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Law Primary’s Blogging earns HMIE Good Practice September 2, 2008

Posted by Gilmour David in : Student blogging, blogging , add a comment

Law Primary’s recent inspection report is now available on HMIE’s web site. The school’s blogs get seven mentions altogether, including in this Good Practice box.

Effective Use of ICT
Staff wanted to be more innovative in their use of ICT. They created a school blog to provide information on all aspects of school life and to encourage a regular dialogue between home and school. Staff worked closely with the local authority ICT team to set up the site and then took on responsibilities for maintaining it.

Pupils were given a key role in providing the content. Pupils at the upper stages displayed and gave an account of their achievements and the range of activities that they had taken part in. Across the school, pupils used the site to provide feedback on school events. At P6 and P7, a pilot programme for homework was introduced with homework tasks and links to helpful educational sites posted on the blog.

The blog also helped parents to keep in contact with their children who took part in the P7 residential trip and let them know about the daily activities. Development and use of the blog has helped to promote pupils’ language, ICT and independent learning skills. It has also proved to be a highly effective way of highlighting and celebrating pupils’ achievements.

Hopefully this positive report will help other schools Scotland-wide make the case for using blogs for educational purposes. Unfortunately we know that Law Primary’s blog, along with all edubuzz.org blogs, are currently blocked by web filters in a number of Scottish education authorities.

School web sites can engage hard-to-reach parents August 30, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : Exc-el, Humbie Primary, Parents as Partners, blogging , add a comment

Good school web sites can engage parents who want to help, but just aren’t comfortable setting foot in school, or talking to teachers.

In talking to Mhairi Stratton today about developing the Humbie Primary site, and class blogs there, she told me the story of how she discovered from her pupils at a previous city primary that parents were going to great lengths to get access to the internet so that they could get involved via the school’s web site. Yet these same parents, the children explained, would not come into school, or talk to teachers.

This suggests that there may be an unexpected benefit here from East Lothian’s plans to develop class blogs as a key part of the new Parental Involvement arrangements.

Class Blogs to Support Parental Involvement August 16, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : Exc-el, Parents as Partners, blogging , add a comment

LongniddryDuring today’s In-Service, Longniddry Primary staff got some hands-on practice with the eduBuzz blog system so more people can update the school site, and so that they’re ready to make a start with class blogs.

The school’s Development Plan for the year includes work on parental involvement, and the blog-based school web site is one of the tools they’ll be using. They’re also keen to develop class-specific web pages which will provide a more to-the-point channel of communication with busy parents.

East Lothian’s Parental Involvement consultation found that primary parents liked the idea of a class-specific web page. A survey finding was that today’s busy parents might want to be involved with the school, but only had time to be involved with their own children’s classes. For that purpose, a whole-school site can be a turn-off, as these people don’t have time to dig around in search of class-specific informatiion.

After the CPD session, Melanie Bertram and I explored some other new ways to use the school blog:

I’m looking forward to seeing what new ideas this group come up with over the next few weeks.

DEMOS identifies teacher need for more professional dialogue and reflection May 30, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : ICT Benefits, blogging, eduBuzz , 1 comment so far

A new 28-page DEMOS report, DIY Professionalism, looks at the future of teaching and identifies a need for more space for professional dialogue and reflection. Perhaps what we’re seeing with educational blogging is that latent demand finding an outlet, enabled by the emergence of easy-to-use blogging tools?
DEMOS don’t consider the role technology might play, preferring instead to make analogies with water-cooler conversations.

The water-cooler has become a powerful metaphor as a central junction box in the hidden wiring of workplace conversations. It’s where events’ real significance is worked out. To support the skills and confidence DIY professionalism demands of staff and to connect up their experiments with professional roles and protocols,teaching needs more of these kinds of conversations.Conversations around the water-cooler require three things; a place to meet and talk (the cooler), shared experiences and rituals to talk about (an un-missable television programme, the Christmas party) and a sense of connection and recognition. As we have seen, teachers today lack something of all three. The focus of school reform on the ‘what and how’ of delivery has limited spaces for professional dialogue and reflection. (DIY Professionalism, John Craig and Catherine Fieschi, May 2007 Page 25, link )

Educational blogging can clearly enable these conversations in a way that meets some of the DEMOS requirements:

  1. a place to meet and talk
  2. shared experiences and rituals
  3. a sense of connection and recognition

The report includes many useful proposals that could help with development of our on-line community in East Lothian.

Student Quotes Work Well on Yester P7’s Benmore Blog May 28, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, Trip blogs, blogging , add a comment

Yester Benmore blogYester’s P7 class, on last week’s trip to Benmore, provide a good model for how to get the student’s voices onto the blog without too much time being lost to blogging. They used short quotes from many pupils, which went down very well indeed with their audience.

We’ve already seen from Law Primary P7’s Loch Insh trip that regular blog posts can be hugely popular with those left behind. Their first post from Loch Insh got 69 comments, for example.

Evidence is building up that this wasn’t a one-off. Longniddry Primary, for example, have successfully blogged trips from Ardmay and from Barga in Italy.

Today I noticed some exceptional feedback on the Yester P7 blog which I thought worth pulling together. Michael Purves and Lucinda Stuart did alternate posts of photos and news. Each “news” post included quotes from large numbers of pupils. This post, for example, Benmore, Day 2- Tuesday 22nd May, includes 20 pupil comments. Maybe this way of including contributions from such a large number of the pupils was a factor?
Here are some extracts from comments left which relate to the blog.

(more…)

Times Ed: Exc-el is leading the way in effective web use by schools April 7, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, Student blogging, blogging, communication, information literacy, internet safety, learning journals, social software , 2comments

TESSThis week’s Times Education Supplement Scotland (Friday, April 6th 2007) includes a feature we’ve been awaiting with interest on the use of social software in schools. Sue Leonard, the author, set out to investigate recent events where public web sites had been used to post anonymous comments on teachers. As part of her research, she contacted East Lothian to hear how we were using these tools.

You can read a cut-down version of the article on the Times Ed site. It’s in two parts, and the on-line version provides about 3/4 of each:

I’d been a bit worried that the article could so easily have painted a negative picture. It’s a relief to find that Sue’s interviews with some of the Exc-el community have provided more than just an abstract sense of balance: they’ve provided a tangible example of an alternative, positive way to view, and use, social software. I hope that’s helpful to people making decisions elsewhere.

It does make me think, though, we’ve got a much stronger story to tell, though, than can be covered in just a couple of pages. Although we’re trying to share what we’re doing via blogs, for example, we know that - by their nature - they’re preaching to the converted. They also tend to focus on a short time period; what we’ve done today, or this week, rather than what we’ve achieved over 6 months or a year.

There’s a gap here. We need to find ways of making it easy for people new to Exc-el to quickly get their heads round not just what it’s all about, but to find stories about successful examples they can build on.

Law Primary’s blog: 670 comments in under 5 weeks March 28, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, Parents as Partners, Primary, blogging , add a comment

If you’d like an example of how powerful an easy-to-use, interactive blog can be as a school web site, have a look at the Law Primary blog. This site was created on 23rd February 2007, so it’s not yet 5 weeks old - but has attracted 670 comments already. As always, there are surprises. Who’d have thought aspiring stars in the school show would use the blog to share their thoughts on the auditions?

Earliest writing on the web? March 4, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, Haddington Infant School, blogging , add a comment

Don’t know about you, but I don’t have any of my jotters from my Primary 3 days. The Primary 3 children at Haddington Infant School are in a completely different situation. Now that they’re writing regularly on their individual blogs, they’re publishing not only to a global audience that’s separated by geography, but also to a an audience separated by time - which could well include themselves as adults.

I’ve now shown these blogs to a few people, and it’s clear there’s something very special about seeing such early writing on the web. No doubt there’s more of the same elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it. Here’s an example from Erin of P3-8.

Super School

If I was Minister for Education I would get new chares for the teachers beacause some off them are riped and all the fluf is cuming out.I would get new bookes for the cumputers sweet beacause some of them are scrubeld on.Then I would put a new carpets in the classroom beacause thay are dirty. Link

This formative assessment project has moved into another stage now. The children have learned how to comment on one another’s blogs, and are starting to leave comments.

To make that easy, we’ve provided each child with a Blogroll consisting of links to every other P3 pupil’s blog. (An earlier post explains how we did that.) This means they can easily browse not only the work of other children in their class, but also that of pupils in other P3 classes in the school.

This is enabling peer feedback between children who aren’t working in class at the same time. Perhaps this places more importance on reading and writing than would take place if the peer feedback took place using jotters, between children who could supplement the reading and writing with verbal communication?

We went for the giant blogroll because we felt it important at this stage to offer one-click access to the peer blogs, and not tuck the list away, or break it down into class-sized chunks.

If you go to any one of these blogs, you can use the Blogroll to easily browse the others. I’m sure your feedback would be appreciated on their work to date. The first one on their blogroll list is Aaron’s blog.

Keeping Bubbleshare-ised blogs loading quickly February 8, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : Bubbleshare, Exc-el, WordPress, WordPress tips, blogging , 4comments

Bubbleshare Albums, such as those on the Pencaitland Primary Blog, are a great way to illustrate blog posts. But the blog can become slow to load if there are lots of Bubbleshare albums visible on the front page.

[bubbleshare 118790.b2ad07edbb5]

(If you’ve not tried this, activate the Bubbleshare plugin, then add a pointer to the album to your blog Posts - or Pages - like this: [bubbleshare*118790.b2ad07edbb5] (replace the * with a space) where the code part is album’s ID, easily visible from the URL.)

The reason for the slowdown is that each album contains a number of images, which visitors can play in-situ using a slide-show. (more…)

New Exc-el-wide Recent Posts widget January 15, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : Exc-el, WPMU, WordPress, blogging , 5comments

Any Exc-el blogger can now display the latest posts from the whole Exc-el blog system. All they need is a Sidebar Widget-friendly theme. (You can check themes for widget-friendliness here.)

It’s done with Skcsknathan001’s WPMU-Recent-Posts widget.

You can currently see it working in the right sidebar of this eduBuzz pilot blog.

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