Some initial thoughts on learners, language, children, blogs and experiences.

As a teacher I have been keen for the pupils to be involved in blogging as I recognise that it is another environment for, shall we say, the pupil centred experience.  I had had some problems with Word Press blogs in glow previously so had gone down the line of using the built-in blogs within sharepoint but found them a little limiting and awkward to use beyond simply typing a post (especially linking to media in sharepoint).

Since signing up to the Bootcamp it has brought my motivation back to give the pupils the ‘blogging’ experience and so I quickly created two primary 7 blogs for both our p7 classes. As the blogs are public on the bootcamp, we also took the decision to encourage parents to comment; the new blogs coincided with the annual primary 7 trip away from school for a whole week. Inspite of the very limiting hardware and internet connectivity many posts were made.  I found it exciting  to read and to see examples of the activities they were doing; and what fun they seemd to be having!

Back at school! So now the pupils have been asked to post a reflection on their week away. A class of pupils is of course wide in range when it comes to being a learner and being a social animal.  Many pupils these days are heavily into social media that has already laid down its own rules or codes of conduct. A wide range of social media apps are used by children of all ages ( and apps that parents and older children are not even aware of).

So really, it is questions that are going through my head at the moment.  How to organise blogging with pupils under the pretext of learning and teaching? In school we aim to teach language skills that are fit for the purpose creating a range of text types, such as, information, explanation, persuasion, imaginery and poetry etc.  In the ‘real’world before 9.00am and after 3.00pm the children have learned and are using other forms of text types that stimulate them and excite them and seem more relevant. How do w, as learners and teachers negotiate the blog space, within the context of education, where all these text types seem to collide?

Any comments gladly welcomed.