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I came across this through the BECTA ICT research network discussion list. It’s a wonderfully ambitious and creative project from Access Art. The aim of the project is to develop primary pupil’s use of sketchbooks to develop and support their creative thinking. As the Sketchbooks in Schools site puts it so well:
‘Creativity does not occur in pre-determined time and space, and is certainly not linear..sketchbooks (or notebooks or journals…) are central to nurturing and feeding these processes..’
The site will act as an online area where all those involved or interested can meet, discuss and share ideas.
Of course, blogging is online journaling and can be used in a similar fashion. Teachers and students can and do use blogs to think, collect, sort, rationalise, share, reflect, dream and discover. So should we be using online or offline sketchbooks and journaling tools?
Online tools have the added bonus of collaboration over distance and time but of course, students can always meet and share their real sketchbooks too (face to face – fancy that!).
Like all things digital – they’re just tools – to be used when, where and how appropriate and helpful. There is no right or wrong. Just personalisation.
Getting Digital in Art
A couple of weeks ago I was tasked with thinking about how ICT could be embedded into GCSE Art. A teacher wants to stretch the more able students and reach better grdaes through using ICT. Here are some ideas:
- Create a Teacher’s Blog using Edublogs. use this to host useful resources for students and post questions or stimuli for homework. Students add comments in response. Example
- Create student blogs using Edublogs (Example) to use as portfolios for art projects. Teacher can post comments to these. Students can upload images, video, audio and written text. Used in conjunction with the online tool for collaborative mind mapping Mind42.com
- Use Flickr to create a class group and upload and share images – either student’s own work or secondary resources. Add comments and notes to the images.
- Using Using Photoshop to scan in artwork and adapt it using filters, layers and the pattern maker.
Ready, Steady, Blog!
This is a student’s guide to blogging. Here, you’ll find out:
- What a blog is
- How to blog
- How blogging helps you learn
Please use this area to share ideas and to let us know how it goes if you try something out in class. You can also recommend good web sites or get help from us. Most of all we want you to join in and help each other.
Examples of student blogs
(All fifth grade student’s in Mr Chamberlain’s class in the USA)
Printable guides for students and teachers on using Edublogs:
How to use MP3 Voice Recorders
Uploading Voice Recordings to the Blogs
Adding photos/sound/video to your Blog
Videos on how to use your Blog on Edublogs:
How to write a post (advanced)
Adding photos/sound/video to your post
Some stuff to think about..
- What kinds of stuff are you going to put in your blog?
- Are you happy to share some of it with other students so they can learn from your blog or do you want to keep it to yourself?
- Can you use photos or record yourself talking to get your point across? Does it have to be written?
Blogging for Teaching and Learning
This is a basic guide on blogging, why it’s a great tool to use and how it can help you teach and help your students to learn.
I’ve drawn upon some great resources I’ve come across (mainly blogs!), my favourites being Bionic Teaching and The Edublogger. I particularly like this posting on Bionic Teaching as it has a great presentation explaining the basics entitled ‘Bob on Blogs’.
I’ve also drawn upon my own experience of blogging and how that has helped me develop professionally through a ‘personal learning network’.
First of all then, what is blogging?
The best description of I’ve heard of a blog is an online (i.e. on the web) journal or diary. When a blog is used by a number of different people it becomes more than that – it becomes a collaborative space. More about that later.
A blogger is therefore someone who keeps a blog and the process of writing in their blog is called blogging!
Blogs about all sorts of things exist – they are as varied as the bloggers that create them. They range from individuals writing about a hobby or what they had for tea to multinational corporations using blogs as a form of public relations.
If you are reading this, then you are already aware of what a blog is. Please feel free to leave a comment below and you will be fully experiencing the interactivity of blogging! And hey, I’ll even post a reply back!
A further clever thing that blogging does is that it uses something called ‘trackback’. When I write a post that refers to someone elses blog – for example, I mentioned ‘Bionic Teaching’ above, they will be notified through ‘trackback’ that I’ve written a post about their blog. It links people together and creates a network of people who may be researching about and writing about the same things.
Why use blogging in Education?
A blog is relatively easy to set up. You can set a blog up and publish your first post to the masses in minutes. Google has it’s own blogging interface called Blogger. Some people use Typepad. Some people use Wordpress. Many people in education use Edublogs because it’s custom designed for teachers and students and has useful moderation and security features and unlike Blogger is free from advertising.
There are a number of ways blogging can be useful in teaching and learning – and it’s up to whatever suits your needs and those of your learners best:
- A blog that is purely a resource (like a web site) for you to keep all your electronic and web based resources together. You can access it anywhere and so can your students.
- A Teacher led blog. (I particularly like this example as Mr C awards the commenting tiger award for best comment by a student) The Teacher has a blog where they post questions, homework and resources to. Students are asked to comment on these – to promote discussion and collaboration in and outside of class. Don’t worry these comments (or replies) can be moderated by the teacher before appearing on the blog! This also keeps a record of discussion, a record for assessment and a body of knowledge in itself.
- Student led blogs. Students each have their own blog. They can write posts and keep them private if they wish, share it only with selected individuals or publish them to the masses. The student could keep a reflective learning journal or use it for more subject focused tasks such as creating a fictional blog for a character in a novel in English or History, record of Scientific or Mathematical investigations or in another language in MFL. The teacher can respond to the posts by the student and give direct feedback and/or you can allow students to give peer feedback (again moderated). You could even get students to post their essays directly to the blog and by moderating you are assessing their work.
Of course, a combination of the above is possible too.
To get started, I’d suggest registering with Edublogs for a blog here and then choosing a nice layout called a template. It;s then fairly straightforward to write your own post but if you come unstuck, have a look at this on the Edublogger blog.
ClustrMaps
