co-ordinator I will be doing the staff meeting on ICT. They wouldn’t let me talk about anything else. As part of the meeting I am thinking about looking at different web 2.0 things to see if the staff at school can come up with any reasons to use them! I am confident discussing blogs, and podcasts etc. So I thought this evening I would spend a bit of time looking into Wikis.
I’ve set a few freebies up to see if I can make any use of them. Some of them claim to be ad free but you have to prove you are a school before they take the adverts off (fair enough!) Wikis are something I am not too familiar with. I know what they are and I use them often enough but I have never written one or been part of one. It will be interesting to see if we can find a reason to use them at school.
The places I have looked so far have been Wikispaces, PBWiki and Wetpaint. Wikispaces is probably better than wetpaint - it’s cleaner and easier to use (so far!) but the ads are really obvious and I don’t know if there is a free way of getting rid of them. Wetpaint is ok though - a bit messy on the layout front but that’s probably to do with the style I have chosen and the fact I haven’t turned the ads off yet. I’ve not played with PBWiki enough yet but it looks ok - clear layout and no ads but you have to pay for most features.
In my quest to find a reason to use blogging / wikis / etc for educational reasons I have stumbled across Common Craft. They make a video animation series called “… in Plain English”. They describe how to do things in, you guessed it, plain English. They are pretty handy. Not so much for my quest to use this all to teach the kids in my class but a useful place to send people who are new to this kind of thing. The following one is an example - it’s about blogs. And it’s in plain English!
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