Reading Sharon McGuinness’s article in Incite (v.29, 5 May 08 p. 12) about teacher librarians using email and blogs to participate in online book discussions with classes of children from their schools, I decided to get online and take a look at what they’ve been getting up to. I found the Wilfrid rap blog in which children from all around Australia (and some in Vietnam too) discuss Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas.

The number and quality of responses show a high level of engagement. What a great idea. The blog is hosted at Edublogs and its WordPress platform lends itself to this kind of collaboration. The rap extends over a few weeks with a fairly small number of posts (or perhaps pages in this ase) but with extensive comments added to each one. Each post is a new page on the blog. One of them is just for teachers to share their experience of the rap and the rap wrap up gets the school groups write about their learnings from the rap.

“I presented the rap blog and wiki to a group of our parents on Tuesday night and they were surprised/enthused/fascinated at how we had harnessed the capabilities of Web 2.0 to share such meaningful learning and teaching, especially that their children had been communicating with students all over Australia and even Vietnam.” — Rap Wrap up comment from the rap facilitator, ianmclean.

Image by Brave Heart. Used under CC licence.