At 5:45 pm -0500 1/3/02, don ledingham wrote:

>Ref: http://duncan.smeed.org/2344
>
>As promised here is a brief report of our very productive meeting.
>
>We brainstormed a number of ideas relating to the use of ICT to 
>support teaching and learning. Here they are in no particlular order.

>Our school website www.dunbar.org.uk/dgs is already having a very 
>significant impact upon the the school and yet we all recognise 
>there is still a great deal of work to do.

>We are exploring the idea of having a web-based personal learning 
>plan for every student, which would allow students to develop a 
>secure web-based folder in which they could keep information about 
>their learning preferences, learning strategies, personal targets, 
>interests, schools reports (which could be uploaded by the school) - 
>perhaps with read access for parents.

>This took us onto the idea of a virtual schoolbag in which students 
>could keep all their school work from throughout their school 
>careers.  This would be particularly helpful for those students who 
>have a tendency to lose information or to be disorganised.  It would 
>also reinforce the notion of education being a progression and 
>students could actually see the extent of theirlearning as the years 
>go by.
>
>We were most excited by the idea of students having their own web 
>pages.  Duncan intoduced me to the idea of wblogging and I was 
>immediately attracted by its apparent simplicity and potential.

I promised to dig out some links to school weblogs in addition to the schoolblog we looked out during our meeting.

>We are very interested in trying to make students 'learning at home' 
>(rather than homework) to be more relevant for students and to 
>extend beyond traditional closed tasks or worksheets.  By engaging 
>students in open-ended investigations and projects there is a much 
>greater likelihood that students will actively engage in their own 
>learning.

>A key apect in modern Scottish education is the concept of core 
>skills - one of which is 'working with others'.  Duncan spoke about 
>the collaborative projects which are undertaken by his students.  I 
>believe that school students would respond very positively to the 
>opportunity to complete collaborative 'virtual' projects.  I bounced 
>the idea off a group of less than enthusiastic 4th year students and 
>they expressed real interest in the notion.

>We would like to establish a pilot project for volunteeer groups of 
>students to undertake a weblogging initiative.  The conversant 
>software seems to have real potential for schools.  My only concern 
>is the security angle for young people and we would probably need to 
>have some means of ensuring only those individuals who have password 
>clearance can read the web logs.

This is how some of my student group projects have been organised - see for example http://www.arspentia.,org from last year and the set of similar projects this year - just getting started at http://www.2002.arspentia.org

Incidentally, I am a member of the Programme Committee for the 2002 Institutional Web Management Workshop and I'm keen to show how weblogs can impact on teaching and learning in this context.

>Finally, we agreed that the two key criteria must be that the system 
>does not place any burden upon teachers and the system is VERY user 
>friendly for students.

> >I would welcome the thoughts of current undergraduates and school students. Me too. I'll try and drum up some interest in my students quite a few of whom read this site. I'd be happy to see some of the school students to contribute too.

I don't expect much feedback over the weekend though ;-)

Cheers,

Duncan