Sustainable ICT practices in the classroom

I'm a sucker for punishment! This is my 2nd year of being a BT and in my wisdom I decided that I was going to start a class blog and Twitter account (@rm1hns). I recognised that these were both effective tools for connecting the class with the rest of the world and providing an audience for their work (amongst many other benefits). But let's face it there's plenty of other things that a BT could be doing but you'll struggle to convince me to not take on too much.

I enjoyed the learning that I encountered getting these things going and the class have loved the excitement that this has brought to the classroom. However, I was doing a lot of the work and hence the late term 1 entrance of my ICT-challenged mentor teacher (he admits this himself and claims that he and computers are allergic to each other!!!). He'd listened to my advocacy of the blog and resulting student interest for most of the term but he had some wisdom (that's what he's for!), what was going to happen next year when my year 5s went into his or someone else's room where blogging wasn't occurring? Cue scream! He needs to learn to blog but most importantly my student's need to be taking more ownership, the latter is not rocket science but my own enthusiasm was going to provide my downfall.

My class need to be take more of an active role in the blog's production rather than just producing the work for it. Furthermore, they're better at it than me!

In the last week of term I introduced a handful of room 1 to the blogger dashboard and posting things. The following day, the class had been through two voki's (discussed here) I spent my holidays playing with iMotion, a timelapse photography app and spent a good deal of time puddling about to get the backing track onto the video and the result is visible here in the Tae Kwan Do video.

Compare this with one student's efforts, he got told that he could take a timelapse of Jump Jam and I showed him how. By the end of 1 block, he had a far better product all ready to go (bar the sharing). His video is below also, unfortunately we realised after that the backlighting is hopeless but next time... He has now assisted one other student to produce their own.



I'll be introducing their own blogs to them very soon, I can't wait to see what they teach me and facilitating their efforts will be invigorating and a challenge. I don't think there will be an issue with the sustainability of blogging, at least not with my students, but my mentor teacher...