As I approach my retirement from class teaching, I thought it might be worth making some notes about how I use Glow Blogs1 in that role2. I’ve been using blogs in class since 2024. A lot of what follows is obvious stuff but there may be a nugget or two.

Class Blog

My current class site is the Banton Biggies – The Tallest Class in Banton Primary

This is principally a way of keeping a record of some of the more interesting things we have been doing. Informing parents and any one else interested.

When I started running a class blog, back in 2004, I had pupils doing most of the posting. A rota of pupils who posted about the previous day’s learning. I now focus on my pupils posting to their e-portfolios and some project work. I do all of the posting, I do give some ‘pupil voice’ lift quotes from the classes e-portfolios and exit tickets.

Surprisingly I now find it harder to organise rotas and give individuals time for posting than I did before CfE.

I post a lot more video now than I used to. Most via YouTube. These are often just concatenated photos that I take or short videos the pupils have created or a combination of both. I don’t spend much time editing these, using Snapthread or iMovie, Magic Movie.

I use the WordPress block editor for most things. I try to use featured images, limited number of photos in galleries with some single images. I use the quote block quite often to add text from the pupils.

I use the Embed Plus for YouTube plugin to post YouTube videos. This allows me to avoid suggested videos at the end of play. I needed to get a YouTube API key, which was a bit of a faff, but only had to be done once. The videos are unlisted in YouTube as recommended by North Lanarkshire council.

I seldom use any other blocks. I use slash, /, and start typing the name of the block to insert blocks quickly.

I find the class blog very useful for gathering information about some activity or concept that class have been involved in. I can use separate pages to gather posts on a particular topic or project. for example, I’ve posted a lot about our MakerSpace so have a page for that. There I used the Query Loop Block to gather the relevant posts and the Embed Plus to show a YouTube playlist.

Tags and categories allow me to quickly pull together evidence if asked for. Search lets me aid my failing memory to repeat lessons from a few years back or remember ideas to share.

I know that blogs are a bit more difficult to post to that X/Twitter. Twitter became the go to way to share classroom activity (maybe not so much now). I’ve found time & again that blogs are more powerful and useful. I can’t imagine teaching without one.

Homework

I post homework grids to my class blog as well as providing them physically.

e-Portfolios

My class make use of individual e-Portfolios for keeping a record of some of their learning. At one point the council encouraged schools to use them with all upper primary pupils to produce profiles. I use them to track targets and record learning in a slightly less formal way. Since I teach multi-composites some of my primary sevens have had quite impressive sites.

Hopefully some experience of using the most popular app to create website, WordPress will do some good too.

Project sites

Banton Beasties

This lists and classifies the creatures we have seen in the playground or our outdoor learning trips to the woods. It has been running for just over a year and I just made it public. The site is organised around the classification of animals. So we are learning about that, lifecycles and some WordPress skills.

This site is being made by the children in the Banton Biggies class of Banton Primary. They are using it to practise their research and writing skills. The information is gleaned from the internet and we try to acknowledge sources appropriately. We may make mistakes and will try and correct them over time. Always a work in progress.

Podcast

My class occasionally creates an episode for the BBP, this has turned out to be about two episodes a year. In my previous school we tried for a podcast once a month, but that was a lunchtime club. Currently my whole class is involved. We use it as an opportunity to explore, writing, collaboration and talking (more).

I’ve posted a lot about podcasting here, for example: More Classroom Podcasting & More Podcasting in the Classroom thoughts

Learning resources

I keep a site as a resource site for my class: Banton Buzz – Challenges, Links and Tasks for the Banton biggies. At first I tried to organise it. Now I mostly give the class links to posts and projects on the site. This means a lot of the content is not easily discoverable. I use H5P a lot (hundreds) on the site to create quizzes and activities. The vast majority of the content here goes along with the NLC spelling program for second level. But I’ve experimented with a lot of other H5P content types, e-portfolio starters, video embeds and experiments.

Exit Tickets

I’ve got blog of this name where I post short exit ticket style questions and pupils post comments. I use this as an occasional alternative to post-its and other plenary tools. I am not sure that I recommend it for anyone else, but as I am pretty familiar with the system I can quickly post a question on the fly and pop up a QR code onto our Apple TV or airdrop a link.

Scratching the Surface

It was over 20 years ago when I started using Blogs in my primary classes. I feel I’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible. It is one thing I would certainly recommend to my fellow teachers as being worth the extra workload.

  1. Glow Blogs are WordPress blogs provided to Scottish Educators by the government via Glow. Glow is Scotland’s national digital learning platform provided by Scottish Government and managed by Education Scotland. ↩︎
  2. Slight caveat, I work part-time as Product Owner for Glow blogs, so have a bias. I did start blogging in class before Glow and before Glow adopted WordPress Blogs. ↩︎

Usually at this time of year I am busy ‘tidying’ things into cupboards. The summer holidays are approaching. This year I am having to clean the out – nine years of accumulated stuff.

There are worksheets galore, laminated instructions and guides, old Tate gallery calendars. Books, tapes, things I’ve made to help with a task, things I thought might be useful, kids work I couldn’t throw out, old bits of technology, a tower of dvd disks I was keeping for bird scarers.

The electric trunking round my room has a collection of interesting wee things the kids have found, spider skeletons, squirrel and mouse gnawed nuts, broken egg shells feather and the like.

As someone who doesn’t have a great memory, this brings back lots. It has also makes me think of a few slightly connected things.

Reinventing the wheel

Primary teachers create a lot of resources. Or buy them from twinkl or similar. I thought that the flowering of edutech might have delivered shared resources in a more distributed, open way than it has. I do resent the money spent, as I think with some leadership we could have had something great.

I am organising, as best I can, anything I think might be useful and leaving them for the next person to occupy my classroom. But I also found resources left by the previous incumbent that I’ve never touched.

memories

Some of the memories I’ve got are stored in our class blog. As they get older I doubt there of much interest or anyone other than me. I will be a wee bit sad as they are lost or replace in the future.

Give them a flip phone, a brick phone, a dumb phone. The key is you want your kids to be able to communicate with their friends, but you don’t want to give them over to for-profit companies [whose] goal is to hook your child.

My emphasis, I’ve no real idea if keeping kids away from smartphones is possible, but I do wonder if alternatives to for-profit companies could be created?

I wonder too if it might be even more important to keep parents of pre schoolers away from their smartphones?

Intriguing
via Steven Splinter

This is a fascinating read! I had a shallow understanding of what aphantasia is before reading this account of trying to remember without access to mental imagery.

Where the comments are interesting too.

I feel I’ve more than a touch of this, I don’t really visualise, have a less than perfect memory, and my facial recognition is poor. I am quite good with knowing where I am and navigation.

montage of six webpages listed in article

Craig Mod on The Talk Show

Interesting take on the morality of using AI

But I have a hard time parsing out what is moral or amoral about how this stuff is being used, or how the information’s been gleaned, or whatever it’s been sucked up from.

-✂️ snip-

00:03:25 ◼ ► I don’t use any of the photo generation crap or whatever.

00:03:28 ◼ ► What I do think is profound, and I feel like it’s way more morally defensible, is the code generation stuff, just because of all the open source stuff, yada, yada

The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 421, With Craig Mod

The Sea

▶︎ The Sea | Francisco del Pino/Charlotte Mundy | Notice Recordings


wilding.radio

From the famous Knapp estate via Joe

we have installed a solar-powered, quadrophonic live audio feed just north of the dam: A pair of hydrophones brings us closer to the sounds of the water itself and reveals the tiny sounds of fresh-water organisms. A pair of microphones in a fallen willow tree let us get to know the birds and mammals that live near and visit the water and hear the play of weather in the trees.

wilding.radio

Organic Maps

I’ve installed this on my phone with the intention of giving it a shot for recording walks.

Organic Maps is a privacy-focused offline maps & GPS app for hiking, cycling, biking, and driving. Absolutely free. No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community. Powered by OpenStreetMap data.

Organic Maps is one of the few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card, and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.

Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation

Poetry on the line

Quite delightful raspberry pi project.

 a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi

Poetry on the line: a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi

My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ 

Looks like a good classroom activity.I’ve done similar occasionally but the prompt is much better than mine.

 You tell the children/students that they are going to be poem or story ‘detectives’ and their job is find the ‘secret strings’ in a poem or story – or play or any ‘text’.

Secret strings run within texts linking words, phrases, sentences and pictures or ‘images’. The students’ job is to find them. 

Sometimes the link is to do with sound – eg alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, long phrases, short phrases. 

Michael Rosen: My ‘secret strings’ game to unlock ‘texts’ (stories, poems, plays, non-fiction etc)