Blog Juice for Educational Technology

It’s been a while since I wrote, but I have been reading. However, this is only half a conversation. I would like to post more often and now that the first week of the new year is past, maybe I’ll get into a routine of writing befor school (if I get there early enough). We can but hope. The first week went well. My year 8 class have started to set up their blogs with Learnerblogs and I can’t wait to see what they make of it. I have set up a wiki with Wikispaces for my homegroup and we hope to get that started pretty soon. With the wiki I hope that the students will be able to create a record of their year the highs and the lows the learning and the friendships and that it will be able to be put on disc to beput into the year 7s who are in my howmgroup’s time capsules. We’ll see. I will also be starting with blogs for my year 9 class. This class however is not ever booked into a computer lab so we will have to borrow a class set of laptops (which is only 15) for a class of 24, but I’m sure we will cope. I have planned more carefully for this class so that they get enough time to participate in the Literature circles. I have learned that they need about a week between meetings to get their reading done. I also want to have focus groups with volunteers and have planned for those as well. I want to write a narrative to explore how I have come to these understanding of what I have to do in order to ensure that the students have the conditions they need in which to maximise their learning, but that will have to wait for now. The staff area is filling up as teachers come in on this Monday morning and I know I have to turn my attention now to what is around me.