It took some time agreeing how to go about this with my school, concerns over pupil safety and representation of the school were obviously paramount, but to be fair school have been wholly supportive of the project. I have kept the terms of use as simple as possible and spent half a lesson discussing the correct use of the wiki and how important it was the pupils used it respectfully. They have taken to it fantastically, they are taking great pride in seeing their work online.

At present I am simply letting 1 or 2 pupils per lesson be our blogging scribes, recording the details of the lesson and then afterwards I am adding copies of anything that I think useful (for example photos of pupils work and copies of the IWB pages). This has proved fantastically useful at the start of each lesson as a means to recap what we have done so far in the topic.

At first I asked pupils to sign up to wikisapces themselves as a homework, this was not successful and I ended up with only two users. Instead I spent a little time setting up accounts for each pupil using the gmail address trick, each pupil having an address of myclass+THEIR NAME@gmail.com. This also has the advantage that any messages sent via the messaging function in wikispaces automatically get sent to my email account.

I must admit that wikispaces messaging function hadn’t crossed my mind at first, it is effectively an email system within wikispaces. The pupils found it within about 5 mins! This was a concern at first, especially as I read this at the same time the issue arrived at my door. However after a little reflection I decided that it shouldn’t be a great problem and sent a simple message to all pupils asking them to use it responsibly for discussion on topic and nothing else. AS I was receiving copies of all messages I was rather pleased to see a “maths has become cool” replied by “yeah!!!!! this is better than doing work” which made my day.

Please head over to the blog and leave the pupils a comment if you feel inspired, I’m sure they would be delighted. I plan to continue with this for the next half-term and if successful I’ll roll it out with some other classes. Some ideas in the pipeline at the moment are getting each pupil to add something as part of a homework, and also to get them all to take pictures using their mobiles for use with one of the forthcoming topics.

^{Thanks to Ewan Macintosh for the image.} 

So yes, the screen and trackpad are a tad on the small side, but they are quite usable.  The cost and speed saving build of linux works great straight out of the box, although the tech guys at school are finding it a little buggy to get hooked up to the wireless.  They are also avoiding altogether any attempts to access network drives etc for the time being.  Hopefully as uptake grows, so will support for these issues.

Initial impressions from the children are that they love them!  Hopefully I will have them all wifi’d up this week and will be able to start using them on a lesson by lesson basis. Our main first uses will be access to MyMaths.co.uk, playing online maths games as rewards, and I’m looking into copying the videos from our Mathswatch CDs onto them, might have to invest in some headphones for this.

More soon….

Well I’m very excited, in a bid to trial wifi in our school, and spend some of our remaining budget I will be getting at least 6 new eeePCs next week. Initially they will be mainly for web access to the excellent MyMaths and other resources, but I’m sure they will become an integral part of the classroom in no time. I might even get the pupil blog/wiki off the ground at last!

Andrew Brown, one of Learning and Teaching Scotland new technologies team has made a little video here exploring the machine.

_{Photo from Matt Westervelt’s CC Flickr stream}