My Blogging…
Exploring Together…
There is a sense in the school that both adults and students are exploring this powerful weblogging phenomenon together. What started off as a Year Six venture, quickly spread to the rest of the school. Every class in our school now has a class weblog. In Nursery and Key Stage One the class weblogs serve to give the parents an insight in to the life of the class. Some teachers update the weblogs with their class as a shared writing activity. Recently a number of parents have created their own weblogs as a shared writing space with their Nursery children.
In Key Stage Two the picture is equally dynamic. Led by the headteacher of the Junior School, students in Year Four have posted book reviews to their class weblog and commented on each other’s presentations. A new student who had not yet arrived at the school was introduced to the class by way of his comment on the class weblog. Year Three students have received comments on their posted work from relatives around the world including Japan and the UK. Year Five has worked on group weblogs, each member of the group taking responsibility for an aspect of a chosen project. The administrative staff is not excluded from the weblogging action as the School Secretary updates a weekly Newsletter weblog outlining the coming week’s events. Also the Year three teacher produces a football weblog chronicling the lows of the school and staff football teams.
How much investment in terms of time and money has this taken? For a little under two hundred pounds, a hundred weblogs were made available to the school. All staff received a one-hour introduction course, covering weblogging basics. That was enough to start the project rolling.
The simple nature of weblogging means that it can immediately make an impact. Teachers start to think about how they can use weblog to complement their own subject expertise and start to explore ways of using the internet for themselves. Skills that are often hidden behind a closed classroom door become visible online for others to benefit from. It helps foster a climate of collaboration.
A not-so-silent publishing revolution is taking place in cyberspace that could positively impact our schools and classrooms in the near future. Weblogging is taking publishing to the web out of the exclusive control of the high priesthood of technical experts and powerful corporate entities and putting it into the hands of the masses. Individuals are being empowered with an online voice and afforded a potentially vast audience for their thoughts, opinions and information.
At the British School of Amsterdam, we found ourselves at the forefront of exploring the educational potential of these developments with our students aged between three and twelve years. The number of educators using weblogs to enhance their teaching is increasing. It is a great time for schools to examine the potential of weblogs for enhancing their own teaching and their student’s learning.
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