Learning, Teaching and ICT

My local authority are now keen to promote blogging with pupils. I wrote about this in a previous post, and some recent events have indicated some ways that they intend to take this forward.

1. Our ICT support team have been visiting some schools in order to make a video about good uses of ICT. On Tuesday of last week, it was my turn. I didn’t really know what to expect and, apart from looking out a ‘posh frock’, I didn’t have anything prepared. Malcolm and Jane turned up with some fancy looking cameras and asked me just to talk about my use of blogs and wikis with the class. I spoke for maybe 20 mins or so, referring to the blogs and wikis shown in the whiteboard beside me. It will all get edited down to about a 2 minute slot in the finished video. I’ve included most of what my ‘ramblings’ consisted of here:

• I began by talking about our set up generally, referring to the main class blog and the various pages that take visitors to our individual blogs, a wikispace we shared with AllStars in Australia, our pbwikis and our links to the children from last year’s class
• I explained that the class blog was where we posted general news about the things we’ve been getting up to, as well as a place to share what the pupils have been writing about in their individual blogs
• This session, I’ve tried to give the children a sense of ownership over their blogs. I didn’t want to use them as an ICT time activity, where they’d be asked to write a post about what they’ve been up to. Instead, I wanted to give them a space where they could have a voice in a supported online environment
• Safety is very important, a page containing our ‘blogging rules’ is embeded in each individual blog
• The children have personalised their blogs by choosing their own themes and creating avatars using online sites such as weeworld or voki
• Using programmes such as photostory3 along with sites such as photobucket can make their posts come alive! In the example below, the children are reading from, or describing, their favourite books 
• Links with home are strengthened by using oportunities such as this one. The children took home their mp3’s and found an older person in their family to interview so that they could experience a sense of ‘the past’ before beginning our WW2 topic. In an earlier topic on writing our autobiographies, the children interviewed parents about their early years
• Learning has become more ‘child led’. For example, read this post to learn how the posts on the children’s individual blogs led us into our ‘world of work’ series of interviews. The children have been learning to devise ‘open questions’ for our visitors. There are also opportunities for follow-up report writing and thank-you letters
• Miss Law was with is for almost 10 weeks and she summed up what blogging with the class it meant to her. She wrote: Before joining 7V I would never have dreamed of having a blog but it’s been great. I know I haven’t written many posts, as I have not had the time, but I’ve loved reading everyone elses. It has allowed me to get to know the class really well.

 ………… and I could have went on… and on… and on

2. I’ve been asked to provide some CPD courses on blogging next month. There will be 3 twighlight sessions beginning on the 30th April. This is new territory for me, but I know there’s lots of help out there. For example, posts such as this one will be very useful. The new Open Source CPD wiki set up by John will also be a great help … and a great resource for any interested teachers who sign up for the blogging sessions. I know there’s lots more out there, too (and if anyone has any advice … get in touch!)

Last weekend, I made the decision to move the class individual blogs away from learnerblogs over to edublogs. Recently there was an announcement in the edublogs support blog:

‘Here’s some pretty big news… Edublogs.org is now open only for teachers but also for students of all descriptions.

Previously we’ve hosted three other sites – uniblogs.org, learnerblogs.org and eslblogs.org for students but we decided a few weeks ago that this is both overly complex and limits what teachers can do with their students through their blog on Edublogs.org.

Uniblogs.org, Learnerblogs.org and Eslblogs.org will remain in operation indefinitely but we won’t be allowing new signups to them ……..”

It may have been a coincidence, but around about the same time, the pupils’ learnerblogs started receiving some spam comments. I’d set the blogs up using the ‘gmail+’ trick described in this previous post. The comments get sent to my email address, and the children moderate them themselves. Last Friday, however, a comment appeared on the class blog from a pupil to say that an inappropriate comment was awaiting moderation. The conversations can be viewed here. The pupils know that I can also log in to their blogs as a co-administrator.

 I had just finished reading the terrible news about Al Upton’s class blogs when all this was taking place. I made a decision to close down the pupil’s blog (at least I copied and pasted all her posts before taking the ‘one way trip’!). I also erased another pupil’s blog where there had been a previous spam comment noticed. It was a rushed decision and the next morning I decided to create new edublogs for the pupils. This was quite a simple job using the new blog and user creator.

Last Monday, we spent our computer time exporting all information from the learnerblogs accounts and importing it into the new edublogs accounts. It was a simple process and the children managed to do this themselves. They left a short goodbye message on their old blogs and provided a link to their new blogs.

Our next job is to activate the ‘Akismet’ spam key required to deal with spam comments. I’ve had this installed in the class blog and have had over 1000 comments deleted as spam……. and I still need to replace links on the class blog.

The best things to come out of the experience was the fact that all the children made it quite clear how much the appreciate the fact that they have their own blog

 In a previous post, I wrote about the children’s online identities:-

In her email to me, Jackie’s thoughts included:

•  the idea of exploring the area of gendered representations of identity

She was referring to the children’s use of ‘weemees‘ to represent themselves.

This weekend I came across a book edited by David Buckingham entitled: Youth, Identity and Digital Media via this website. In the section Introducing Identity, David Buckingham adds his contribution. I’ve incuded ’snipits’ here:

• Identity is an ambiguous and slippery term. It has been used—and perhaps overused—in many different contexts and for many different purposes, particularly in recent years.
• Susannah Stern’s discussion of young people’s online authorship of blogs and home pages suggests that this activity can provide important opportunities for self-reflection and self-realization, and for expressing some of the conflicts and crises that characterize this period. Some of the young people whom she discusses explicitly see adolescence as an “in-between stage,” in which they are consciously seeking future directions in their lives.
• The extent to which all social interaction is a kind of performance. ……… The issue of performance is also very relevant to the ways in which young people construct identities, for example, via the use of avatars, e-mail signatures, IM nicknames, and (in a more elaborate way) in personal homepages and blogs.

The children in p7v enjoyed creating vokis. Some have embeded them in their sidebars. I’ve included an example here.

Another example can be seen on Fraser’s Blog

Below is an example of a 3D avatar some of the pupils have been playing around with.

More from David Buckingham’s contribution:

• Rebekah Willett, for example, looks at how girls’ online play with dressing up dolls raises questions about body image …
•  Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell also address questions of gender and ethnicity, looking at how the markers of positive identities can be quite subtly coded in young people’s online expressions…….. 

• Simply keeping pace with the range of young people’s engagements with digital media is an increasingly daunting task.  
• Even so, our hope for this book is that the theme of identity will provide a useful lens through which to view particular aspects of young people’s relations with digital media more clearly.

I believe that having the freedom to personalise their own blogs is an important motivational factor for the pupils in my class. Recently, I decided to move the children’s individual blogs away from ‘learnerblogs’ and over to ‘edublogs’. This was a safety decision (I’ll put on a post to explain the reasoning behind this decision soon!). I contemplated reducing their set roles from administrator to editor until I discovered that this would mean that they would no longer have access to the different themes available.

Customising their own spaces has allowed them to share their online identity with their audience. Courtney recently posted to her new blog (she uses ‘text’ speech in her blog). I’ve included part of it here:

‘……I would like to say soz to everyone who Read’s ma blog for not doin task a week but ma other pages are @ da side now not da top We have just moved blog so I’m a bit higglty pigglty write Now…………’

Denying them the opportunity to put their own stamp on their new blogs was not an option  

Miss Law has been with us for almost 10 weeks. She added a post to her blog today. She said:

This week was a really funny week. Wednesday was horrible and then Thursday was really strange as well. It reminded me of things when I was at school. I hope it made everyone realise how much effort is put into making each day at school as enjoyable as possible!

 I’ve just been on my google reader and Russell’s post made me laugh. If I knew how to put a link to it I would.

Here’s the link to Russell’s blog post..  RUSSELL’S POST

His post made me smile, too.

The ‘horrible Wednesday’ referred to by Miss Law was one of those days that we’ve all experienced. Things had got out of hand in the classroom and they quickly deteriorated into a place where nobody wanted to be! Miss Law had planned some ’active learning’ activities and P7V were just not in the mood to ‘engage’.

I interviened and devised the ’strange Thursday’ mentioned in Miss Law’s post…..text books, silence, hands up to speak - no voices allowed! It was a very strange and boring experience for all involved

By Friday, we had all agreed that this was not the way we wanted our class to be. We wanted to go back to the usual interactive classroom ethos.

The moment that the agreement was reached, Russell’s first request was, ‘Can I go and post something on my blog?’- he doesn’t blog very often!  He wrote

celebrate good times come on!!! 

YES!!!        We are back doing co-operative learning    YES!!!

We were sitting right there in front of him …. but he chose to express this thought online via his blog.

More reflection soon

While researching for my Literature Review, I came across a copy of the Learning and Teaching Scotland  online magazine. The Connected 10 Magazine had a special feature which brought together 5 articles each focusing on different aspects of online communities. I had come across of the authors in a previous Chartered Teacher module entitled ‘Introducing E-Learning, E-Teaching and E-Assessment’.

The first one is an article by Dr Gilly Salmon.

With colleagues, she has researched the key success factors in enabling happy and successful online communities of practice and has built a model of what to expect.

Here’s her description of the model:

The model has five stages, each of which acts as a ’scaffold’ to the next. Individual access and the ability of participants to use the online environment are essential prerequisites for participation at stage one, at the base of the flights of steps. Stage two involves individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact, a form of ‘online socialisation’. At stage three, participants give information and receive information freely. The success of communication depends on the establishment of common understandings at stages one and two. Up to and including stage three, a form of cooperation occurs, i.e. support for each person’s goals. At stage four, group discussions occur and the interaction becomes more collaborative and the knowledge generated more applied and constructed. Interaction for online knowledge construction gets to the heart of what most participants consider important. They feel intuitively that knowledge is not just about data or information but is much richer and broader and is linked with personal experience in complex ways. At stage five, participants look for more benefits from the system to help them achieve personal goals, explore how to integrate online working into other forms of learning and reflect on the learning processes.

During the Chartered Teacher module, we were asked to evaluate where our own schools were on the model.

Now, if I apply the same thinking and place our class online community on the model, we’re probably at stage 3? …… I’m referring to those pupils who choose to be actively involved in blogging.

Dr Salmon goes on to say that:

We find that everyone needs human support to take part successfully in online communities. I give the name ‘e-moderator’ to this person since, although some of the skills are the same as those of group facilitators, there are some new ones too. The e-moderator’s role in such rich and interactive environments is both rewarding and demanding!

E-moderators need to give very explicit attention to enabling and promoting all aspects of online socialisation. To succeed in fully engaging the participants and promoting their active involvement, imaginative and creative images will be needed! Energies can to be harnessed towards the shared enterprise and purposefulness of the learning community. In a sense, e-moderators create a special little cultural experience belonging to this group at this time through discussion and negotiation.

For the past 10 weeks or so, there’s been a 4th year B’ed student in class. Miss Law has had a lot of responsibility for the class (a fine job has been done, too!), and I’ve taken more of a ‘back seat’. On reflection, I think I’ve subconsciously become an e-moderator!

• I’ve tried to make sure that there have been lots of posts made on Our class blog, and that many of these posts have linked to the children’s posts.
• I also created My ‘Learnerblog’ in an attempt to show by example ….. I find this difficult
• Recently, I also made use of a new edublogs facility by trialing our forums section of the blog  …… I even got permission to become a supporter so that we can have more than one forum (I’ll find the time soon to get round to actually using this great facility!)
• Miss Law’s contributions to our blogging community have helped as well … the children are very sad that she’s leaving soon, but are very aware that they’ll be able to keep in touch through their blogs.
• I’ve also made more of an effort to catch some time with the children to point out the great contributions to their wikis. I need to spend more time helping them to organise their front pages …. it’s not immediadely obvious how much work is in there! The writing that has been done recently, has been by the children in their spare time at home. For example, check out Bethany’s great story here  and Maryam’s playscript

   The second article in the Connected magazine was by Linda Lafferty and is entitled Everything in Moderation     . Linda was my online tutor for a number of my Chartered Teacher modules …. and I can vouch for her great ability to moderate online (and I suspect that everyone on the course would echo that!).

Linda wrote:

To develop an online community requires a more student-centred approach with the tutor transforming into a facilitator from ’sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.

It is my belief that potential moderators should be introduced to the subtleties of online facilitation from the perspective of first becoming an online learner, thus enabling them to actually feel and experience the myriad of online processes which provide them with the whole picture. How else can you develop and properly hone the almost ’sixth sense’ you need to be able to read your participants’ requirements online – tuning in to the subtleties and nuances and reading what is not being said?

She goes on to say:

As every online event and community is unique, you never moderate the same things in the same way – it really does put the fun back into teaching and learning and keeps you on your ‘virtual toes’.

Yes …… it does!!!!!!!

…. And now I understand what Ewan meant when he commented way back when I started this blog. He said:

The notion of work patterns seems to correlate to the traditional classroom’s ‘routines’. If an online community is going to be successful people always need a reason to go back to it. This is where routines and regular ’special events’ help people have that kick into action in those parts of the course where motivation begins to flag. Is this what your tutor means?

After contemplating some advice, I replied to his comment. I said:

…. I’m interested in Ewan’s notion that ’special events’ should be provided to motivate pupils to return to the ‘online environment’ – I’d thought of taking a ‘back seat’ now that the class have their own spaces and just watch to see what happens?

Recent events have made me think again ….. constantly reflecting

Girls and young woman are now the most prolific web users

The internet began as an almost exclusively male preserve. Now young women, from primary school age upwards, are now making it their own

This is the claim made in the The Times Online . The article goes on to say that ….

‘A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of “super-communicators”. Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys. ‘

I have spent some time on Google Reader having a look at the blog posts by my class over the last month. Here’s the breakdown:

• There were 73 blog posts by girls and 7 posts by boys
• the 73 ‘girl’ posts were made by 12 different girls (the biggest contribution from an individual was 20 posts, most contributed between 5 and 8 posts, a few have only put on 1 or 2 posts)
• the 7 ‘boy’ posts were made by 5 of the boys. One boy contributed 3 posts, the others contributed 1 each

I haven’t yet analysed the types of posts.

I also checked my class gmail account where the comments arrive for moderation. Altogether in the same period there were 128 comments. I know that quite a few of the  children leave comments on the AllStars individual blogs, but I’ve no easy way of  gathering this information … maybe Kim could help

Here’s the breakdown for the Comments information that I do have:

• 100 of the comments were made on the girls’ blogs
• 28 of the comments were made on the boys’ blogs
• of the 28 comments made on the boys’ blogs, 8 were made by boys (and 3 of those were by AllStars’ boys)

More from The Times article :

“If you look at young girls, they do more communicating than young boys and that’s what they are doing on the web,” said Professor Anthony White, a lecturer in the school of computing science at Middlesex University. “It’s just natural for them.”

Professor White reports that in the computer courses he teaches at Middlesex University,  women are beginning to outperform men.

He is also quoted as saying:

‘In actual fact [the courses] are oriented towards what women like doing. They just don’t know that before they enrol. The last time I checked the figures, female students were doing better than men in the courses’

Thanks to John for his great post that helped me find this article through ScotEdublogs news. I now have the site added to my Google Reader account