A few technical gliches getting the standard themes working properly in our installation, but we’re there now (Thanks, Dave), and the personalization idea has really captured my pupils imagination, and has won a few converts to the ‘Elgg’s better than Moodle’ contingent.

The actual blogging is going well, too. About half of the cohort are using it for themselves, rather than waiting for the lessons, which is pretty good I reckon. These extra posts are not, on the whole, centred on school subjects, but it’ll be interesting to see if that changes over time.

The degree to which their posts represent relfection varies a fair bit, but even just providing the space is getting some of them thinking more about what they’d like to say. Here’s one which I thought deserved a wider audience:

European Day

European Day was really fun especially in the afternoon when we had to show the tables. The trouble was whenever someone came over to look at our table, [my friends] showed them the rollmop herrings so everyone disappeared. Also in the afternoon we had a quiz which was about Europe. For the day I had come dressed for Sweden and the writer of Pippi Longstocking came from Sweden so when this question came along I knew the answer straight away, this is the question, “Which country does the writer of Pippi Longstocking come from. ”

The year threes in our group kept on saying that the answers to the questions where either Scotland or Italy.

Keywords: Europe, European Day, Herrings, Italy, Pippi Longstocking, quiz, Scotland, Sweden

Also, they’re doing a fair bit of commenting on one another’s posts now, so the social network side seems to be working well.

We’ve also taken the decision to put a few of their posts out onto the school website, so that at least some of their writing will get a wider audience, without raising too many child protection concerns.

http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/2848.html