Two posts in a day? - peak creativity !!!

After much procrastinating and discussion and reading of blogs, I have decided to use the 21classes portal for blogging with my year 8 class. I have tried this two years ago with Edublogs, but ran into issues with spam and firewalls and internet budgets being eaten up so I am giving the idea a second go - older but wiser about what to do.
Blogging myself- although it still doesn't come easily is getting to be more natural and at least I can say to the kids that I do this too! So last week I dived in and had huge hastles with sites being blocked for making avatars as part of our discussion of Internet safety - thanks Jo McLeay for the idea - but we worked around this and there was much fun in creating them at tektek.org and Meez.com.

We discussed what the guidelines for using these blogs would be and I thought they seemed from vaguely interested to the usual 'why more work?'type response. Well the registrations are happening, as I have asked them to do it from home to save their internet budget, and so are the first posts. I just wanted to share the buzz as this is the kind of response I had hoped for but thought that these cool young computer savvy folk would not do. Here are some of the responses I have received to the question 'What do you think of blogging and what use could the blog be?'


I really like doing this blog because it is sort of like something I would do in my own time and I think it is really cool that we get to do work in class that we enjoy. I like communicating with people from other countries, and talking about our different lives and school work, and I think that this website and and blogging would be a fun way of doing it. I also think that, we could also use it to write about not only school work and book reviews.etc, but stuff that we did on the weekend and hobbies that we have.
I think some good entries might be, to talk about books that we have read so that we can compare the books that we have read to ones that they have read. It might also be a good way to write up book reviews and other small written tasks.
I'm really looking forward to posting more blogs.


I really like being in the accelerated class because I get to mix with other kids, not just the ones in my home group. Also to have some new point of views to listen to. There's some pretty bright kids in the class :) I like the way that here at ***** we have access to classes like this one because it gives students a chance to increase their learning.
I'm looking forward to starting to speak to students from other countries and schools because I'd like to learn about their cultures and things they're interested in.


I think it's awesome that we get to do blogging in English. It should be really enjoyable and its definitely a change. I'm looking forward to talking to interesting, new people from all over the world and finding out about their general way of life.

I think this blog would be more enjoyable if we could include videos and pictures of our favourite things or write about our interests as well as school issues. I believe we could use this blog to communicate with people from other schools or countries and find out there interests and beliefs, it would be a great experience.

Who is a happy teacher tonight then ? Yay blogging !!!