Friday, July 09, 2004
Blog work in 'class'
After 3 days of reading and discussing articles and chapters addresing aspects of gender in relation to literacy achievement in school contexts we referred to the fact that weblogging is being seen by some teachers and schools as one possible way to 'engage' learners (and boys in particular) more fully with texts.
Participants who had portable computers with wireless access brought them along and we set up a wireless network using the trusty Airport. Groups formed around the 5 machines we were able to connect, and in no time a number group and individual blog shells appeared.
When these were in place we brought the group back together as a whole and one by one the blog 'shells' were projected onto the large screen, and used as vehicles for preliminary introductions to some html coding -- to insert hyperlinks, add images by hand (as an option to using the handy bloggerbot resource), etc. After a couple of hours the following blogs were in place.
To end the day the small groups discussed the potential they saw and did not see in webblogs as a classroom application in light of their preliminary 'outings'. The potential of blogs will be explored and discussed further as a theme during the second week of the course.
