The first round

Well that was the first round over. I took advice from Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. He suggested that I gave my students a topic to research first, which I decided would be something fun, so I gave the girls makeup and the boys cars. Quite sexist I know, but I thought it would be a good focus and would cause some discussion. Lots of the students stayed safe and looked at how the topic affected them, whether it was the fact that they didn’t use the product or whether they couldn’t live without it. Some students took a different approach as they researched their topic, they were guided by what they were reading, which was the whole point and showed that they were actually reading! We all created new blog sites successfully and with a variety of creativity, I am please to say. There are some little quirks with Blogger that I didn’t understand, such as when you choose a template, it does not always use a suitable font colour for the page background. For example, if you have a black background, a white font would be most suitable, you have to change the font colour yourself, which means that you can’t actually see the text on the editor page! (Obviously we just changed the font colour at the last minute.) The students seemed to enjoy the session, each was asked to comment on someone else’s blog, some comments were more appropriate than others, but this was just a test run. I hope to get the journal blogs going very soon though...I’ll keep you posted.