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Saved by John Pearce
on July 7, 2008 at 10:20:40 am
 

What happens when you ask 120 students to tell the world about the one thing that matters most to them? What about if you provide them with an online webspace in the form of their own personal blog? Well for the grade 5-6 students at Bellaire Primary school you get the BPS Passion Projects. Working with Globalstudent blogs and a range of other addins and tools these students were guided through a process where they generated questions, researched and presented personal anecdotes about topics as diverse as Coeliac disease, NBA, drums and computer gaming.

This wiki has been developed to support presentations and tell the story of the genesis of these projects during 2007. Using the Navigation at side you can follow the process that we adopted as well as explore the tools that the students utilised as well as the rationale for their use.

After the initial setup, some time in class was given to providing instruction on how to use the online GlobalStudent blogging environment. Apart from some discussion of content and issues of safety and copyright these six month long projects were then largely completed as work done at home. This contrasted with traditional homework that was also being conducted at the same time.

As they revealed a need, different students were also introduced to a range of ancillary products. These products included the use of

  • Talking avatars such as Vokis as a means of providing a “spoken” personalized introduction to the blog.
  • The inclusion of map based counters such as Clustrmaps to provide the students with information on the number and location of visitors to the blogs. The recognition provided by these maps also served as a major motivational factor for further development of the project.
  • Survey tools such as SurveyMonkey in order to collect and collate survey based information about preferences such as favourite characters and the like.
  • Presentation tools such as Slideshare as an online means of including PowerPoint based presentations in their blogs.
  • Inspiration to plan and revise planning for the project prior to exporting them as digital images for inclusion in the blogs.
  • The online digital image repository Flickr to locate free Creative Commons licensed images for inclusion in their blogs when they were unable to provide images of their own.

Along the way students also learnt about manipulating digital images in order to include them in their blogs. Other students used digital audio and video to add other than text based content to their project. Students were also expected to view other student’s blogs and add comments on the content and direction of their colleague’s work. In addition blog based links were made with another class of bloggers interstate some of whom also contributed commentary to our student’s blogs. In one case one of our student’s projects was used as a primary reference source by another student in Scotland.

The students also were provided with in context discussion on the etiquette of posting and adding comments. Initially many of the comments offered by students were a little self serving however by the end of the year most students were becoming very proficient at using the comment functionality to advance their understanding.

 

Finally, as the year came to a close a number of students expressed sadness at having to leave their blogs behind as they moved onto other grades and schools.

 

 

·         Personalised Learning: SLU, kids were familiar with class blogs in previous years, good idea to give individual blogs.

 

·         Brainstormed topics, criteria were something they knew about, but they didn’t know everything, had to be a long-term interest.

·         Brainstorming with Inspiration, mind maps, turned into JPEGs to go on blog.

·         Create blogs, was a nightmare, easier now, lots of troubleshooting, email deleting, can’t remember URL’s, etc.

 

·         Began with simple posts.  

 

·         Encouraged commenting on other’s blogs.  Teachers had to check emails and approve comments. Another headache! Workload!

 

·         Discussed the rules.  Using the last name, photos, copyright.

 

·         Kids wanted pictures.  They were shown Flickr, take their own pics, Irfanview.

 

·         Putting on Vokis. Spread like wildfire!  Permission from home was needed. Lots of lunchtimes and recess times were spent.

 

·         Put on Clustrmaps.  Great, because it showed where their visitors came from. NBA blog etc.

 

·         SurveyMonkey as a tool to bring people to the blog. The staff are using it now for surveying parents etc.

 

·         Went back to look at original mind map. Made another updated map.  Some were better than others.

 

·         Teaching about what made a good post and a good comment.  Great literacy link!

 

·         Made the rubric for the PP.

 

·         Lots more started to happen!  Kids wanted to make recordings/videos, making Powerpoints into slideshares, home movies (drums), used the TEST BLOG as a resource.

 

·         Made contact with other schools in Sydney and NZ. Kids started to comment on these other blogs.  A student in Scotland used Emily’s blog as a resource for a presentation.

 

·         Blogs aren’t for all students. But for the kids that really get into it, it is really impressive.

 

·         Zara, Fraser F, Leo, Emily, Brendan, Josh C, Sarah M,

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