ICT in my Classroom

Since the staff at my school have begun blogging the questions surrounding the pedagogical practises in the classroom that incorporate blogging have been spiralling amongst us. For many, including the teachers of early years classes, it seemed a very solitary activity with the children sitting and the teacher typing.

It is clearly an important stage in the development of our school blogs. I have read a small number of articles that sound out the fact that there really is no hard evidence of the widespread use of blogging to improve standards etc. I suspect, in my humble opinion, that there has not been enough of us to ask the questions. Not enough classes actually engaging with the technology to make it part of the daily fabric of the classroom. There will always be a form of playing and dabbling with the tech but as one of my colleagues asks:

“How does blogging actually improve what I am already doing well?”

So after half term I will be working with my school to take our blogs offline. As in what can we do as teachers to incorporate the use of our class blogs into the rich learning environments we have already created.

John has already taken a small step towards this with a page on my Classroom Blogging Wiki (newly reorganised) called Classroom Organisation. as he puts it:

Recently on my blog I was wondering ‘How long does it take your kids to post?‘ and had a few replies. I though it might be a good idea to collects the various ways of organising blogging in the primary classroom.

This however is specific to working online - I want to collect ideas about creating opportunities for all the children in the class to interact with the blog even if they are not online. So back to simple things like a writing table, that many early years classes in the UK have,  leaving a piece of writing from another class blog there for them to look at and write a comment on some paper. I suppose it is also an effort to embed the vocabulary into the class as well. A post-it note wall so the kids can write ideas for the class blog on.

In the UK we have something called guided reading during our literacy hour - perhaps children could be working with an adult to read another class blog and at the end of the 15 mins leave a comment written together.

I understand that this last example is online work but it is blogging where we might not consider it. I think that we need to look at not only our curriculum but the learning environment itself - so the children can see their blog (and others) around them, not just if they sit in front of a computer.

We need to bridge the gap between writing online and writing with a pen, between seeing their blog online and seeing it offline, and perhaps we can begin this by creating a rich learning environment that encapsulates the diverse learning opportunities that blogging brings.

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