teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

“Please can we come to your ICT room and go on Imbee at lunchtime, Sir?” is a question I’m getting used to hearing with my Year 7 class. I take them for both History and ICT and decided to get them using social networking tools. In what follows I share my experiences of using both Think.com and Imbee.com to motivate students and encourage them to continue their learning outside the classroom…

Dave Warlick, along with other thinking educators, is always talking about ‘flat classrooms’. This picks up an idea by Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat, a book which, although I haven’t read yet, feel that I know intimately through the number of references made to it!

The ‘flat classrooms’ metaphor is used to get a handle on the increasing inter-connectedness of classrooms around the world as well as the ability for students to learn in many places, not just within the four walls of a subject’s classroom.

One such way to develop these links, to increase motivation and to encourage students to learn outside the classroom is through social networking. The most famous example of this is probably MySpace which around which there has been some negative publicity leading (in the USA) to the DOPA legislation.

There are, however, some more ‘friendly’ and safe social networking sites you can use with your students. The ones I’m going to focus on here are those I’ve had experience of: Think.com and Imbee.com. Both these sites allow your students to ‘blog’ in a ‘walled garden’ which only approved users can enter. Think.com is a lot more stringent with their security, requiring the head or principal of an educational institution to sign a legal agreement. With Imbee the teacher can sign up herself and her students quickly and easily.

I started using Think.com before Imbee as I didn’t hear about the latter until after I’d signed up for the former. When I introduced Think.com to the students in ICT they were very enthusiastic about it and produced lots of interactive elements such as polls, mini-forums and ’stickies’ in the fortnight that we used it. They were getting comments from people in the USA, India and other schools in England. That really opened their eyes!

The problem was that I had agreed with the Headmaster that, due to a problem involving derogatory comments about members of the school on a forum last year, I was to moderate posts before they went live on the site. With Think.com there was no way to do this. As a consequence, I looked for another option.

I came across Imbee via Wes Fryer’s blog. It was initially set up for young people without educational aspects in mind, but now the potential has been seen they are actively encouraging teachers to use it for learning. The site is slightly more grown-up looking, but it still appeals to students as they can set their own themes, etc. The great thing is that I can set permissions on a whole range of things on a per-student basis. At the moment I’m moderating their posts and picture uploads, but not comments they make on other people’s blogs nor their ability to add one another as friends.

So far we have used it both in ICT and History in a very basic way. In ICT they have created ‘About Me’ presentations in Powerpoint. I then went through the types of information they should or shouldn’t be telling people about on the Internet, and they made a blog post about themselves accordingly. In History we used it to recap key historical terms such as chronology, anachronisms, bias, etc. I have then commented on each post they made. The great thing is that they can also send personal messages to one another (including me) which I get a report on but do not moderate. This means they can ask one another (or me) for help.

They are beginning to use it for recreational purposes as well, I have noticed. Some are arranging times to go to the cinema, etc. via personal messaging and they are creating picture albums showing what types of things they are interested in. We have an teacher training day tomorrow on ‘personalizing learning’ - well this is one way of doing it!

(click to enlarge)
The students seem to understand the concept of blogging with no problems at all - the idea that the most recent thing goes to the top and that you can edit what you have ‘posted’ seemed to come naturally to them. Obviously some are more enthusiastic than others, but I’ve had absolutely no complaints and every piece of homework I’ve set using Imbee has been completed by every student.

There are some other options, including learnerblogs.org or, if you’ve got your own webspace, Wordpress Multi-User but for now, for me, Imbee’s a great option. It’s really straightforward and easy-to-use, both for teachers and adults. I just have start them using wikis next…

Popularity: 5% [?]