I just returned from the Tlt Summit in Saskatoon and I’m still in the “go” mode of conferences. There were lots of great ideas and thoughts to ponder. We were treated to keynotes from the diverse thoughts of George Siemens, Alan November, Rick Schwier and Stephen Downes. My head is spinning.
At the conference I heard over and over that one of the best parts of this kind of conference is getting to meet face to face with people that you have met online, or at earlier conferences. This is so true.The attendees shared a passion for learning and a desire to help their students use technology in effective ways. The conversation always turned to learning and how to improve it.
A couple of primary goodies from the conference: Kelly Christopherson shared Go2Web20, a site that allows you to search web 2.0 tools by tag. (Hint:Try the “kids” tag.) A great find.Marnie McMillan presented a wiki to go with her Writing on the Web session.
I did a session about using web 2.0 tools with elementary students. Because I already had a wiki for primary, I set up an elementary wiki for this conference as well, focusing on grades three to eight. Here is my slide deck from the presentation.
Tlt was a great experience. I can’t wait until next year.
I’m sitting at home working on my computer on a Friday night. (Boring life, I know, but I have to do something between folding loads of laundry.) I hear the little ping that lets me know I have an email. Thinking it is an email I just sent to a new recipient being returned, I check it. Instead, it is a blog article from Hailey, one of the six year old students in my class.She writes “Hi Ncol gess what we got to take with our bogging butty in aschaiea it was fun.”
Two things are noteworthy about this.First of all it is the weekend, and she is writing on her blog, definitely a school–type activity. It must be something that she enjoys.
Secondly, she is writing to Nicole, who was her blogging mentor at the University of Regina this past semester.Although she did get to meet Nicole once, all other interaction with her has been through the blog and somehow she has formed a definite attachment. (She is referring to a Skype chat she had a couple of evenings before with another blogging buddy her own age in Australia.)
These are two things that I love about blogging with my class.The way it captivates the kids’ interest and the connections that they make. (Never mind the fact that she demonstrated the use of a capital letter at the beginning and on Nicole’s name and that she ended with a period—two things I’m looking for on her writing rubric next month.)
We’ve had laptops available to us for almost two full weeks now. They have been two weeks full of learning—learning how to use them, and learning about my own thinking. Here are a few of the highs and lows. (It was a stretch to get the two lows.)
High The kids love them. They vie for them the minute they are in the classroom and remind me if we are late in getting them into our classroom when I have said that we will be using them. Riley commented, “I like plaeing with the labtops.”
Low Small technical difficulties that interrupt. For example, each of the computers has a wireless mouse, and the kids have discovered that if the laptops are too close together, one mouse can control two cursors, irritating the user of the second computer. There have been other difficulties with the wireless mice as well. I think they might be on their way out of the computer cabinet. We have also, on occasion, not been able to get all of the computers on the Internet at once. My principal tells me that this means that the school has reached the limit of its Internet capacity.
High The kids love to watch anything that moves, especially if there is sound attached, and they are now able to view them all without the computer stalling. I’ve been able to use a couple of new applications (Animoto and One True Media) on my classroom blog that I had tried before, but had to remove because they were just too much for my elderly Sunray computers.
Low Now what do I do about those Sunray computers? I can’t recall us using them more than once in the past two weeks, and as we begin to use more applications that they can’t handle, it will be more unlikely that we will. I’m hesitant to get rid of something that will work for even a few things we want to do, though…
This morning I had five nine-year-old Sun Ray computers in my classroom.This afternoon, I still had them, but I also had ten gleaming new laptops with–wonder of wonders–wireless access.The excitement in the classroom was palpable.
I should mention at this juncture that we do have to share these computers with three other classrooms, but that didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm today.
After a few words of explanation about what that red dot in the middle of the keyboard was, and how to use a wireless mouse (make sure you can see the word Microsoft when you push in the receiver), we were off.
Well, not quite.In our school, we all log in with “lastname.firstname”, and a few kids forgot this in their excitement, but we eventually sorted it all out.One pair of enterprising students who were being very fair in their sharing of the computer even tried to log in with the user name “Riley and Hayley”.
After that, the kids checked out each other’s blogs, read comments and took turns writing comments.It wasn’t perfect (“why do I have to have the last turn?”), but it was a great start.Oh, the places we’ll go…
So, you teach kindergarten and you have a classroom blog.Your children are not yet what you would call fluent readers, but you want them to be engaged in what you have written on your blog, not just look at the pictures.What to do?
Cindy Blakely has solved the problem by voice-enabling her blog using Odiogo.When you sign up, it adds a “listen now” icon to each of your blog entries.After a short commercial, a “near human” voice reads the text aloud to your pre-reader children.Cindy says,
Odiogo freed the student up to hear the words….the message….and know why the images went along with the words. In the far reaches of my vision, they would follow along (as best they could) and pick up a few words to read.
As my son would say, “sweet”.
Unfortunately, Odiogo only works with WordPress, Blogger and a few other platforms.I’m a dedicated Classblogmeister user for my own classroom blog, but adding a listening component for primary bloggers is inspired.
Today, still at the Saskatchewan Reading Convention, I wore another one of my hats, that of a literacy team member at my school.We have worked very hard over the past few years to improve the reading levels of our students, and we have been very pleased with the results we have achieved.(Check out the graph on slides three to nine.)Shelley Hager, our primary Student Support Services Teacher and I did a presentation about what we have done at our school to accomplish what we have so far.The audience was great—we could feel their energy.They asked helpful, clarifying questions and they put up with us rushing through the last part of our presentation.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a session on blogging at the Saskatchewan Reading Convention. The theme of the conference, was “Unlock the Mystery, Find the Treasure:Read”, so I titled my session Unlock the Mysteries of Blogging.
Following in the footsteps of Dean Shareski, and the wiki he did for his Are You Published? session at Showcase last winter, I created a wiki with my slides embedded and some links for the teachers to check out as they explore a tool that was new to them.
Jody Hayes, bless her heart, went to her school at 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to Skpye into my session.I owe you big time, Jody.
Live blogged (I’ve always wanted to say that) at the Saskatchewan Reading Convention in Regina.
Faye Brownlie – Grand Conversations, Thoughtful Responses
Marketing the Books:Faye is modeling ways of introducing books to students so that they can make good choices for Literature Circles.She is clear about the settings of the books, the genre and reads a small section from each book.She never tells the kids if the books are too hard or too easy for them.She goes with their judgment because readers should make their own choices.
Literature Circle Conversations:Her key idea is “say something”.What are you thinking?Tell us.After conversation, ask who made a connection with this?Who thought “I hadn’t thought of it that way?”How many of you got an image in your mind?
Effective Discussions:Don’t jump in to start as the teacher.Let them start and jump in only to add to the conversations.
All voices must be included
Everyone must feel included
Everyone’s ideas are respected
The discussion should move us to new understandings
Response Journals:
Initially, written in class, together
Develop criteria together for powerful responses
A response should include a summary and thoughts. The challenge is to get the thoughts part to outweigh the summary part.
Comprehension Strategies:Sample - Make acontainer that has three pictures on it showing one thing about each of three characters. (My own children have always hated this kind of assignment.)
My personal reflection:Literature circles do not work for emerging readers; however, readers whose reading level is near the end of grade two can begin to use these strategies.
I had a conversation with Troy Morris, the Community Evagelist from Wetpaint Wikis recently, and something he said has been buzzing around in my head ever since.He called it the 90-9-1 rule.Ninety per cent of people just look at a wiki, nine per cent of people join the wiki and perhaps contribute something and one percent of people become engaged and make it work.
Probably much of online activity is like this.I am in the ninety per cent for most of the blogs that I read, a nine per cent twitterer, and in the one per cent group for certain wikis and other projects that I feel passionate about.
It occurs to me that much of life is like this—churches, service clubs, school councils, I haven’t yet thought of an organization that isn’t working because of the few. I guess the lesson is that if you want to expand the number of people involved in something, it’s of little use to keep flogging the ones you already have contact with.You have to expose your ideas to a whole lot more people.You’re not going to change them all.Hmmm.
For the past three months, the children in my class have all had a blog mentor from the University of Regina.These mentors are all talking a class from Patrick Lewis that focuses on how to teach writing to primary students.It has been an ideal partnership.The “big blogging buddies” get to watch and participate in the writing development of a live, breathing primary child, and the little blogging buddies have a captive audience for their beginning writing.
One of the requirements for the university class is that the participants comment on each blog entry that my students make.I provided the students with the rubric that I would be using to assess writing at the end of the year so that the expectations were clear.We also had twice-weekly chats via Skpye in which the mentors took turns chatting with my children about their writing.The other requirement was that the students all come out to meet my children at the end of the semester—a forty-five minute drive.(Patrick made this a requirement this year after I had several children in tears last year when the anticipated day arrived and their big buddy did not.)
The improvement in the writing skills of children in grade one is always profound, but the modeling and suggestions that the pre-service teachers have given have made a big difference to my children.Knowing that someone besides their teacher will be nagging them about periods, capital letters and writing more details has motivated and encouraged them.
Last week, after I had answered the question “when are our blogging buddies coming?” 304 times, our university blogging buddies finally came to visit us.As you can see in the picture above—pure joy.I wish every classroom could experience this.
I’m sitting at home working on my computer on a Friday night. (Boring life, I know, but I have to do something between folding loads of laundry.) I hear the little ping that lets me know I have an email. 
Access.
I had a conversation with 
