Year 9 Student Blogs

Well, that was an exciting hour - my 25 year 9 students (13-14 years old) have just created a blogger identity and some have managed their first post. I look forward to sharing a link (student permitting) to some of these new blogs.

When we we got to the bit about setting up our profiles on blogger I suggested the kids add their full name, address, phone number and a picture! This provoked a storm of debate until someone commented "he's just being sarcastic". We decided first name, city and some interests were OK to post - or should I say they decided. It's great they have such a strong sense of online security issues.

Over the past few classes (I see them once a week) we have been learning about Adobe Dreamweaver. All the usual stuff for and introductory course - text, image and link formatting... The students were interested but not hugely engaged. We didn't discuss this lack of engagement but I suspect they knew the Dreamweaver task was a task going nowhere, that it would have no practical application in their lives.

I still think there's a place for the teaching of web design - we have a 2 year course here for seniors where we teach .css, html, Coldfusion and MySQL - after all, who's going to make the Blogger applications of the future?

I asked the students about their use of various social networking sites; interestingly only 1/3 have Bebo, MySpace, Facebook or whatever. I plan to survey some other classes and year levels as 1/3 use is not what I've read with regard to teenager use of social networking sites.

The kids were hugely engaged with the process of setting up a Blogger account. They saw how they could own the site, how what they wrote was immediately available to all, how people (friends) could comment.

Next lesson - some further posts, sharing of blog URLs, comments on their friends blogs followed by a blog aggregator. From my perspective, working with excited kids, rather than compliant kids, is very cool.