First Lines Blog

Think of the First Lines Blog as a bag of props to help inspire us over the writing starting line.The whole school community can add ideas and resources that are designed to help us to create! This is not a project that needs to be finished but could evolve over many weeks months and years.

The First Lines blog might contain a great opening to a pupil’s story or poem, an idea, a headline from a newspaper, a photo taken on a school trip or a piece of atmospheric music created in a music lesson or at home. The possibilities are only confined by our imaginations.

In my classroom there was a box containing various photos, news headlines, bus tickets, jottings and other random objects of varying size, colour and odour. Students would both rake through it when they wanted some inspiration for writing, and also add to it as they came across the weird and wonderful in their everyday lives and travels. One pupil added a seed pod washed up on a beach in Jamaica. It looked and felt smooth and soothing, doubling too as a shaker-type instrument. Another added an Oscar Award replica statue and yet another a descriptive set of made-up words we had cooked up during a literacy session. Sometimes it contained a smattering of wood shavings because someone hadn’t managed to find the bin when sharpening their pencil. We never found out the culprit but we did write a series of poems about the ‘Elusive Sharpener’ who left his calling cards around the school. We suspected they were working in a gang.

Who owned this box? We all did! Both teacher and student had a stake in it – both were responsible for adding interesting objects for the benefit of others. We all used the box at some point during the year. It wasn’t a magic box though. Sometimes it gave us ideas and inspiration for writing and sometimes it didn’t. However, the box was more than just a box of ideas for writing – it was a box of our ideas for writing, an expression of our creative and collaborative intent.

The First Lines blog idea is like an online version of the above box. In a very small way, it seeks to extend the climate of collaboration and creativity that we are all looking to develop in the meatspace of our classrooms, into the online arena. It is important that we develop that link between our class community online and in physical space, aiming for a responsibility and creative ethos that branches both areas.

A class could throw in their own ideas and stimuli to the First Lines blog as and when they feel like it, serving the class community as a whole while exercising their own creative processes online. The blog can just evolve over time like an ongoing, organic, online scrapbook.

The actual process of setting up a blog like this is covered in the Teachers’ Notes and the First Lines Guidelines are there too.

This is just a proof-of-concept in a continuing series of ideas for using blogs in schools.

Blog 101

Room 101 was the room in George Orwell’s novel ‘1984′ which contained “the worst thing in the world”. Programme makers have taken this concept and turned it into a TV show in which various celebrities talk about things that they hate.

On Blog 101 you are the celebrity. You now have the chance to banish some of your worst nightmares to the depths of Blog 101. What are your pet hates and why are they worth banishing to Blog 101? Your reasons will be put to the vote to see if your arguments are persuasive enough.

I’ve been exercising my mind recently to come up with some hopefully creative and fun ways to use blogs. The Blog 101 idea came up in conversation with one of my students so we created a blog and built up the basic content for getting the idea off the ground.

Here is the process after the initial blog has been created. We are using a multi-user install of WordPress but the principles could be applied to most blogging software.

1. Fill in the About page to outline the plan for the blog.
2. Create a Guidelines page.
3. Create three new categories – Nominated Item – Entered Blog 101 – Escaped Blog 101
4. Create an initial post to model the type of writing in nominating something to go into Blog 101.
5. Use the comments on the nominated item post above to discuss with students the merits or non-redeeming features of the proposed Blog 101 entrant.
6. Use the democracy plug-in (or other polling software) to create and display a poll about the nominated item.
7. Run the vote for a set amount of time.
8. Edit the initial post to be added to the ‘Entered Blog 101′ or ‘Escaped Blog 101′ category.

Once you have been through the process once, you can let students start to nominate their own entrants to Blog 101. If you add students as users to the blog with ‘Contributor’ access they will be able log in and write a nominating post that will need to be moderated by the teacher before publishing.

This blog could be used in many curricular areas to address a whole range of issues and styles of writing. If anyone would like to propose an entry into Blog 101 or collaborate with some of my students or schools then feel free to leave a comment. Feel free to vote on the issues as well.

Creative ICT Spring Innovations Conference

The Creative ICT Spring Innovations Conference took place yesterday at Chorlton Park School in Manchester organised by John Sutton. About thirty teachers sacrificed their Saturday and were rewarded with some engaging presentations, workshops and some very pleasing food. I presented as well. The conference blog gives an insight into what was going on and recording of the sessions will probably follow soon. Bits and pieces from my presentation are here.

The new technique I tried out for my presentation was using a bubbl.us online brainstorm to gather some ideas from the audience during the presentation but I left too little time for it. Before the conference I had used the bubblr.us plugin for WordPress to set up a page on the blog with an embedded version of the bubbl.us brainstorm sheet. This meant that as I updated the sheet on the bubl.us site with the audience’s ideas, it was automatically saving the changes to the blog version. This has superb possibilities when working with students. Any brainstorm you complete in class – automatically saved to a blog and updated when you make changes – ready for further collaboration online. Only a proof of concept but definitely something I will be using again – the version I completed during the session is here and one I made earlier is here.

One who would never try out new ideas ‘on the fly’ during a presentation is Russell Prue. Russell was an entertaining and effective presenter with a strong and inspiring message, calling for a change in strategy at the school level to embrace technologies that are already in the hands of students. I can see why he is gainfully employed at every educational ICT conference over the length and breadth of the country and am going to buy his book ‘The Science of Evangelism‘ to find the secret of his presentation success;-) I’m quite surprised that he doesn’t blog – he seems the type to me.

It was good as well to meet Paul Harrington who travelled all the way from Wales and who is switched on the possibilities of new technologies in the classroom. He could have at least touched up the photos though to take a few kilos off both me and Russell. At least Russell got some exercise which is more than can be said for Peter ’15 slices of quiche and 47 sandwiches’ Ford !

BlogDesk

As an offline weblog client, BlogDesk lets you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog.

BlogDesk is a simple yet effective desktop application that allows you to write off-line with all the same functionality and categories that you would have on your blog. For those situations where internet access is patchy, or where you might have no access at all, such as on school field trips, BlogDesk allows the blogging experience and organisation, including the uploading of pictures or audio, and the use of categories. The publishing can happen instantaneously or the posts can be saved to be released at another time when the blogger has connectivity.

Another positive of BlogDesk is the frequently-used phrases feature that could easily be used in the classroom as a blogging wordbank. Click on the example below to see how I added some story starters and phrases to encourage students to give credit to their sources. They simply click on the phrase and insert it into the post.

Getting the students to build up a creative and supportive bank of phrases for their peers’ blogging would be another way to encourage a collaborative attitude within the class community in ‘meatspace’.

Templates for blog posts can also be created within BlogDesk, effectively allowing the creation of writing frames to help scaffold student writing. Like all good software – it is simple and could be put to a whole number of uses. I’m just scratching the surface here but will be putting it through its paces with my students next week.

BlogDesk is available for free download.

You’re so vain…

I bet you think this blog is about you!