OPLS blog

During a Will Richardson session at NECC 08, this blog, by 11 year-old Laura Stockman, was highlighted:

Laura started the blog in December 2007, after wanting to do something in honour of her grandfather who tragically died of brain cancer in 2005. He had been an inspiration to her over many years and so she decided, beginning Dec 1, to do 25 things that would make a difference each day leading up to Christmas. She decided to blog about what she had done in the hope that it would inspire others to do something similar.

It’s a wonderful example of how doing lots of small things locally can have a significant impact far beyond what was originally intended. Just take a look at the comments people are leaving and where they’re checking in from to see how widespread her readership now is.

Pedagogically, it’s also a great example of how a primary school student can reflect on her own learning on an on-going basis.

The blog reminds me of the key purpose of the IB community theme project, which encourages all members of the IB community to engage with some serious global issues, such as infectious diseases, the digital divide, peace & conflict etc, and actually do something about them - no matter how small that action might be. Two great examples are highlighted here:

“Make poverty history” a post by Sofia Thorell from a school in Norway describing all sorts of ways you can make a difference.

“Community and curriculum” a post by Randy McCord detailing how his economics students not only learned about development economics but actually experienced a much deeper understanding by putting it into action.

We now have over 2000 schools and 600,000 students. That’s a lot of small things adding up to a big difference. And as you’ll see from Laura’s blog and the examples outlined above, this difference can been sustained beyond the original “25 days”.

Yesterday, I found out that blogging will reach its tenth birthday on 17 December 2007. Extraordinary.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was the use of voicethread to power comments and reflections on the article itself.

I encourage you to explore this tool. It provides a great way to share narratives, reflection and rich media commenting. Run the demo to see for yourself and watch for Sord Dragin Man.

I think the success of this lies in the fact that it is so easy to capture what you want to say, ie voice via phone or mic, text and video doodling, webcam, and audio file. Importing media looks straight forward too and I particularly like the link up with flickr.

So, the impact on teaching and learning? Well, clearly, it’s another interesting tool for encouraging peer reflection in our students. There are also possibilities for critically evaluating a piece of artwork or poem, for example. Or even simply collaborating on a work in progress. Once again, we are limited only by our own imaginations.

Except, of course, through the read/write web, we don’t have to be limited to our own imagination, but can share our ideas and experiences with others. Happy birthday, therefore, to blogging

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Samorost and Samorost 2 - fantasy, Flash-based games by Amanita.

The discussion has centred on how the games have been used in creative writing classes in primary schools and the dramatic impact they have had on improving student outcomes in this area.

One teacher has blogged about her experiences with it and you can see a summary of her principal entries below:

• Setting the scene: stating the initial issues, eg “Descriptions of any sort seem quite hard for my students to write – they consist of basic details of what can be seen, without any emotional connection to either character or setting.”
• Initial reactions from students: “When you activate certain objects or certain people you have to think how it will affect your surroundings.” Martin. “When we worked as a team we did well. Everyone thought it was exciting so they all wanted a turn.” Timothy
• Student responses and outputs: setting the scene and putting themselves in the character’s shoes
• Six Thinking Hats and Samorost: The teacher used de Bono’s six Thinking Hats to help structure her reflections and evaluation of the experience.
• Final reflections: a wonderful final reflection post, looking back on why it went so well. Read the comments too - they help frame the post.

If this isn’t a great example of a teacher’s e-portfolio, I don’t know what is.

For me, one of the more successful uses of blogs in schools is when there is a real sense of collective ownership - students, teachers, parents etc.

This example, from a school based here in Wales, follows the progress of an exchange visit to Grünstadt, Germany.

I don’t know how long it will last, but the students certainly appear to have enjoyed themselves and there is some good modelling of language by the teachers.