My class of year 5′s and 6′s in Auckland have been blogging for a while on our own class blog http://ithinksummerland.blogpsot.com so it was quite a learning curve for us to move from blogspot layout and editing to WordPress. We did have quite a bit of trouble adding children as editors for the blog and next time I shall use our generic email instead of some of them using their own personal ones.
Once the basics of editing and adding widgets was understood by them and me we managed quite well. I had a few selected ‘experts’ that were used as supports for other children. The children certainly enjoyed the being able to add friends aspect and being able to add comments to each other. Although one student was trying to communicate with another child from another country via the messaging part – I think I would prefer this to be more ‘obvious’ in that she wasn;t sure if he had replied to her and couldn’t find her original message. We get notifications for freind requests and acceptances but no notifications of responses to our comments either via the blogs themselves or via the activity chat area.
The children could easily post and add embed objects from other Web 2.0 applications. They really enjoyed sharing learning from other group blogs on countries. Being a rugby nation, it was quite fun to see the interest in the project gather momentum as they started understanding and watching the games. They thoroughly enjoyed the score rankings list too.
We were in charge of the NZ part of the blog, which initially did not excite us as we are in NZ anyway, but slowly they gathered interest. It was marvelous to add learning maori voicethreads, fish and animal voicethreads, photos, google earth trips and an animation which has inspired them to go further with developing animation skills. The class also enjoyed creating football games using classtools – although we had a few issues getting them to play directly, got there in the end but ran out of time to upload all of them, children enjoyed playing them though. Next time we will have a go at a wider variety of Web 2.0 applications like Dipity, but we just ran out of time as our term finished a week before the World Cup finished. But it just shows how excited and interested they were when i could see a number of the children still accessing the blog and adding comments during their holidays!
All in all an excellent experience – class comments to follow when school reconvenes on Monday.A thoroughly valuable experience for them as far as safety and etiquette in cyberspace are concerned. An excellent chance to teach these for an actual purpose. it also led to much discussion about Facebook too and safety issues arising around that.
I am sure they will be raring to go for the next one too. I certainly am! Thanks again for inspiring all of us to connect with others around the world and gain a wider insight into other countries.
One thing I would love to have had a chance to do with them is to get a few video conferencing sessions happening between classes from around the world. but we shall hopefully continue to connect with some of them via thoer own class blogs…..or the Olympics blog!
Congratulations to the amazing people who set this project up, answered all my daft questions and monitored everything throughout the 4 week project. If only the world cup lasted longer than 4 weeks!!!!
Rock on the next one
Claire Cheeseman, teacher, Auckland, my blog
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