Last week I met with my Inquiry group to co-construct a picture of where we are at the midway point in the year. I chose to do this as I wanted my learners to be able to make a visual connection to their progress. It was a really worthwhile exercise as my group could see at a glance where they were as far as commenting and replying to comments on their blog posts. This picture shows that replies are still very much a work in progress when compared with the amount of posts published. I have not included the blogging from the Summer Learning Journey in these totals as my inquiry was not in place when this took place.
After analysing the data together we came up with a way forward. I wrote about this and the introduction of Student X to our group in a previous post. We decided to go ahead with the competition idea suggested at our meeting at the end of Term 2. The first challenge had two parts. Part 1 was to write one comment on each member of our group's blog. That meant six comments in total. Part 2 was to reply to each comment you received. 5/7 students met the challenge, with the other two choosing to catch up immediately after we met.
With my inquiry in mind I found a great example of a quality blog comment and reply from G3 and B1. I can see from this that the learning is the focus with evidence of the content language being used to strengthen connections to the lesson the original post was based on. However, is still not the norm for all this group. After reflecting on the weekly challenge we noticed that although we had replied to comments received there were no comment chains. This then became our motivation for this week's challenge of choosing a blogging buddy and creating a comment chain on one post each. To make the numbers fair one student has chosen a buddy from outside this group.
A change I have made to my practice this term is to actively plan time in class to drive these challenges because every team needs a coach, opportunities to train and game time to use their skills.
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