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Lesson 4 was the switchover. Six students missing but we go ahead with the switch. I explain quickly why we are doing it. To the boy’s credit I have a captive audience. Comments cause a stir of enthusiasm so they get their blogs shifted. I ferret around making sure the boys feel supported in this moving of the goal posts but everything seems to go smoothly with all snags being identified and dealt with.

The snags if you’re interested:

1. If the boys had made a table and inserted pictures and text to cause the horizontal scroll bar to appear, then they couldn’t use the mouse to highlight the entire contents of the table. All the images and text would come but not the background colour – a vital feature because the formatting had been based on it. This had to be set again in the new blog.

2. Setting the background colour. We have pop-up blockers on our web browser. The table properties (the method by which you can change the bkgd colour) are like a pop-up dialogue box. They got blocked. You had to allow pup-ups for the site and then the large screen editor went kaput and you had to return to the original page and open it up again. Not very dynamic but the user doesn’t have rights to change these settings unless they present through error messages. I didn’t like it but it didn’t cause too much fuss. This happened about five times.

Once up and running the new blogs were popular. The true interactivity of comments spawned motivation in bucket loads. The blogs are set to send emails to me and Ms G whenever someone makes a comment or creates/amends a blog. The next morning there 91 emails generated by this facility in my inbox (only 15 boys in class that day). This is good going wouldn’t you say? I am not envious of Ms G who is (in theory) marking all this and collating the results for her research.

Saw Ms G at lunch and said I would resolve this with a rule in her inbox to redirect the mail to a specified folder.

Also we had a conversation about the comments made on the blogs. This was connected to the code of conduct she was asking the boys to write. We talked about the possibility of encouraging the use of textease (if that is the appropriate term for SMS abbreviated language) because when communicating with my A level students using ICT they are all, without exception, very keen on using tags such as lol (laugh out loud) to declare any humour in their messages and it seems to me that this is to let me know they are joking or to prevent me from taking offence or thinking they are bad people. I thought this might be a good method of keeping critical comments safe for the recipient.

However, we tread carefully around this issue because Ms G wants the boys input unspoilt. We don’t want to guide them into anything in particular – give it a sense of text messages, MSN, email, websites, blogging or anything else. Miss hasn’t asked them to research blogs – which is what I recommended in the beginning – because they are not to be directed to look at anybody else’s stuff and see what a blog ’should be’. Instead I think she wants to know as precisely as possible the impact digital literacy is having on the content of what the boys write. They are not told to do anything other than enhance what they say with the tools at their disposal and that this is never intended to be printed. This, to my mind, is the edge/the rub/the absolutely fabulous gooey bit in the middle. Why?

At KS3 my work is paperless. Not sure if that’s right or wrong or neither, but it is. These students are engaged by the fact that what they are doing will never be viewed (except for the evidence for Miss’ research) on anything other than a screen – that is what it is. They will never carry it in their bags or store it in their lockers or lose it before handing it in or get it back with red pen on it or drop it in a puddle or have to make the decision to keep it or throw it away with all that stuff called school work. Big deal? For some reason it seems it is to them. Years of handwriting and exercise books and printed word docs are fading.