Earlier today I was at a presentation by Nick Potts, from the British Council Singapore, on the lessons he’s learned from two years of using blogs with lower secondary students in Singapore. He gave an account of all the problems, lessons learned and he also shared strategies he’s worked out to overcome these challenges.
His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.
He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access – he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.
His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.
One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.
I’m listening to Mitch Resnick at the ICTLT conference talk about Scratch a free tool for software creation for kids, by developers at MIT.
As Mitch Resnick explained, the aim of this tool is to get kids really creating. He made the point that kids might be able to use digital tools, but this doesn’t really mean that they’re digital natives. He added that they will not be true digital natives unless they’re able to make the tools and manipulate these themselves in a process/cycle: Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, Imagine, and so on.
Some great examples. But one of the most impressive things about the Scratch site is that there’s a community of people who’ve made stuff using the software. The variety of uses is impressive, but the depth of communication and reflection fostered by the community is truly impressive. Gonna get my own kids using this.
Here’s video tutorial showing how easy it is to make a Scratch game/animation:
Voicethread is a neat online tool that allows you to set up or join group discussions around photos, presentations, documents or videos. Here’s their own description:
A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. About Voicethread
Teacher created podcasts – they call these enhanced podcasts. Teachers make them to help teach key concepts in maths or to model language. They see this as a form of communication for the parents to use with their kids. The benefit is that it’s easy to use and provides a consistent message about what’s been taught in class.
Learner created podcasts – Learners record what they read aloud, record interviews and record their oral reflections about a topic. The presenters gave one example of an interview recorded by two learners saying that their teacher use the recording to reflect on and evaluate their learners’ speaking skills.
There are a few places where you can set up a kind of homepage for yourself, with all the stuff you like in one place. For free. Here are four for you to try out.
Very handy: all your bookmarks are open, on one page, and show your most recent emails, news items, photos, etc…
And it’s easy…
Set up a free account.
Drag and drop your online email (shows the most recent emails), your favourite news sites (e.g. BBC), your Photos (e.g. Flickr), Music, Weather, Sudoku, currency converter, whatever you want (useful or silly).
Dave Pollard has written a ‘methodology for Web 2.0 collaboration experiments (in reluctant organisations)’. It’s a neat roadmap for getting collaboration experiments off the ground in contexts where cost, risk, culture and complexity are concerns.
Here’s a summary of his steps:
Champions self-organise. One point he makes here is to co-opt all Web 2.0 users (wikiers, bloggers, online appers, social networkers, etc…)
Champions get together face-to-face to understand the situation and brainstorm opportunities. Adapting to the context/culture, not trying to change it.
Design & create experiments extending existing relationships and integrating with legacy technologies.
Run the experiments
Monitor, celebrate success, learn from failures
I particularly like his points 1 & 2, because they focus on the people – the soft side. I think this aspect is often left out in the early stages of too many projects. Early stakeholder engagement done well is essential for the success of any project – particularly projects that are about collaboration. click for Dave Pollard’s article
