Cassie’s Laws

Tonight I started to play around with primaryblogger. My original intention was to find out if I would be able to export the girl’s blogs onto primaryblogger without having to ‘re-train’ them in a new blog format. Simple answer to this one – no.

Primaryblogger, from what I can see anyway and in the words of Rich, “seems faster and doesn’t crash” which to be fair is a big improvement on Edublogs.

The main issues I have with Edublogs are slowness, crashing and spam.

Slow – edublogs can be incredibly slow and at first I assumed it was the school computers until I noticed the same problems at home.

Crashing – this is something that drove both myself and my class nuts! Quite often edublogs is totally down and you can’t get onto it at all. This can be irritating in itself. However, possibly more irritating is when you have put a lot of time and effort into a post for it to crash when you click publish. To be fair this hasn’t happened for a while but it was happening a lot at one point. This was really demotivating for the kids and quite often they did not want to write their posts again and therefore not feeling the benefit of posting their thoughts.

Spam - Edublogs has definitely served its purpose and was a necessary move from learnerblogs last year but the problems Margaret had with learnerblogs are appearing in edublogs. Margret got an alarming comment from one of her girls, Monica, saying that she had an inappropriate comment on her blog. The next day we changed all the blogs over to Edublogs and since then no problems. Until a couple of weeks ago. As all the comments come to my email I am usually able to see them before the kids do. All in one afternoon there were 6 inappropraite comments referring to sex and other things that would not please parents! I paniced when I read these and was able to sort it out before any parents or children saw them. This is one of the main reasons I am considering moving host. However, will this happen again with a new host, that’s two now that have ended in the same way?

However, Edublogs is not all bad, it has accepted everything that I have wanted to embed both in posts and in the tool bar. Primaryblogger is definitely getting there and any problems Margaret has discovered have been fixed quickly and efficently so no complaints there! I guess this is something that takes time to perfect and the creases are definitely being ironed out. Whilst playing about with it myself and Rich have also noticed things that primaryblogger does not accept. Nothing major that we can’t live without though.

For the moment I am still deciding what to do. One of the main reasons that puts me off moving is that I don’t know how much the girls will use their blogs next year without me encouraging them. Primaryblogger is a totally different set up from Edublogs and it will require input from me to help them use it for the first few times. This would be no problem if I was still in the school but ofcourse I’m not. Other than this reason I cannot see any reason not to move over as everything the girls would use is accepted on primaryblogger.

Hmmm…maybe this wasn’t the best post to write on an edublogs blog! :0S

Due to recent twitter conversations I decided the new name for my blog should be Cassie’s Laws. Seemed to fit quite well.

Here’s to the next part of the journey!

A while back when I was feeling down and moaning (nothing new there!) about the job situation I got some nice letters from parents. Evelyn (my 0.3 partner and new owner of the CShore blog) told me to keep a hold of them and read them when I felt like losing it. Another piece of great advice from her!

I’ve just read a comment from Jaimey on the class blog - “It was really fun can we start p5 again?” Made me smile and gave me a bit of a boost in the positive thinking department!

Then I started to think, if a comment like that can make such a difference to a 23 year old adult how much difference do the little things we say make to our kids? I always tried to listen to their stories and take an interest in the things that were important to them. Sometimes it’s hard when you’re having a bad day and need some peace but to be fair if that’s how you feel you’re in the wrong job!

I always tried to make comments and praise children for things they were doing well and I usually ignored the silly behaviours that were sent to try me! This technique was not approved by all but I think it worked and I stuck with it.

Jaimey’s comment has just made me think about this more and I’ve realised that it’s the best way to go. Simple comments like hers (and hopefully mine!) can make a big difference to how a person is feeling.

I’ve been having a few problems with spam comments on my children’s individual blogs. They’ve been really inappropriate and they have discussed things that you would not want 9 year olds discussing.

I know that during my placement Margaret had this problem with learnerblogs and this is why we changed everything over to edublogs. Although this was quite straight forward it was time consuming. Problem solved we thought? Until now obviously and the problem is happening again.

The girls’ blogs are all under the CShore blog which is an ‘Edublogs Supporter’ – however, this only promises no ads.

Margaret has moved the class blog over from edublogs to primaryblogger. Primaryblogger promise to help in any way they can and it’s great having someone to discuss issues with, it make a big difference. I think I will move the girl’s blogs over to this as well and then hopefully I’ll be able to sleep easy for a little while longer.

Changing the host means that I can also change the email address and hopefully also the person responsible for them. Again, going back to a previous point, I do have some regrets in giving the children individual blogs as I should have thought about what happened when I left. I think this is one of the reasons eportfolios (thanks Margaret) would be a great idea. I think the logic behind eportfolios, that they move with the child, makes a lot of sense. It would however, involve a lot of staff training!

I was really pleased to see that my girls are still blogging now that it’s the holidays. Befinitedly one of the benefits of not pushing them to blog and allowing them to do it when they wish. They obviously enjoy it.

I was really amazed at Emma who has managed to sign up to PhotoPeach and embed it in her blog with no help at all. I’m trying to ignore the fact that most of the images are from google! :S

I really hope they have the inclination to keep this up next year and continue to refelct on their lives and learning. I think this is a really useful skill that will definitely come in handy later in life. I remember in first year at uni when they first started telling us to reflect on our practice and I didn’t have a clue. I don’t think we give our kids enough opportunities to do this.

I also think that reflection is not something that should be forced and therefore a blog or something similar is ideal as the children can access it when they need to. However, I’m not naive enough to think it will benefit all children as there will always be the children that have to be asked to do something otherwise they won’t do it. So possible a mixture of structured tasks and free reign would tick this box?

Well, that’s me finished. Phew is my initial reaction. It was great and I need a holiday but I’m also now jobless so that’s a bit scary!

The last day of school was very teary, was lovely to get so many lovely cards and letters, made me feel like I must’ve done something right! A few of my girls have posted about it on their blogs as well which was nice!

Currently in limbo just now, can’t find work at all but I know there are lots of other NQTs in my position. I think this is where the induction scheme falls down. The new scheme is great because it gives everyone the chance to get experience in a school but it’s bad because you get a taste of something you love and then you are in danger of losing it. Towards the end of the year I wondered if it would be better to fight for a job at the beginning and then at least you knew you had one usless something went wrong.

I found it really hard leaving CShore (again!) I had a fantastc placement there and an amazing probationary year. Hopefully I’ll be back for the odd day of supply!