Blogging with ESL, Interactive book reviews, Symbaloo for resource curation...

It's been a busy week - lots of meetings and planning for projects underway.

The last while has been really enjoyable because there' s been lots of time for library work - I've really enjoyed getting more familiar with our collection, and gaining confidence in being able to find the right book for students, parents and teachers when they come and ask. However, we are just on the brink of the next phase of the CIS Self-Study, so I will need to devote a lot of time in the near future to collating the evidence and analysis collected by our sub-committees, and creating the report.

But, a quick review of the week, because there are some exciting things going on...

The Grade 3 ESL class I've been working with now have their blog up and running. Their ESL teacher is excited to have another way that the children can show their parents the work they've done so far this school year in her classes. Hopefully, it'll also provide a useful tool for reflection later in the year - they can watch the videos of themselves speaking and be proud of the progress they've made! My next goal for this group is to have them begin creating their own posts.

With this same group, we've been using Storybird to create narratives. There's lots that's great about Storybird - the illustrations are absolutely stunning, for one. It's really simple, available for computers and tablets, and it's relatively easy to share your finished product - via social media or by embedding. My only complaint is that there's no option to generate a direct link to your work - which means it's not so compatible with Blogger and other Google products. You can play with the embed code to make it work, but those are precious minutes better spent elsewhere, really. The other thing I'd really like to see included in Storybird is the option to add audio - this group of students has trouble getting their thoughts and ideas written down in English. My work-around for this time is to have them use Audioboom to record their stories, and we'll embed the audio underneath the Storybird work on the blog. I think next time we'll try Voicethread...

I worked with a couple of Grade 5 classes yesterday, which was wonderful. I know this group quite well, from being a Grade 4 classroom teacher last year.. I'm working with one group on creating interactive book reviews, using Thinglink. Here's the link so you can see what we've done so far, although it's clearly a work in progress. I love Thinglink - it's really fun, is a great vehicle for kids to learn to upload photos and video, hyperlink and manipulate basic code, and the end products look great. We'll add the finished product to the library's book review blog.

With the other class, we also published book reviews. They chose to publish theirs in Destiny Quest, our catalogue/library management system, so other students can easily access their reviews as they browse. We're just beginning to use Destiny Quest more effectively in the library this year, and so far, I like it a lot. It's very simple and user-friendly. Some students also chose to add their reviews to the library review blog to share with the wider school community, which made me very happy. Most of the reviews are written by me, about picture books, because 50% of my teaching time is spent with the very small children, sharing picture books. Which is lovely, but I'm very conscious of a vast body of excellent literature for older readers that I'm not getting into yet! It's a goal.. On the upside, reviews about children's books are more authentic when they're written by children, I suppose. Kids know better what they like than I do :).

I also had a really exciting meeting with the Grade 2 team, and am looking forward to trialling our new system for resource curation with them (Symbaloo). I have a load of curation to do with/for them for their next unit of inquiry, Resources and Choices. Also, more tech integration work with narratives, a couple of author visits, AND hopefully some drama.

Oh it feels so good to write all that down - so nice to be back in reflection mode - really keeps me on track and clears my head. Now for the weekend!

Our blogs are going so well!

My students have achieved well with their blogs this year. We began in the last week of August '13 and quickly attracted comments from around the world. I've also received a number of encouraging emails and comments on the children's work from colleagues at our own school and abroad. It's worth reflecting on what we have done in class this  year to help us along the way.

• First and foremost: Our blogs are open for anyone in the world to read or comment on. Last year, my students' blogs were kept private and commenting privileges were extended only to those within our school community who had a password. Thus our readership started small and dwindled throughout the year. It didn't matter how cool our work was, or even how cool other people (who managed to find our work) thought our work was, because at the end of the day, nobody could remember their password to leave a comment to tell us so! Part of the power of blogging is in its interactivity - the more comments they get, the more children want to write. Important note: All comments are sent to me for moderation before they are visible on the blog.

• Investing time. Blogging was completely new to my students at the beginning of the school year. We spent a lot of time reading blogs, comparing blogs to different kinds of texts we knew about and experimenting with the different features of blogs, as well as developing technical proficiency. This initial unit took about 6 weeks. Now we have one designated lesson per week for writing posts, commenting and responding to comments. Many children also blog from home. Check out Silvia Tolisano's excellent Langwitches Blog for planning and teaching ideas.

• Conceptualising blogging as a 'conversation'. It's really important that the children understand that a blog is an interactive space - not a static one. In our investigations of blogging, we talked a lot about the 'social media' aspect of blogging. A blog is not so much a place we publish as it is a place we have conversations. This understanding feeds into the development of further understandings about digital safety and etiquette, as well as literacy learning in terms of genre and text types. 

• Freedom and flexibility. Giving students control over blog content and layout. It's been really important that it's the children who own their blogs, not me. Whilst the primary purpose of blogging in our class is for reflection and digital portfolios, students also post jokes, stories, informational pieces, opinions etc. Blogs are so versatile - it's a mistake to limit their use to reflection.

• Quadblogging. I signed us up for this at the beginning of the school year and it certainly got our name out into the student blogging community. Even if you don't sign up, it's a great way to see a range of blogs and how different teachers and schools are choosing to blog with or for their students.

Some things to work on/think about:

• One thing that I did expect (that hasn't magically come to fruition) was that my students would edit their work more carefully when they knew that they were writing for an audience (and not just me!). This is something that the literature assured me would happen, and it ain't. 
• Encouraging students to go beyond their own blogs in furthering their 'conversations'. Next time, maybe I will start my blogging unit by having students comment on blogs outside of our school community. Students in my class love to comment on their friends' blogs, but need a quite a bit more prodding to visit and comment on a stranger's blog.
• Blogging with iPads. This is definitely a small part of a much larger conversation. We are incredibly lucky, and have just been issued 1:1 iPads in our class as part of an action research project at our school. As regards blogging, we are still familiarising ourselves with the Edublogs app. It will be really interesting to see what happens next.

This teaching thing is HARD

Sadly, my best intentions to write regular posts (full to the brim with reflections on our amazing, inspired, wonderful classroom experiences) have not really come to fruition. The real world of being a teacher can very quickly smack those best intentions down. Fact: only crazy people think that teachers have an 'easy' job. To be honest, at this stage, I can't remember which week of school we're in. 4? 5? It has been nuts.

I spent a lot of time over the summer researching and dreaming about wonderful things to do with my class - coming back to work has entailed a not-so-nice reintroduction to the reality that there is not as much available space for fitting in these well-researched-and-dreamed-of dreams as one would hope. I want to reflect on some of what has passed so far.

Most difficult so far is the return to Earth - remembering that this job involves so much more than working with the children in class. So many pies, so few fingers to stick in them... Day-to-day teaching, learning and assessment, keeping track of emails, website creation and maintenance, liaising with other class teachers, ESL teachers, learning support teachers, other specialist teachers, the school counsellor, staff meetings, professional development courses, preparing for parent-teacher conferences, short-term, mid-range and long-term planning, home learning, steering committees, parent meetings, team meetings, staff meetings, developing goals, author visits, excursions, filling out various forms blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Another downer is that I've decided to postpone using Twitter with my class. Those 140 characters a day turned out to be more than I could cram in from the beginning. I thought that parents would be all over it, but it looks like they're not so into tweeting. This is a bit sad for me as I hoped that using Twitter to communicate with parents would be a good starting-point for Twitter use in our class. I'll have to rethink it. This is fine for now - blogging has provided plenty of fodder for teaching and learning thus far.

After that little whine, I need to write here that my students are amazing. I have a great bunch of lively, interested and hilarious kids to work with every single day. You can see from our class blog that they are a highly talented bunch. I like them all a lot.

I am also very excited by the blogging work the children have done in the last weeks. We started off with a few weeks of working intensively to learn about blogs through reading and writing. This group began the school year with very little to no idea about what a blog is. By week 4, they are writing their own posts and commenting on each others', as well as on other blogs, responding to comments and beginning to insert their own photographs and hyperlinks. The secret of our success thus far, I think, has been that the children made their own choices about the structure and content of their posts. Post titles include 'If you are a noob at Minecraft read this', 'The day in the Aquarium', 'What is an atom?' and 'How to make kids interested in math (for teachers).' It makes for interesting reading and has been a winner for keeping the children motivated to blog. Sadly, it's time to move on now, and while we will continue to blog throughout the year, it is no longer our focus genre.

Remembering to give credit where it's due, I should add that something else that has worked really well has been our involvement in Quadblogging - if you blog (or are thinking about blogging) with your class, check it out.

The children are also learning to use google Drive - at this stage for simple word processing, but very soon they'll be into sharing docs, commenting and embedding work from Drive on their own blogs for portfolios (or blogfolios, if you will, which I won't, because it is an AWFUL word).

Meanwhile, in Maths, we've been hammering away at Number with as many games and hands-on activities as we can fit in, while still making sure we spend plenty of time working on our sums. Last year, I learned to love maths very much but I can't wait to move beyond this beginning-of-the-year intensive focus on place value and number consolidation. At this stage, pattern and the really cool problem-solving stuff is a wistful dream.. That said, this week we've had a brief respite in a couple of wonderful sessions working with symmetry. After weeks of slogging away at digits, sums and symbols, we broke out the paints, pastels, scissors and glue and remembered that Maths is beautiful. I'm looking forward to inquiring into the places we can find symmetry in real life..


Image from flickr: http://flic.kr/p/fQzwPZ Sourced: 27/09/13

Enjoy the wildlife! Happy Friday to everyone!

Counting my Blessings

It is Tuesday night, and so many cool things have already happened this week.

• 'My kids' are great. I love teaching Grade 4 and in week 3, my class is really starting to come together as a team. I'm getting to know the children and develop relationships with individuals. I really believe that my first forays into Morning Meetings are helping with this.
• Our class blog is really taking off. I was brave this year and opened it up so that anyone in the world could comment, with great results. My students are so excited.
• Relatedly, I decided to ditch what I'm supposed to be teaching this week (in terms of writing genre and content) and asked the students to make their own choices about what they blog about. We have articles from 'How to choose a new bike' to 'How to care for a Praying Mantis' and 'How to keep your child from hitting the piano'. I have a couple of young boys researching jet-fighters with impressive energy and enthusiasm, using search skills I might never have otherwise known about. These kinds of results are well worth breaking the rules for.

• I had a meeting with a parent today who told me her son has completed a home learning project of his own already. This is before formal homework has even begun! My colleagues and I have been working really hard to come up with a framework to support the students in their home learning inquiries and trying to 'take it slow', and this kid just took things into his own hands and went for it! I am stoked! Hooray for self-motivated, lifelong learners! This has to be a sign that we're moving in the right direction.
• Kids from my last year's class visit me every day for chats and hugs. I really like my new class but it is so great to keep up with the wonderful group I worked with last year. I am so proud to watch them continue to grow.
• My leaders want to work with me. I have had a couple of meetings with leaders lately and it is so reassuring to feel like I am being heard. They don't always agree with me and they don't always pat me on the back but they engage, they listen and they give me guidance when I ask for it. I really feel like they are doing the best they can to help me do my best, and not just 'managing' me.
• Saving the best for last: I have some of the greatest colleagues who are also dear friends. They love, enjoy and are passionate about what they do, they inspire me, care for me, make me laugh and most importantly, they are there when I need them.

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?