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David Gilmour

Wednesday 17 May 2006

Took part in a meeting at Prestonpans Education Centre on Monday to explore next steps in student blogging. Hosted by Karen Robertson, ICT Curriculum Officer, it included a number of enthusiastic primary teachers. It was good to meet Richard Wilson and Jonny Baxter, both of whom I knew via Exc-el. I knew Richard at once from the picture on his blog .

The pilot is based on the Typepad hosted weblogging service, which is one of the market leaders. The idea is to base this work on a product that's designed for the purpose, and as easy to use as possible. Exc-el weblogs, such as this one, are written using the eZpublish content management system. It's more complicated, so doesn't have such a child-friendly user interface.

There's a prototype blog at http://exc-elspace.typepad.co.uk/ . We had a look at the user interface, and managed to work out - eventually - how to make our changes publish to the web.

Possible application ideas so far include using student blogs for:

  • Learning Logs - reflective diaries of day-to-day learning experience
  • Enabling conversations that wouldn't otherwise be easy, such as across transition stages, e.g. P7 to S1

We talked about the practicalities of how things might work, such as what rules might be needed re identification. It's another kind of web site, so the rules set out by LTS in their document Creating and Managing a School Web Site provide a good framework.

Next step is for us all to have a look at the product, get familiar with it, and start getting some pilots under way.

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