Blogging in the classroom

I thought it may be interestiing to share my students experiences of class blogs in the classroom. I completed a project with a group of year 8's that involved them desigining and making a television programme and sharing their experiences via a blog. Their overall experiences where very poritive and though limited you can see how they have been able to evaluate their work and comment on various things.

For this I used blogger- this has allowed me to invite students to take part and also moderate their comments- ginving me a cotrolled and hassle free learning environment.

Hope its useful.

BECTA bids have their advantages...

We have just had our statutory training day where as teachers we have to master the intricacies of the new national curriculum. From ICT it has not changed much but it interesting to note how it has evolved.

The new national curriculum allows for much more cross curricular work- especially in ICT- we have been using a SOW that uses an environmentak ethos for some time. What this new curriculum allows is a great deal more flexibility as prescriptive programmes of study have been dispensed with allowing teachers to tailor courses to the needs of their learners.

We have just completed a bid to BECTA where we have asked for a sum of money to produce a condensed key stage three SOW taht we can then share with other schools- we are hoping to have the schemes available by September- if you would like to be involved contact me at school!

Cheeesecake- its the future!

I have just taken delivery of an eee pc from liverpool city council. I ahve it on loan for a couple of weeks just to see, whether it offers any advantages over current hardware.

Its a small, light and inexpensive laptop. It comes supplied with open source software which means its a very reasonable £169 +VAT.

The only two downsides are that it has a relatively small screen and battery life of two hours could be better.

This technology raises a few interesting pointers- its relatively small memory means that most resources that are used with it will need to be primarily web based as laoding lots of software on the machinme is likely to slow it down. Secondly, schools will need to make significant investment in their wireless infrastructure in order to enable students to make full use of them in every lesson.

This must give some useful pointers for leadership teams as to where they will investing money over the next few years as schools will have to face the change from "we cannot afford to have one computer per student" top "we cannot afford not to have one computer per student".