Library, Marblehead Village School, 1 hour

The observation on 3/7/13 had me back in the library to see the LMS working with her 6^th grade “Books and Blogs” EDU students.  Today I was lucky enough to witness the “birth of a blog!”  As I was warned by the LMS, set up is the most time consuming part of blogging.  She was not kidding!  Off we went into the computer lab.  The one on one student aides remained in the library with the majority of the class that once again chose to read along with the one boy that is writing his own book.  The directions were simple enough, "From Safari, go to EduBlogs to create a free blog."  With all the questions the students had, I was able to assist one student while Mrs. Soghomonian worked with another.  Mrs. Soghomonian shared that she liked EduBlogs since they were geared towards educational settings and had no advertising.

 

EduBlogs Set Up Page Screen Shot

The set up screen only had a few fields that need to be filled out but that was where the majority of the time was spent.  The students had to agree upon a username, email, password, blog domain name, title and the language.  The language was the only field that did not present a problem for each of the students.  Either the domain name, username or title was already being used and alternatives had to be found or the password was flagged for use in another account.  The latter was confusing and concerning for one group until they decided to put in the domain name that they wanted to use but EduBlogs stated was already taken.  Thankfully the password must have been a commonly used one for them since one student realized that she had previously created her team’s blog.  One cute comment was when the students had to fill in the “human verification” field.  Mrs. Soghomonian explained the need for this so that a robot is not trying to create accounts.  This student exclaimed, “Do robots get it wrong?”

After happily moving on from the set up page, all the girls were excited to create an avi for their blog.  Mrs. Soghomonian reiterated the need for the avi to not be recognizable and that their full names should not be used on the blog in order to safeguard their identities.  For this, the girls used Photobooth to take a picture.  By using their features they were able to create an avi that was unrecognizable.  The group of two students chose to distort their heads so that they resembled the “yin and yang” symbol while another girl added additional shading to wash out some of her facial features.  

The various options on Photobooth allowed for student creativity and expression.  Luckily, after a few attempts everyone was happy with their choices.  Mrs. Soghomonian told the girls that next week they would be able to actually POST their first introductory entry.  This process has evolved over the years and Mrs. Soghomonian shared that with each year, she tweaked it a little bit to provide more structure up front and planning so that the time in the computer lab would be more efficient.  I like this time since it is very informal and there are some great exchanges between the LMS and students that might not occur in a whole class environment.   Naturally, I had to explore with Photobooth later at home and came up with an original kaleidoscope design of my own.

My Photobooth Kaleidoscope Photo