Newcastle writing workshop

Travelled to Newcastle last week for my first web 2.0 writing workshop and it was a blast! I worked with 14 year 7 students and the workshop was a reward for good behaviour, hard work etc for them - they had been booked to see Robert Muchamore but unfortunately the event was cancelled, no pressure there then ;0) . The workshop was on the theme of superheroes and villains so we started the day with a chat about ourselves and whether we considered we are good readers/writers, most of the kids didn't think they wrote much at all but when I pointed out that using Facebook, fansites, MSN etc counts they changed their minds. Went on to discuss the importance of using good descriptive words in their stories and gave out a neo notebook to each group of 3 students, they then spent time listing superhero/villain words. After beaming all the words to one neo we created a wordcloud in Tagxedo on the board and the boys and girls made their own on individual computers, they loved being able to change the shape of them and experimented with using different images for this.
Storybird to create picture books online next and what a popular choice this was. Students loved the variety of images they could choose and were very inventive with their text - think 'destructinators' was the best word of the day! 
Some reading aloud from Andy Briggs excellent Hero.com got them in the mood for storywriting and they completed a writing frame with details such as 'how did your superhero/villain get their powers?' and 'who is their arch nemesis'. They went off to lunch buzzing and the librarian, Beth and myself had a well earned cup of tea.
Story writing in word in the afternoon (had intended to do this direct into the blog on www.writepath.ning.com but unfortunately it was blocked - the stories are there now though if you would like to read them).Think my favourite name was HighHeelah but they were all very inventive. Ending on a high we used Hero Machine to design the way our characters looked and during this I took the kids aside individually to ask about their thoughts of the day and captured this on video.
Absolutely fantastic students to work with and they were all very appreciative and came to say thanks at the end of the day - I was very impressed with their manners and enthusiasm.
I have now sent a disc to Beth with photos and videos, the completed writing frames, stories, wordclouds and Hero Machine images so that she can use them for display and to show other departments. Wonderful day, it was great to be working with kids again and I can't wait for the next one!