Smarties

I finally managed to get the computing lab for an hour and a half. Things moved on really fast. Students worked in pairs, some in groups of three. The introduction to setting up a blogger account turned out to be a good first step: students found setting up a blogger account simple enough. Those who felt less easy about computers needed my help most of the time and felt relieved that I was around. I also noticed that a few students soon started helping the less skilful, which was great. .oO (Thanks, Bee.)
The majority also wrote their first posts (the Proust questions were very helpful - thanks, Lesley). Some of the students were reluctant to publish their first posts immediately so they saved them as a draft to finish them off later in peace. It was great to see how impressed they were when they saw their own texts published on the web. I didn’t expect that.
We agreed to set up a class blog and they chose the name for it: Smarties (because they are so smart, they said). I promised to set it up for them. And I did. (My kids bought a package of Smarties, my husband photographed them and I used an idea from Mandarin Design to incorporate them in the blog. You can see it here.) 18 students have already sent me the link to their blogs and some of them have posted new posts to their blogs. Most of them didn’t use the spell checker though. I’ve sent a comment to each blog and one of the students started to do the same. Most encouraging. I’m proud of them. .oO (Nancy’s post on passion and caring.)
They’ll be absent for 10 days (they’re off to the tourism fair in Berlin). I asked them to keep on posting from their field trip. We’ll see.
Overall, it feels goooood.