The Power of Live Blogging... Cover it Live

Imagine the scenario:

60 Grade 1/Year 2 children and 30 adults, travelling on public buses, trains, trams and boats on a 'transport trail' in a city of 7 million people... armed with iPods, iPhones and a captive audience following our every move.

Impossible?

Fortunately, my teaching colleagues are not only open-minded and trusting of my "only useful technology" philosophy, they are also willing to step outside their technology comfort zones and have a go at anything I can throw at them! It was no surprise then, that when planning for our Hong Kong public transport trail, they were reaching for their iPhones when I suggested we have a go at live, mobile blogging.

Traditionally, we'd carry digital cameras with us. We'd take photos. The class would view them back at school. By using the amazing coveritlive.com, their free iOS app and an iPhones or iPod Touch we could take photos, videos and record audio AND share it with each other, other classes and teachers back at school and parents worldwide.

After setting up our 'live event' via the coveritlive site, we embedded this into our password-protected school VLE and invited parents who couldn't come on the trip with us to follow our blog online. Through the easy to use iPhone app, we were able to take photos and instantly post them to our event and into our VLE.

As half of the Year 2 children set off on their trip, the other half of the year group stayed at school and followed our progress.

We took a photo of our class mascot getting ready to leave with us, and said hello to two members of our class who had Chickenpox and couldn't join us for the real trip.

Children, parents and teachers took photos from different devices and they were all embedded into the one blog feed. We were able to add quotes from children, and receive comments from parents viewing from home.

The classes that remained at school were excited to follow our progress - and the children on the trip were thrilled to learn that their blogging had a real purpose and a real live audience!

We were able to add GPS maps to show our location, and as both classes were travelling separately, we could see where the other group was!

We added pictures with captions, and as you can see from the screenshot above, we were able to capture HD video with the iPhone, and upload clips straight to the blog. As the school day wore on, the leadership team and our year group colleagues back at school followed our progress towards home.

The most exciting part of our live blogging experience is that at the end of the event, the blog is archived and can be viewed at any time. Our children went home and were able to see the photos they had taken and share their day, and trip with their parents.

Live blogging? Possible!

Twitter in the Primary Classroom

I would have to admit that social networking and micro-blogging weren’t my number one priority when meeting my new class of 30 six-year-olds in August, but tweeting has since become a daily routine for the 120 children in Year 2.

We already sent home ‘parent newsletters’ detailing our upcoming units of inquiry, but this update (every six weeks) didn’t answer the question which I anticipated the children were asked the most…

“What did you do at school today?”

I set up a Twitter account for the year group, and integrated the feed into our school(Moodle based) learning platform. My year group colleagues were very supportive of the idea, and initially I updated the feed at the end of the day, with one tweet from each of our four classes. The class teachers took responsibility for writing their own updates and we began to see parents joining Twitter specifically to follow us.

When we started sharing the process of ‘tweeting’ with the children, that’s when we saw the real potential. Now, at the end of each day, we take 5 minutes to be reflective, thinking about what we have done and learnt during the day. Articulating our reflection into the 140 characters forces us to be effective communicators. The children prioritise what they want to share, we consider our audience (parents) and while we started out with purely factual tweets, these have since become more sophisticated and actually encourage our parents to ask questions!

We received this feedback from a parent:

Just a quick note to say how much I enjoy reading the tweets each day. Previously, the 

generic "what did you do today?" was met with "I don't remember" but now I can 

ask specific questions like "How is your Eric Carle wall coming along?" which results 

in an actual conversation!

I’m really pleased that these tweets are being used to foster parent-child-teacher communication. I hope this Twitter dialogue helps to set up a student-led conference every night at the dinner table, and I hope that parents working away can call home and engage (almost magically) with their son or daughter about their day at school.