A Journey into Learning

I’ve posted previously about the blogging project that I am undertaking as part of the TTP at the Haringey CLC. I am piloting the project with a single child – known as ‘D’. His blog is now up and running - although I have encountered several challenges.

D’s literacy is low. Although he is verbally able, he rarely has the patience to construct written sentences. He can read – but again rarely sustains it for any length of time. However, he is literate enough to glean information from web-pages. He can copy text from the page onto the computer. He is able to understand the text within windows menus and pop-ups and can read the contents of most of the buttons on web pages (single word). The multi-media aspects of the Internet appeal to D. His obsessive nature is also well suited to the Internet – whatever his latest obsession is he will find web pages devoted to the subject.

As with any young person -  there are issues with blogging and child-protection. However, D is a particularly vulnerable child. D struggles with understanding the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and craves adult attention. I feel that it is absolutely essential to protect D by ensuring that I vet all posts and comments before they are posted live on the Internet. Although I am eager for D to make the blog his own, I am also determined not to allow anything on there that would allow anyone to identify D or his family. In order to do that I set myself up as the administrator of his blog, and D himself as a contributor. However, after some investigation I discovered that meant that D was unable to upload media to the blog!

As a way of overcoming this problem I have set Moselle School up with a Flickr account. I am planning to spend Friday morning with D capturing all of his haunts round the school – his seat in class, where he eats his dinner, where he spends his playtimes etc. We will upload the images to flickr together and then embed them into his blog. D is a master of copy and paste – and with a little support was able to easily imbed an image into his blog.

This afternoon I happened to be working with D in an ICT lesson – where we were using a piece of software called 2animate to make simple drawings move with a computer animation technique called tweening (aka inbetweening). With no adult support D managed to upload the gif to Flickr – and then enbed into a post.

I have just watched this video of Michael Wesch’s fascinating presentation to the Library of Congress. He is the man behind The Machine is Us/ing Us (a YouTube video about Web 2.0 with 7 million viewings) and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It’s nearly an hour long – but well worth watching. It’s funny, touching and entertaining.

As seen on Sue Kambalu’s blog.

We’ve had some child-protection issues at school lately involving social networking sites and I have been addressing e-Safety issues in class and assemblies. There are ongoing issues as to what sites to filter and whether online games should be permitted (Runescape is the current favourite amoungst the secondary cohort).

This film gave me food for thought – as seen as Susan’s blog. Could there be a role for using social networking sites as a teaching aid with ASD pupils who often have huge issues with socialising and self-confidence similar to (although more profound than) the 3 music fans in the video?

I ran the text from our newsletter through wordle. It’s fantastic – and quite beautiful! I must show this to our literacy coordinator! I can see lots of applications in the classroom…

*EDIT* I just ran our recent OFSTED Report through Wordle – it’s so interesting!

I had a good day at the SENJIT conference yesterday. There were some interesting speakers – including the inspiring Wiltshire special school head and Mac-nut Sean O’Sullivan, and the enthusiastic Jocelyn Chappel (ICT teacher and open-source enthusiast).

There was much discussion over the BSF programme and the share that SEN gets of the £4.5bn IT spending. There seemed to be a concensus that the raft of learning platfoms avaliable for schools are overly text based and are not yet suited to SEN schools.

On a personal level I find it hard to get excited about learning platforms whilst there is so many free Web 2.0 resources to be harnessed on the internet. How can a learning platform compete with the innovation of the internet? I worry that it would be constraining.