The Art of the Blog

Over the past two years all Yr 7-10 English and 7-12 visual art students at St Hilda’s have created a blog to use as their ongoing Creative Writing and Visual Art Journals. The long term vision is that in 5 years time our current year 7 students, who continue with their studies to year 12 will have accumulated a six year Blog that represents their development as a writer and artist over their life at the school.

As we use Google Blogspot, the student can opt to continue to develop the blog beyond their time at school. Students can also use the blog as a part of their portfolio when applying into tertiary studies. The Art program makes extensive use of Web 2.0 technology. Current and past students work is displayed via our online Art Gallery (GoSHA), student’s multimedia pieces are embedded on YouTube and the Head of Faculty has developed a Wiki that is a used by all art students as a resource vital to their studies. Peer mentoring is a feature of our Web 2.0 strategy.

At St Hilda’s we have been looking at ways we can leverage the already strong skill set students have developed within their own social network software experiences. How students interact within social network spaces is an area we have chosen to explore with a view to developing educationally relevant and enriching experiences. We also hope that by using Web 2.0 resources in this way, appropriate and safe online behaviour is both demonstrated and modelled. The success of this program in Art saw us expand blogs into English and to use Google docs in a range of subject areas, including maths.

This presentation will be a run down of the program described above, relying heavily on student examples of work and audience questions. In addition the session will cover the nuts and bolts of implementing such a school wide program. You really do need to consider things such as blog naming conventions, getting everyone onto iGoogle, appropriate behaviour policies etc. Once successfully established, the whole thing is self-supporting. The students utilise their existing MySpace and FaceBook skills to maintain their blogs. Our experience has been that all technical requirements needed to register, login, gain basic editing skills etc are covered in a single lesson. From then on, the focus is on maintaining a quality blog.

About the presenter
Geoff is an academic who, for over 25 years, has been adapting technology into classrooms around the world. He is currently Director of Learning Technology at St Hilda’s School, Southport in Queensland. Previous to this he was Director of Computing at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria and spent time as an Exchange Fellow at Deerfield Academy (USA). He has also worked on projects in the Hartford and Killingworth School Districts (USA), Saltus Grammar School in Bermuda and on exchange programs in Bangladesh.

Geoff has presented at numerous conferences both nationally and internationally, including the NECC and AAL conferences in the USA, and the MYSA, ACEC and ELH conferences locally.

He has worked as an education consultant and PD facilitator presenting workshops across the USA, Asia and the South Pacific. In 2004 he established, and was the founding principal of a small boarding school in the Yasawan Islands of Fiji before returning to work in Queensland.

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