My Blogging…
Routine Collaboration …
Weblogs are also a great collaborative tool. Projects between schools across the globe can be provided with an online platform in a matter of seconds. A teacher from a school in San Francisco created weblog to chronicle a trip to Japan. Students in the school’s ICT club in Amsterdam were able to read his writing from Tokyo and his students comments from San Francisco, before they wrote their own ideas and questions. This was particularly exciting for the expatriate Japanese students in the class. The beauty of it was, that it was simple and not time-consuming to set up.
Another weblogging adventure involved Lloyd Nebres, a weblogging pioneer and a teacher at UC Berkeley’s Academic Talent Development Program. During sabbatical months spent in Maui he used his weblog to record his thoughts and experiences. One weblog entry was a description, complete with photos, of his rowing excursion to a deserted junk called the Lin Wa II. The students used his description as a stimulus for their own writing, letting their imaginations run wild. They recorded their responses on their weblogs and a day later Lloyd commented on their individual writing on his own weblog. The look of pride on my students’ faces was priceless, when they read the responses to their own writing and realised that they had interfaced with an author on the other side of the world.
Weblogs can be subject specific. Our Poetry Express weblog was originally used to respond to poetry written by a Laura Shefler, a weblogging teacher in the United States of America. We have used it as well to write and collaborate on our own poetry. The material then serves as inspiration and reference for subsequent years studying the same poets. It helps to ensure that knowledge from one year is preserved for the next. It is also proved very effective during a recent school inspection when writing poems as a class. The Poetry Express weblog was fired up and our initial efforts are typed on to the computer, making it ready for publication.
“Shall we publish this to the world?” I shouted in my best Dead Poets Society voice.
“No!” they cried in unison.
The discussions that followed were all about redrafting to ensure that our poem was perfect for our audience. When the class was happy with it we pressed the button and it was immediately published to the web. Some of the children reflected on the poem later on their own personal weblogs. The lesson was very well received by the inspector.
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