BRJ Mission Day Blog

Taking lots of inspiration from Steve’s blog and the work he is doing in Shropshire schools, I have unashamedly pinched his ideas and tried to blog our year 9 mission day. 10 year 9 students, 2 sixth formers and 2 staff armed with cameras and mp3 players tried to capture the essence of year 9 mission day in pictures and interviews. You can see the blog here and it is still very much in production. We used flickr to store our photos and box.net to store our movies and sound files. Some post production on the interviews was carried out using audacity.

It was a good day on the whole but quite a steep learning curve for all concerned. The main problem was the lack of time and everything was a bit rushed, however, the students did come back the following day to try and finish things off.

del.icio.us in the classroom

Have tried the following lesson with years 7, 8 & 9 – it seems to have gone quite well so far…

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   1. Firstly, I ask the students to open three different internet explorer windows with three of their favourite websites (they like this bit). Then we have a bit of a discussion on how they can easily get back to these pages again. Nearly all of them will talk about favourites and we talk about the fact that their favourites go with them around college because its part of their network profile. However, they can’t access those pages from their computer at home.
   2. Then I introduce del.icio.us and show them how to register, download the various buttons and post to delicious. They open up another IE window for del.icio.us, register and then post their three favourite sites (and others) to del.icio.us. We also have a quick chat about tagging.
   3. At this point I explain that all they are doing is using a glorified favourites page but the clever bit comes when you are able to look at and share the posts of others. Usually, I simply pick a child in the class, ask them their user name and we have a look at their links. I then show them how to add their friends using the “your network” section and then they head off and do that for a bit.
   4. Lastly, I explain that there is a site that I would like to share with them from my del.icio.us and I send it to 4 students in the class using the for: tag. These students then pass on the site to the person next to them and the chain continues until all the students in the class have the site posted on their del.icio.us.

Now then, it seems to work well as an introduction but where do I go from here? How do I sustain its use within the classroom before the kids become disinterested and forget their login details?