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Posterous offers the opportunity for class blogging free from some of the limitations of a standard school VLE. It allowed my students to use a versatile and flexible platform which would enable multi-posting and the potential to open up to wider audiences.

The Year 8 class (students aged between 12-13), were scheduled to work on a group Media project. After discussion, they decided to create a site in which they tried to offer help and advice to their parent in understanding how they use technology.

Initial ideas for features included: a guide to the mysteries of facebook and chatrooms;  advice on which phone is best for a child; and advice on how long their children should be allowed to spend on the net.

We wanted to go beyond the class magazines/newspaper approach and so, together, created the following brief using in terms of a TAPs analysis:

• Type: multi-media blog;
• Audience: parents;
• Purpose: writing to argue, persuade or advise.

Although the easiest arrangement would have been to create a new site ‘off’ s3atlarge, it seemed better that a school’s site should not ‘point’ to an independent site.

One of the joys of Posterous is that it automates so many things. However, I couldn’t find a way of removing links back to my personal site. It took a little while to work out that one way was  to severe the link to my primary email address by creating a new dedicated email account.

The ‘How to Do It’ bit:

Create an email account simply for the project. I used gmail. This meant that the site would link directly to this account and that all notifications coming from successful points could gather in one place.

Using this new email account, create a new Posterous account. URLs do tend to be rather long, so I used a shortened form for the primary site with a longer name appearing on pages.

Having logged in to Posterous, use the Manage section to add the emails of students as Contributors who wish to post directly to the site. Students can also create dedicated email accounts for this to give greater personal security. (Our school network seemed happy with gmail accounts but we seemed to meet some restrictions on hotmail equivalents.)

During the writing process (and practice phase) I ‘locked down’ the system with a password so that only my class could read the posts. This gave us some time to practice posting, enabled some peer proof-reading, encouraged students to compare the ‘look’ of different kinds of posts, and let me keep an eye on the content and any personal security issues e.g  We discovered that forwarded emails gave full details of email addresses and so these were edited out.

The password can then be either given out to the intended audience (in this case - their parents) to allow reading and comment posting, or removed entirely to let the site ‘go live’.

What's next?

That’s where we are up to at the moment. Once parents have had a look and everyone is happy, I’ll remove the password and post a link here. Here's the link!

The students were genuinely excited at the idea of writing for a real audience, and it would be great if they could see their work being read beyond their local community. Perhaps we can track this using Google analytics in due course.

Inspired by Posterous, a couple of years ago I had my Year 8 students create a class blog. It was set up to read like the School Newsletter for the Year 2013 and worked pretty well I even if I say so myself. Because all this was pretty new, I wanted to keep control of posting and so created a site 'off' this one, and did all the mailing myself.

Time and classes move on, and this year's group are planning a blog which is a guide for parents about issues relating to technology.

I don't want 'their' blog to have direct links to this one (one is part of school whereas the ideas in this one are mine) and so I hit on the idea of creating a whole new Posterous place. That would need another email address, I figured, so I created one on gmail.

The problem came when I wasn't happy with the name of the new site, but couldn't see how to change it.

Then I started to get confused as I moved between sites. When I tried to 'Manage' a site, I wasn't always where I expected! I think the problem was about remembering to log in and out of sites carefully as I moved between them.

So, thinking this through, I think I need to start again and :

1. Create another email (gmail?) account.
2. Create a new Posterous and name it carefully!
3. Add the students' email addresses as contributors.

I need to be pretty careful to keep note of the various log ons and passwords don't I?

Also, I guess the name we really wanted will now not be available because I have already claimed it in practising all this. Bother!

Will this embed automatically, I wonder?

I used this first on a VLE page for students at Primary school before they transferred to Secondary as a way of 'softening' the content.

Perhaps it amused me more than them, but I think it could be a useful addition to ways of drawing attention to particular bits of information such as deadlines and 'things to do'.

Full details can be found at the Voki website, so I won't repeat them here.

This is an example of Spezify search on poet 'Simon Armitage'

I keep looking at how my students go about searching for information. I had a class the other day who needed some illustrations to go with a review of Robert Swindell’s brilliant novel ‘Stone Cold’, and was surprised to see  the same two images appear on no less than six screens. With seemingly limitless resources available, that seemed pretty disheartening.

Perhaps I need to teach my students how to search; I’ll return to this in a later post. For now though, I’m interested in how a different search engine might liberate my students. Spezify seems to fit the bill – particularly for those first tentative explorations of a new topic.

Its non-hierarchical visual listings of images, texts, chat and music presents the user with a searchable mosaic of links.

Well worth a look!

Useful hints:

Click Space bar to get an overview and then return.

You can filter by types from the icons at the top right.

Clicking on the star icon on the bottom left of resources puts them into a Favourites folder. This is useful in class as it allows some prior selection by the teacher and is a great way of introducing Spezify to group.

The Skills section could be of interest to KS3/4/5 students and beyond and includes The English Course with advice on  spelling and punctuation.

There is also an excellent section on ‘Writing and words’ which includes advice on troublesome words and champions the cause of clarity.

Here is not the place to go in to the issue of whether it is part of the BBC’s remit to be creating sites like this: let’s just be thankful they have.

An initial response to ‘Talking, learning and formative assessment’ – a CPD session presented on 3rd Dec 2010 by Dr Phil Scott of Leeds University.

Dr Phil Scott appealed to us to reconsider our use of talk in the classroom to move away from the teacher and towards the students by using talk ‘as a basis for thought’.

The initiation-response- evaluation model is the most commonly used sequence of exchange as teachers chase the answers they require. Dr Phil Scott argues that we should consider moving towards a ‘dialogic’ or ‘communicative approach’ to increases motivation, understanding and learning.

He offered the following model which he using during lesson observations with student undergoing Initial Teacher Training:

ie ‘interactive’ indicates talk between teacher and student

    ‘non-interactive’ implies speech is significantly between students (although it might be mediated by the teacher).

Perhaps what needed expansion were the authoritative (closed) dialogic (open) categories. In many ways, I could think of these as a continuum, and I’d wonder if the selection they might be thought of as reflecting the degree of ‘certainty’ in the answer sought? There are bodies of knowledge that are closed, accepted, factual which can be efficiently searched out using IRE techniques for purposes of both formative and summative assessment. However, when moving onto opinionated, tentative, interpretational or analytical learning, then a ‘dialogic view’ might be more effective in promoting deep learning. It would be interesting also to think about this dimension in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy too: are the higher order skills more likely to be gained by the dialogic approach?

My view is that we should perhaps move towards this communicative, non-interactive form when it is the most effective way to promote learning, but the example used in the presentation (a discussion on ordering a series of numbers of one and two decimal places) seemed to me to be one in which there was a low level of uncertainty: there is a ‘correct’ answer. Surely this is a case when, having seen students making errors (and there is no ‘nearly right’ here, by the way) the teacher has a formative  or ‘assessment for learning’ opportunity which says the students don’t understand. Here is a case when the most efficient method would be to explain place value again.

The assertion that the dialogic discussion contained in the transcript was ‘deeper learning’ is not entirely convincing either. The claim that it was motivating and powerful might be questioned because it is only an impression and also because it does not take note of the learning of those not speaking. Have other students followed the tentative progress towards the correct answer, or have they simply turned off? Talk in the classroom is difficult to evaluate because study will tend to focus on the participants rather than the ‘observers’.