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
This 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:
- THE BAD - a discussion of problems arising from the use of a US-based site by students to make comments on teachers in Scottish schools. Perhaps inevitably, and despite inclusion of supportive arguments from the site’s founder, it paints a dark picture.
- THE GOOD - a review of Exc-el, based on interviews with Don Ledingham, Lynne Lewis and Barry Smith. In addition to the on-line text, there’s coverage in the full article of the Pencaitland Primary blog and Preston Lodge High School’s Active Learning Partnerships (ALPs) programme and the student learning logs.
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.
Learning Journals - Jennifer Moon October 24, 2006
Posted by David Gilmour in : blogging, books, learning journals , 2comments
I had a look through Jennifer Moon’s book Learning Journals while in a bookshop at the weekend. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone might have written such a book. (I guess they hadn’t: it sounded like she’d written it to plug the gap.) The thing that really struck me about it, knowing what I do about blogs, is the extent to which blogs could support the various kinds of activities described in the book - see Amazon synopsis below.
