Blogging – has it worked for you?

This year LA19 was the first class in the school to be given blogs. Your task this time is to write about your experience of having a blog. Has it been a good experience? Has it had any educational value for you? Have you enjoyed it? Has it helped you learn how to be safe online? How has it been different to the normal writing we usually do at school? Write what you think (after all, that’s what the blogs are for) and give a review of your year of being a blogger.

Malala Yousafzai, the young girl shot in the head by Taliban attackers is beginning to show signs of improvement in a Birmingham hospital in the UK.

This excellent speech from Sir Ken Robinson questions our motivation for the current direction of education. It goes for around 20 minutes but is very worthwhile, so stick with it.

Airpano.com is an excellent site that can be used easily on the iPads. It offers panoramic scenes of major cities and sites around the world via overhead, 360 degree views. I’ve used it as a motivation for students writing a compare and contrast text. The students had three columns to fill with dot points: the left column for Hong Kong, the right column for St. Petersburg and the centre column for features similar to both cities. Choosing two cities such as Hong Kong and Saint Petersburg in Russia allows for a variety of features for the students to consider. However, a bonus for me was the stimulation for descriptive oral language which came out of the activity. This makes me think that it could be used for lower age groups for viewing/language lessons where writing isn’t the focus. Where writing is the focus then it becomes quite an inclusive English activity.

Make sure you click on the iPad option to view each panorama if using the iPads.

Thanks to ICT Magic for the link.

I have been very impressed with the opinions of the students in LA19 on the Malala issue. In particular, I think Jaycee’s piece was extremely well written and a mature perspective on this tragic event. Well done everyone.

There is so much happening in the world at the moment that we simply cannot ignore. We all, in LA19, come to school and take our right to do so for granted, some even try to avoid it. But how much of a fight would we put up if it was taken away from us? Well, this is happening now, around the world. Read this and perhaps blog your thoughts. Remember, Malala is only 14 and was known by the Taliban because she wrote a blog!

Due to some very foreseen circumstances (my holidays in the UK) this blog will be a little quiet for the next 4 weeks. I am hoping to post a few things to keep it ticking along but there will be no new Blogging Tasks for this period. Feel free to keep looking in and check out the students’ blogs; they are not yet on holiday so they should hopefully have new posts to check out.

In the meantime I would like my students to take a few minutes to review your own blogging practice by reading this excellent and important post by Ronnie Burt on, of all things, salami. Actually, it’s not really about salami, but about an eleven year old blogger who failed to check whether the image he posted was free to use. If you wish to include media that’s free to use in your posts then another excellent resource is Wikimedia Commons.

Watch this inspirational video made by students.

Read this article and write your opinion on the debate. Do you agree with the school or not? Does the school have a valid argument for what it did? Let me know. Write a post on your own blog giving your opinion.

Julian Opie was an artist who came to fame following his creation of the iconic Blur album cover in 2000. I recently came across a website called ArtisanCam (courtesy ICTmagic) that lets you create a portrait in the Opie style. However, I had to chuckle as my students have already ‘been there – done that’, and all by themselves! Check out their examples on the Class News page through the link on the right and I’m sure you’ll agree they’re very cool. The art was created using the Brushes app on the iPads, using layers over an original photo (uploaded via Dropbox). Give it a go yourself as, like they said to Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, “We have the technology…”