The real reason why no one reads your blog. Via J Walk Blog (gone so archive or to the rescue)

Well it amused me.

I was talking to a colleague in another primary school recently. They mentioned that a cpd opportunity in blogging had been offered round in their staff-room, the reaction from the staff was along the lines of that is all very well but we have real work like spelling to get through.
I am a wee bit worried about this, and unfortunately I doubt the message is going to get through very quickly via cpd. A/the problem is that folk seem to think blogging is out with the normal day to day curriculum when it could be an enhancement to it.

A less than best practice example: this week I did a couple of sessions of McRone cover in our two primary seven classes. As it was only the second week of term, I just did my own thing rather than follow the class routine. I decided to do a wee poetry lesson using a basic template to get the class started blogging. The lesson turned out to be about a lot more than blogging. We started by reviewing nouns, verbs and adjectives and introduced antonyms, we discussed powerful vs weak words, the importance of audience and getting our spelling right.
The children wrote poems and blogged some of them on Sandaig Poets, things got a bit frantic and some spelling mistakes were made, eek! Poems were blogged, and over the next couple of days, thanks to Ewan‘s linkage, and comments from Bob, Andy, Neil and Steve, the children’s interest was maintained.

I popped back into one of the classes later in the week (my own macrone) for a follow up. We discussed spelling mistakes, slang, text messaging, audience and the ideas given by the comments, some of which served to increase the class vocabulary. We went on to cover internet safety, audience again and a few other things.

The time spent by pupils on the computers was about 10 minutes each. Most of the work involved, discussion and writing, the odd picture was drawn, nothing out of the ordinary.
Blogging provided some extras (audience,context and purpose) for real work.

After reading Gordon’s post Too much hassle I think the problem is that some teacher do not realise that it is not really much hassle to dip a toe in the web 2.0, but we need to give enough time, training and practice to let them know that. Same as any other aspect of teaching and learning really.

Magic H²O II Originally uploaded by Noë.

I was working/ playing with primary seven today ( a wee bit of Macrone cover) blogging some poems on the Sandaig Poets blog.

The new posts knocked one of my all time favourite entries bio poem by Kimberley off the front page.

Kimberley’s poem started a great conversation between Kimberley and Carol Fuller (Our The Dream Dragon collaborator and fairy blogmother).

It generated two new poems, one a collaboration between Carol, Kimberley and Kimberley’s Gran! 15 comments in total a great read.

Kimberley’s comments were made from home and her writing was really impressive, at parents night I thanked her Mum for supporting her spelling only to find out that she did not see the comments until after Kimberley had posted them.

I am posting here to keep the poem in mind, but also to solicit comments on the new post over at Sandaig Poets, first blogs for some of our new pupils, leave them a comment and perhaps you could start some magic.

If you do and you’d like me to comment on your classes blog leave me a comment here or add yourself to CommentsForKidz on the scotedublogs.

glow doesn’t seem to be a good technorati tag.

Andrew’s post about glow has a nice image at the top, generated by msig.info having spent some time figuring out how to do this in fireworks, I wish I’d seen this earlier. A pity the page has a wee bit of text that is not suitable for the classroom, if we got round to individual blogs it would have been a useful tool for generating header images.

TeachMeet organisation is moving on a pace, wine and dinner seem to be organised, but we need a wifi sponsor.

technorati tags glow ssdn teachmeet06

I always wondered about these, mostly because I’ve never had a result that pleased me when doing the test. An interesting wee bit in the http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/ Wrongly labelled by Frank Coffield who say:

Next time you see a learning styles questionnaire, burn it

and goes on to report on some research on learning styles:

Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?

and

Students need knowledgeable, vocationally qualified and caring teachers, who can enter into a dialogue with them about how to become better learners, as well as what it means to be a painter or nursery nurse.

My own view of learning styles has alway been, some sorts of learning needs a particular learning style so we better have more that one we can use. And if we label a child a this learner or that learner is that any better than any other sort of labeling? Technorati Tags: education, learning styles

powered by performancing firefox

Tomorrow, Wednesday 12th July, a group of students from Grange Academy in Kilmarnock will set off on a journey of a lifetime. Their destination? Kunming in China, where they’ll be learning Mandarin Chinese and taking part in a range of cultural and educational activities which will allow them to experience China first hand.

One to watch: the Grange in China blog

Technorati Tags: scot-edu-blog education

powered by performancing firefox

Ewan was talking about what to do with your blog in the summer. Well i am not going away so I’ve a few things line up to do:

I am working on a site for David which will end up here I am quite happy about how it is going and seem to be learning a little MySQL.

I am also going to be organising blogs for the primary schools in my cluster, but I’ll leave that until August. Meanwhile I am going to try and fix my google maps experiment and play with Supercard so that I can post on my other blog. Links broken

Away from the box, I’ll go some walks, take more time to cook than usual, play some tai chi and do something on Jenny’s allotment. It is hard being a teacher some time

websitesasgraphs

http://www.flickr.com/photos/troutcolor/tags/websitesasgraphs/

The differences between here, the Sandaig Otters and the Sandaig home page are intreguing.

Tim was offline for the last week or so with DNS Issues He say’s

My site has been down for about a week with a DNS issue. It is finally resolved. Not that anyone missed anything while I was gone…

Well I missed you Tim and saw the Safari can’t find the server message everyday. I can’t tell you that in a comment as they don’t seem to be working?

Tim is in my daily reading and I’ve had as much fun following up web and ed ideas from him as anywhere. You also get a lovely feeling about Lewis Elementary from Tim’s postings.