The thinking blog started as a result of several attempts at individual blogging that lacked focus. I chose to focus on thinking curriculum in the guise of philosophical questions. I gathered references at school relating to philosophy for primary school students as there was nothing much on the internet. The classroom blog was used as a best practice example for part of the year before I introduced individual students to blogs.
Each week I featured a topic, often using digital content from Digilearn as links. The class would watch a video about a subject, discuss the subject and write their responses to the thinking questions in their individual student blogs.
In this way students had a clear focus with their blogging. They are covering loads of curriculum including writing, ICT for creating and communicating, thinking curriculum and managing personal learning. Their blogging has formed an excellent body of work for assessment and reporting to numerous dimensions. Students are becoming more analytical in their thinking processes and using examples to promote a point of view.
We use comments to promote communication amongst students and promote positive interaction in the Web 2.0 realm. In the future I hope to expand the thinking community with many more classrooms in order to promote thinking dialogue between students, and to promote the idea of Web 2.0 communication. I have created a separate blog entity in order to do this, specifically for thinking blogging. I will be able to add teacher users to this blog so that content may be added and that the community will expand.
I am not sure how I will use the prize of the Nintendo Wii we won in the classroom. I will need to interact with the games first before I use it in the classroom. It will be a focus during next year without a doubt. Our school is also purchasing Nintendo DSi’s which should complement the introduction of the Wii.
Congratulations to Duncan and Greythorn Primary School for a wonderful unit of work creatively delivered. We look forward to hearing about how the Wii has been used for learning and teaching.