Thursday 15 January 2015

Blogging With Year 3

My lesson today all started when I came across Phil Bagge's Spider search lesson (http://code-it.co.uk/internet/howsearchworks_planning.pdf). 

Last week the children role played being spiders trawling the Internet, to find all the glue sticks, pencils etc in the classroom. Then they ranked the best places to find each object in a similar way that search engines do. 

Today I was planning to get them to role play being parts of a school computer network, so they could understand how it works... when they asked me if they could practise using search engines (we hadn't had enough time to do this last week).

So this is the lesson that unfolded: the children used Google to search the Internet for facts about the Egyptians. When they found their facts they posted them onto our class blog (http://blueprintteacher.primaryblogger.co.uk/2015/01/15/year-3-egyptian-fact-explosion/#comment-2087). 

I had some limited time to approve/reply to them during the lesson (whilst trouble shooting-as it was the first time some of them had blogged!) and showed the stream of comments coming through on the IWB. They were very excited to see their comments appear on screen, and it motivated them to find more facts (they went on to comment on other posts on the site too). 

At the end of the lesson we reviewed their comments as a whole class and they were able to spot that many children  had forgotten to include full stops and capital letters. 

Then I linked their blog comments onto my teaching Twitter feed and requested comments from my colleagues to prove we had a real audience! 

They will be thrilled to see that another teacher at our school, Mrs Lucas, has replied to them. 

So to conclude, the lesson ticked many boxes: they really enjoyed working in pairs to use a search engine to find facts (which were linked to their topic). They were all able to comment on the blog during the lesson and were writing for a real online audience. Some children were inspired to add more facts when they got home. Above all they really enjoyed the lesson. We printed off the blog feed and put it up on our Egyptian display. 

Next week we will be role playing a computer network. All thanks to my Twitter CPD finds! 

2 comments:

  1. I like your role playing approach, thanks for sharing it.
    Have you seen Padlet? It's another way of children sharing their comments to a board immediately, you might like it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Will check it out thanks for comment! Can't take credit for the planning- that is Phils! You will be able to hear him speak when our Teachmeet Bournemouth is streamed (March 26th 2015).

    ReplyDelete

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