Use your edtech for learning!

I met up with a friend and colleague of mine today - part catch-up, part idea-bouncing for the coming school year.  We are both planning for incorporating some more edtech into teaching and learning with our students this year - consolidating on what we started last year, and adding a couple of new tools. We took a look at a few sites created by and for teachers and students (including my own from last school year). She also lent me what is turning out to be an excellent book (Troy Hicks' 'Crafting Digital Writing') that I dove right into this afternoon at home. It's been a great day for reflection and goal-setting.

One thing that I have seen quite a bit of discussion of in social media, books and articles for teachers is the insistence on the need for students to be able to evaluate websites. I agree wholeheartedly. It is imperative that students learn to read and use online texts critically.

What concerns me is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion about the need for teachers to evaluate what they are putting up on the web for their students. So you want your class to blog? Why? Why are they blogging? What are they writing? Who are they writing for? Where is the learning? The same for class websites - is the site for students, parents, or both? What's the purpose of the site? Does the design of your site reflect this purpose? Does the content reflect the purpose?

As teaching professionals, we should have good answers to these questions - beyond 'It's trendy', 'I'm expected to' or 'That's what everyone's doing these days'.

It's a waste of your (and your audience's!) time to create content on the web that is badly designed, uninformed and lacking clear purpose and direction.

My two cents: before we start building sites, wikis and blogs for student use, we need to invest the time to learn about our chosen media and plan to use them effectively.

Prepping

It's been a few glorious weeks of summer holiday with my family - spent hiking, running, eating, reading and catching up on my favourite TV series. But my 'try this!' list has been calling to me and last week I decided to get to it.

Last school year saw a change of direction in my professional practice - my fourth graders were blogging, we were the first class in our school to replace paper with online homework and I began to use web curation tools like Diigo and Evernote, mostly for my own resources but also for students' stuff. I also started experimenting with flipping the classroom for Maths. All this has provided plenty of fodder for 2013-2014 goals.

First off the mark was 'getting serious' about Twitter. I confess to being a 'taker' last school year. I found some excellent chats and people to follow and poached ideas from their links and blogs to fuel teaching and learning in my classroom. I apologise, but thank you all so much for the inspiration! It's going to take time and some work, but I have committed to shifting up a gear this year to engage more effectively with you all. Slowly slowly, my PLN is growing.

I've also spent a bit of time revising and reorganising the homework website and maths revision site. I plan to add resources to the maths site as we progress through the school year, so it looks a little bare now. This is all part of my plan to strengthen home-school links..

Today's job has been to begin the task of creating text sets for my class' Units of Inquiry. I have recently reread Vivian Vasquez's book "'Getting Beyond 'I like the book'" and I'm looking forward to having my students work more critically with texts. Finding appropriate texts for my mostly ELL students is proving to be a bit of a challenge, although kids' news sites like Time for Kids and Dogo News have been useful. Of course, it's early days yet - will mine the school library when I get back to work. What I would really love would be to find these kinds of resources in students' home languages. Will add it to my list.

Next up is to do some planning for blogging. My kids' blogs last year were fantastic but unfortunately we had difficulty drumming up a readership. In the interests of privacy, I decided to limit public access to the blogs, which made us over reliant on the small community of people who had passwords. Lesson learned! 

I have great plans this year to buddy up with some other classes around the world who are also blogging - please do let me know if you have a class interested in being blog pals! 

• Any tips on developing text sets from critical literacy experts out there?
• Any other teachers of ELL students blogging with their kids?
• What are your goals for the new school year?