Breaking the Fourth Wall – Introduction

As a class blog its appearance was definitely unremarkable. There is no engaging design-flashiness to draw anyone to read it, let alone a Year Six class made up of children of eight different nationalities and languages.

On 7th January 2001, however, Mr Ford’s Class Weblog accidentally found itself at the bleeding edge of edublogging. It marked for me the beginning of an experience that continues to define my career today. Over the years, it has also had an impact, directly or otherwise, on a fair few others too.

Ten years on and after re-discovering – with the help of the Wayback Machine – snapshots of my long-forgotten class blogs, it seems fitting to finally record in bite-size chunks some of the class-blogging memories, principles and approaches and that served me and my pupils so well. Those pupils are are now about twenty years old and I’m going to get hold of some of them to reflect on what they remember of their days as pioneering student bloggers. That should be interesting…

Do our experiences have anything to teach us about the use of class blogs today? Quite possibly… but when discussing the use of blogs I continue to defer to advice given to me by John Johnstone in 2006:

In the education timeline blogs have only been around for a millimetre or so. The possibilities are endless and many still to be discovered. It seems to me  far too early to decide what a blog should or should not be used for . Certainly no one should be laying down rules just yet.

That is as true today as it ever was. Hopefully this series of posts will offer some insights, ideas and challenges about class blogging that are useful. However, if I get all didactic on you, take what I say with a pinch of cyber-salt