Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Make things easy

Ann (Lead Teacher) at Ravensbourne started a blog last year. She wants the children to take ownership of the blog this year. Several of her children have an interest and skills using the computer and she has a system set up for the children to use the computer during reading time.

She would like two of her students to help and train the other children in her class to post stories and a picture to illustrate their story onto the blog. Her two blog trainers were lovely to work with and they had everything sorted in 15 minutes. Very impressive.

Ann and I spent a lot of time making it easy for the class to access the blog on all ten of the classroom computers. One thing which helps raise the effective use of class blogs and wikis is to make the blog or wiki the homepage of all of the class computers. So when children open the Internet the first thing they see is their blog/wiki. It is also important to put a link in the toolbar of the browser (Internet explorer, FireFox, Safari) so that if children somehow get a bit confused they can click on this link and go straight back to their blog or wiki.

We signed into the blog on all of the computers and got the computers to remember the passwords etc so the children won't have to do this. This just takes all of the hold ups out of the learning and lets children get on with the task you have set.
It is just the same principle as you might adopt for Art, you may prepare the paints etc, so children can begin painting without all of the hassle.

It varies how you do change you homepage depending which browser you use.
Click on your browser to find out how.
Safari Firefox Internet Explorer

Make a link that children can easily find on your browser

Safari Firefox Internet Explorer

Ann is an expert at this now, she had to do it ten times yesterday. It will make using the Internet and accessing the class blog simple for the children in her class.

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