Cluster thingy
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

I’ve been reading Ewan’s post about play and Mrs. O’Neill’s too. Lots of good thinks to think about. Ewan’s post is one of a series about failure which has given me loads of ideas that are not full articulated yet, limiting myself to the play idea has me thinking about play and time.

To allow children to play with the new toys (tools) takes time. Time away from other things so we need to justify it in some way, I don’t have too much a of a problem about that, but I am thinking of the amount of time it takes to blog, podcast or create a video.

For the Sandaig otters blog I usually have pairs of bloggers coming from 4 classes to the media room between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, so we should get 4 posts a day. Quite a few fall by the wayside. Even if the children make it to the room they quite often do not finish their post in the 15 or 20 minutes they have (they need to select a photo, resize it, write a post and blog the lot). Sometimes they get time to come back and finish, sometimes not (the children have also spent time the previous day taking photos for the days post).
This is an in theory way of working, it has not happened since Christmas as I have been back in the classroom fulltime due to staff absences, some children have been posting independently.

On the Primary Six SJ it has been taking up to an hour to carry out some tasks and again some children do not finish. As I am trying to take primary 6SJ to the media room once a week for ict, and we don’t always blog (spent an hour commenting on other blogs last time) it is quite hard to give the children enough regular playtime. I want them to have enough time to make the tools transparent and to get into some real collaborative fun.

Anyway I am interested in how other teachers manage this. If you blog with children how long does it take children to post? How much time do you give them to read other blogs? For people making bubbleshare slide shows and the like, how long does it take for children to put these together?