Finally! The students of LA19 are now up and running with their blogs. If you click on their names on the links menu on the left of this blog then you’ll be able to see how they’re going. As always, this is a new bunch of bloggers so they may need a little time to find their feet, but if their current enthusiasm is anything to go by then I’m sure they’ll soon be true professionals. Remember, students progress at different speeds so please be patient with us as we begin our new blogs.

Now the blogs have been created it’s about time we started moving things along. This week sees the first blogging task to be set for the new group of students bloggers. Hopefully, by the end of this week, it would be great to see all the blogs have a set theme, header, background and greeting. Also, an initial post to welcome people to your blog would be a great idea, or, if you feel ready, a post on a topic you feel is worth sharing with the world. Don’t forget, all posts and images need to adhere to our strict code of conduct. The writing has to be clear and accurate and the images must either be your own or licensed for re-use. Good luck and have fun!

“You can’t rush perfection,” I think someone once said (if they didn’t they should have). This is what I keep telling myself at the moment as I guide the new students through the initial stages of their blogging year. I know it’s true, the students from last year did such an amazing job on the back of the careful preparation they went through before they were allowed to burst onto the ‘net. All year they didn’t just talk about safe online practices they actually used them. Not once did a student give away personal details or information that could leave them compromised. It was just another example of the true usefulness of blogging.

Anyway, the new group have completed their first task, looking at other blogs to see what makes a good one and what makes a bad one (they’re all out there!) and this week they’ll be onto the all important discussions on safety, etiquette and copyright. Not long now!

The first excursion for the year has been organised and the notes have gone home, clutched tightly in the palms of the excited LA19 students. Well, I say excursion, it’s actually just a walk around the local area – the streets they play on everyday. There is a very important educational aspect to it, however, which is to address the requirements of the Geography strand of the year 7 Australian Curriculum. We’ll be carrying out traffic and environmental surveys at several points on our walk to start our investigations into the “live-ability” of an area. We’ll put our findings together, compare the different locations within our area, then compare these with other areas. I know it isn’t much of an excursion, but sometimes just getting out of the classroom is all the excitement we need.

The new header is up and what a great photo it is! It’s very much like the one I had for my class last year, only this year I had the students arrange themselves in three rows instead of two in order to see them a little more clearly. The photo doesn’t just look good, but it serves a very practical purpose. Having the students create their own personalised mask reinforces, in a physical way, one of the most important aspect of the whole blogging experience – protection of our identity and ourselves.

Some of the students, nine to be exact, were in my class last year and are still blogging away. However, that means twenty are brand new to blogging and are about to embark on a few necessary preliminary activities (as mentioned briefly in my previous post) to prepare themselves for the blogging year ahead. The first activity, which we hope to start this week if we can get the computers (which teacher hasn’t uttered those words before?) will be all about looking at other blogs to see what exactly makes a good one. We’ll be looking at layout, colour (especially text), images, frequency of posts, widgets, topic variety – in fact the whole kit and caboodle! The next step will be to look at the Blogging Guides page on this blog (to the right) and having an in-depth discussion of: the importance of privacy, the format for posts, the etiquette for comments and the serious issue of copyright.

The students’ blogs have already been created and are just waiting for them to be ready. Not long now – watch this space!

The start to 2014 has gone so smoothly it almost seems that we haven’t been away. The new students have come together easily, partly because they already know each other in some way, but also because they’re actually just a decent bunch of young people. They will soon be getting their new blogs, but first they have to complete the initial work to ensure they are ready to face the world in a safe and stylish manner.

The first thing the students will do to prepare them for blogging will be to look at the blogs of other students around the world to figure out what actually makes a good blog. They’ll look at layout, colours, images, posts, in fact everything that makes a blog interesting and fun. Then they’ll have to demonstrate their understanding of safe blogging and the all important copyright issues. Once all this has been done we’ll be ready to go. Knowing the calibre of the students in LA19 this year I reckon we’ll have some fabulous bloggers in 2014.

It’s still amazes me how the six week summer holiday seems so long when we start it, but it always feels like it’s disappeared too quickly by the end. However, that’s not to say that I’m disappointed to be returning to school for a new year with my new class. Well, I say “new class”, but I do have some students that I had last year so there will be quite a few familiar faces. The reason for this is that while the students moved up a year so did I. This year my class are year 7s, the last time this will occur in Western Australia as we move into line with the rest of the country where primary years only go to 6. This will be their last year with us before they graduate to high school so let’s hope it’s a successful and enjoyable one.

Good luck to all the students and staff (and myself) for 2014 and I’ll see you all Monday.

The previous post entitled “Bali Holiday” helped me improve my skills a little when it comes to uploading photo’s from my iPhone. If you saw my initial post then you’ll remember that the images were a lot smaller than they are now. The reason for that was because the option the app gave me when I uploaded the photo’s was similar to the usual site and I consequently chose the “small” option, as I generally do. Unfortunately this made the images too small to see properly and they couldn’t be enlarged like those uploaded from a camera can by clicking on them. So, I went back to my iPhone, deleted the originals and reloaded them, this time choosing to make them “medium”. I chose this as they are just the right size to view, any bigger and they would have taken over the page. Lesson learned and I’ll bear it in mind for the future.

Last year the students in my class asked if they could listen to music while we worked. This in itself doesn’t sound too drastic a request and as they were a very reasonable bunch I was tempted on several occasions. The students followed this request with assurances that listening to music while they studied helped them to relax and therefore perform better. However, this has always been a bit of a debatable claim in my mind, especially as my own experience in listening to music while I studied only resulted in me becoming totally distracted and ultimately drifting off into “song land”. Well, at the risk of upsetting my former students (and the ones to come), I recently came across an article from David Cutler, a teacher in Florida who clearly had the same misgivings as myself. He cites research from Dr Nick Perham from Cardiff University in Wales who conducted experiments to finally solve this ongoing dilemma. I won’t go into the details here, but the upshot of the research was that listening to music while studying has a clear negative effect on performance. I don’t wish to be a killjoy, or be the instigator of a new area of parent/child confrontation, but it’s true.  If you want to check out the very interesting and well written details click the link to David’s page above. A small “Sorry” in advance to my new class.