Wow - it's been a fascinating few days in the world of our build-your-own-VLE, from both staff and pupils. On Friday the school was closed, and during part of the inset I introduced the template facility of Google Docs to the staff.
It seemed to go well, and the fact that a teacher could create a literacy scaffold, a quiz, or opening to a piece of work that all pupils could then load into their own areas to work on seemed to hit home. After demonstrating it, I watched and helped as staff had a go themselves and put some work into our template gallery.
This morning I arrived at my class line to be told by the first child in the line "I've written about Goose Fair in my learning space this weekend". Fantastic news! It might not have been a lot of writing, it might have had some spelling and grammatical errors in it, but it was done at home because the child wanted to do it.
The first session of today (Monday) saw an upper school class use the template their teacher had prepared for them during the inset in an ICT literacy lesson. As the class returned from the suite I saw a thumbs up from the teacher - a successful lesson, and following the morning break I took my class into the suite to complete our work on "The Mousehole Cat".
We'd read part of the story in class, we'd altered the beginning from a stormy setting to a peaceful setting, each class had jotted down an idea for the problem and solution in their story, and then as a class we'd written an ending together.
I'd put the beginning and end into a Google Doc, and they loaded the template, added their middle part of the story, saved it, shared it with me (to mark), published it and then, in some cases, linked to their work from their learning space. (see here, here and here)
It might have only been adding the middle to a short story, but it is a start, and I am impressed that they achieved so much in the one lesson. I was also pleased to see that as some finished earlier than others, they began to help to make sure the rest of the class got as far as saving and sharing their work.
On returning to the classroom I put some of their work on screen to show (and inspire) others, and also used the visualiser to show them how their learning spaces look on a smartphone. Afterall, if a family have no computer at home, but the parents have an iPhone (for example) they can view everything their child has done just as easily.
At long last I am beginning to feel that our solution might actually work - successfully!
