The blog has really taken off – I must be moderating approx 25 comments a day now. Students in classes are quite receptive to these posts and the dialogue in response to the reviews is becoming more thoughtful and also encouraging further depth of information from the blogger who wrote the post.

A couple of ‘aha’ moments that I have observed have been:
One of the buddies wasn’t very confident to read a paragraph from the book that they had. The mentor (without thought) just encouraged the buddy to read a sentence at a time onto Audacity and then they put it all together to create an entire paragraph that sounded like it had been read in the one sitting!

In another situation the buddy wasn’t confident at all to read aloud. The mentor decided that a way around this would be for the mentor to interview the buddy about the book. This came across very well on the reading blog!

Another plus is that in all my ‘busy’ness (with heading off to the Microsoft Partners in Learning Conference in KL this week) I haven’t the time to get letters to the parents. HOWEVER – in the meantime there have been parents commenting on the blog (from both the mentors and the buddies). I will still get the letters out on my return next week, as I think that there are other parents who with an extra bit of encouragement would post comments too!

I enjoyed Michael’s visit last week – it was great for him to see the kids in action – (and it was kids in action and not me – as in their peer tutoring roles there is very little for me to do at times!!). He saw that this (in its current form) is moving ahead and has students engaged and involved in their learning. Michael also took time to interview students and myself and I look forward to him getting some feedback to me in regards to what the students enjoy and where they see the next steps as being.

The ‘big’ test is this week, as I am away for the entire week. The students decided as a group that they still wanted bloggers this week – even in my absence and insisted that they could run it without a teacher supervising!!! This is great – however is against our safe use of ICTs policy and so Mary – my Principal – will oversee and see them in action. The beauty of Web 2.0 tools is that I can watch what they are doing (well at least what they are posting) from afar!