In her email to me, Jackie‘s thoughts included:

•  the idea of exploring the area of gendered representations of identity

She was referring to the children’s use of ‘weemees‘ to represent themselves.

           

          

The children had great fun designing their characters. The girls (2nd row) all spent a lot of time getting their weemees to look like themselves …. eye colour, hair colour, face shapes, etc. The boys (top row) are less recognisable! They’ve designed characters to depict their interests. I know, for example, that the boy represented in the first picture is very interested in characters in computer games (this also shows in his imaginative writing tasks). The ‘guitar hero’ doesn’t really look like his creator, but I know that he does enjoy playing the guitar.

Jackie also highly rated:

• the importance of allowing the children to drive the use of the blogs

I’ve tried very hard this session to make sure that this is the case and have just carried out a quick review of what has happened over this last month.

I looked at gender and types of posts. Here’s my ‘snapshot’ view of the situation in the month of January (2008!)  ……… learnerblogs was VERY slow tonight, so may have got fed up waiting for a few of the blogs to load 🙂

Girls …. 30 posts

Boys …. 24 posts

I broke down the post into types:

• basic pictures from web
• what’s happening in class / school
• playing with codes
• own thoughts

The ‘breakdown’ is as follows  – girls are blue, boys are red

Basic pics from web – 0                10

Class/School posts   – 12               10

Playing with Codes   –  3                 0

Own Thoughts          –  15               4

These numbers are just for January .. the bigger picture might be different 😀