I guess I am now recovered from the trip last week, and starting to think a bit about the blogging.

I expected to blog a lot more this year than on the previous trip. I even took a couple of extra laptops for thew children to use in the evening. I turned out that the weather was far too good to stay in the hotel and blog so the process and results were similar to 2007.

As usual the trip was a busy one, with 2 or 3 main activities each day and another after dinner one, not much time to sit still except on the bus. So the process went, on bus, activity (everyone takes lots of photos), back on the bus; I sort images and create galleries, children blog and make quick recordings on ipod, and repeat. At some point I find an internet connection (11pm outside a closed McDonald’s for example) and post stuff.

After last year I had expected some indoor time in the evening due to rain when the children could have done a bit more typing, made slideshows etc, but that was not to be.

Hopefully in the future we would be able to have better access to the internet with a dongle or at least a hotel with wifi. The previous week we had a visit from our Dutch partner school and they used a usb dongle to blog successfully this must be the way to go.

On the audio front I took along 2 iRivers and my old ipod to record with, the better quality of the iRivers was not as important as the easy of use of the ipod (recording over a bus makes quality unimportant).

I found that the girls on the trip were a lot keener to type up reports and messages and record audio than the boys. The boys spent most of there time on the bus racing on their ds lites. I would like to thing of ways on engaging boys in voluntary blogging when the alternatives are more attractive than ‘language work’.

A couple of boys were in charge of the moblog but we tended to forget to post when things got interesting, maybe a few more phones and higher profile for the moblog would get more boys excited by communication.

As expected the blog seems to have been a great success from the parents point of view judging by the number of comments and a few conversations at the end of the trip. I have noticed that quite a few comments got stuck in our spam trap, mostly for comments containing xxx, too many kisses!

This is the fifth trip blog I’ve run but I still do not think I am anywhere near using the format to its full potential.

We have also a few hundred photos and some video to be used for post trip classroom reflection before the end of term.