Kelli McGraw

I’ve been working on a short unit of work to do with my year 9 class next term once I’ve finished with the Video Games unit. I’ve decided that I’m going to run a ‘taster’ course in online tools that can be used to create or publish their work. We’re going to look at blogging, podcasting, uploading to YouTube and sourcing sound and images that can be used under a creative commons license.

I’ve decided to link both units together under the banner of ‘making meaning’ – weeks 1-5 will be based on how video games make meaning, and weeks 6-10 will look at making meaning online.

While students will work in small groups of 3-4 for the video games unit, they will work in pairs for the unit on making meaning online, to author their own blog. I’m going to be fairly prescriptive with what I want each blog to contain. Here are my current thoughts:

Students work in PAIRS to create a blog to publish their own compositions which must include:
• Central blog with a weekly post on class work or homework task, posts must include hyperlinks
• Widgets including at least admin, latest comments, categories and blogroll listing other students blogs, and other links
• A page for published poetry (including an image added for illustration or visual symbolism)
• A page for at least one published short story (embedded as a downloadable document)
• A page for published multimedia (embedded from YouTube)

Looking back over this list I see the requirements could seem a bit arbitrary, but I envisage that each of the required ‘pages’ will be linked to a series of weekly classroom activities/workshops.
Thoughts?