Fairly unrelated image.

My blogging here seems to be grinding to a once a week post again. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I am still struggling to embed blogging into my class this year, the children are no where near as independent bloggers as the ones last year there were 38 posts from 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2006 , this year 17 in 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2007 . I was also setting up individual blogs for my class at this time last year, I’ll not be doing that for this years.
There was a bigger emphasis on writing last November, this year more comic Life, movie and photos.

I have been joined by two other members of staff who are blogging fairly regularly with their classes, one in the lower school Otter Cubs and one of the primary seven teachers. The setting up of the individual blogs for one of the primary seven classes was probably a bit too hopeful, but I am hoping the wordpress mu install will be useful later on.

In my own class I have mostly been blogging comics and things that need a bit more teacher help (comics are made on non networked computers, children need help/time to move and resize files, movies need export settings etc), but are visual, exciting and don’t involve too much writing. This years class is bigger than last year, has a much wider range of abilities, 2:1 boys to girl ratio and are more challenging to organise generally. They don’t take to whole class blogging very well so the process of teaching them to blog individually is taking longer.

You would think that after 4 years blogging with children I’d have figured all this out, what is interesting is that the goalposts are never fixed in teaching and the groud is constantly shifting.

This lack of blogging on my part has not stopped me planning several magnificent and ground breaking posts in my mind. My book marks and feed reader is full of flagged posts I wanted to write and more importantly think about.

For example I’ve read David‘s post EdCompBlog: Fear of falure at least 5 times with a pile of stuff bubbling up in my mind. I think part of the answer to David’s question is to do with time. In a comment Ewan mentions that he finds managers more open

to take risk. Where the group is student teachers or teaching staff, there is no desire to take risk (for fear of failure and all the managerial pressure that comes with that)

(As an aside I’d say that I find teacher lead risk taking more interesting that top down initiatives.)
The pressures are illustrated by John Connell‘s post Subverting Scotland?s Simplified Curriculum and the feeling I get from talking to my fellow teachers; more and more initiatives that have to be carried out.

Anyway, Next week I am going to be attempting to get a rota of a subset of my class blogging on a more frequent basis. Maybe a wee push on the Book Review blog would help too.