SETT – Creating Communities – Susan Ronnie
Started off at Ewan and David’s seminar on Creating Communities where Bebo was discussed. It is meant to be for over 13s but many children of 8 use it. The least used feature seems to be blogs with children preferring to make comments on other blogs, post pictures of their favourite bands and photos of their friends. But most of all they seem to crave the attention of having as many online friends as possible.
We were shown an example from Sandaig Otters of how to get your class blog read by other people and John Johnson talked about what he does with his class. Posting a request for help generates visits to your site. John had also put posters in local shops advertising a school field trip and this had created an online community of parents through the blog who had never spoken to each other before.
Every child at Sandaig had written a verse of a poem which the P7s blogged for the younger ones. This picked up lots of comments online which they printed out and gave back to the writers. This blossomed into another project where an American teacher asked to do a collaborative project making up a play based on the poem. She then sent the play and props to Sandaig for the children there to put on – a great collaborative project! http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/dream_dragon.php
Later went to the TeachMeet
(photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/edublogger/sets/72157594289391549/ ) where Pam McDowall from Inchinnan and I were inspired to think about setting up a collaborative blog for Beginners’ French in our schools. Pam has already started her own personal blog.
4 comments September 21st, 2006
