The Yackpack is Back!

I’m always on the lookout for web 2.0 tools that work well with primary children.  The YackPack WalkieTalkie Widget is just that.  We have had it embedded into our classroom blog, and people from around the world have “popped in” to our classroom by simply clicking on it and talking to us.  I leave my classroom blog open on my computer during the school day for just these occasions.   The children are all very excited when this happens.  We have a short chat and then we all go over to our world map and mark the spot where that person lives.  The picture on the left is from last year’s class, with red thumbtacks marking the spots.  It has also been a great tool for chatting live with our various blogging buddies.   Unfortunately, near the end of February, the Yackpack disappeared.  I was finally able to contact someone who sent me an email that said  

We’re not quite done fixing the widget problem. We have the basic YackPack UI back but no audio. When audio gets fixed, I believe widgets will work again.

It’s a frustrating problem for us. 

Obviously they have been able to solve the problem, and we can once again go live to the world.  Thanks, Yackpack!  I will have twenty-four happy children when I return to school on Monday. Give us a call.  We’d love to chat.

Doing it Twice

Lorna Costantini blogged about the need to communicate with parents about what is happening in our classrooms.  Primary teachers, on the whole, get this in spades.  We want the parents to be involved, to encourage, to listen and to participate because we know the children in our classroom need their support.   For years, I have complied a monthly calendar, which I send out on the first day of the month, highlighting items to bring to school, special happenings and weekly timetable items such as library day.  That calendar is now available online, but I still make paper copies which I send home with the children. I also send home a bi-weekly newsletter in a duo-tang.  I write a letter and the children write a letter.  When it goes home, the parents respond and return it to school.  The purpose of this newsletter is

• To let the parents know about upcoming events in our classroom
• To highlight some recent happenings in our classroom so that the parents are able to talk about them with their child
• To have a showcase for the parents to see their children’s growing writing ability
• To provide the parents with a venue to respond to their children’s writing
• To encourage communication between the home and school

Wait a minute!  This sounds familiar!  Doesn’t my classroom blog do all of these things?  Why am I doing it twice? The difficulty isn’t just in the shift in the mind of the parents from the paper to the computer.  The difficulty is that every year I have one or two students who do not have Internet access at home.  Can I leave those families out of the communication process?  When I talk to teachers about the way that I do things in my classroom I tell them that using web 2.0 tools doesn’t take more time than traditional ways.  On reflection, this has not been entirely honest.  The new tools don’t take more time, but doing it twice does.  Until everyone has access, I have to do it all twice to avoid anyone being left out.  Perhaps these teachers have seen this.  No wonder they are reluctant to get involved.   

This school year, I have been struggling to find ways to streamline what I do.  Suggestions are welcome!

The What is Clear, but the How. . .

Clarence Fisher, responding to a post by David Jakes, talks about the challenges of assessing contributions in a networked classroom.  It made me sit up and take stock of the way I assess this in my classroom.  My students are not at the Wikipedia editing stage, but can blog and comment, as well as add to primary oriented wikis.   

I allow my classroom blog to be a showcase of my students’ emergent writing.  From their first post to their last, I do not edit or revise their work, although I am constantly encouraging them to do this themselves.   Instead, if I think that the student’s spelling might not be understood by the reader, I will add a note in brackets to indicate what the student intended to say.  (I have been reading emergent writer for a long time, and so I need to remember that what is clear to me might not be clear to someone else who does not read six-year-old writing every day.  I have been called on this.)  At the end of the year, the students and I can look back at all of their posts and clearly see the improvement in their writing abilities, as can their parents.  Assessing their blog entries is the easy part. 

By this time of the year, most of the students’ writing can be understood by the uninitiated, and I encourage them to comment on the posts of their friends, and other primary classes that we have as blogging buddies.  Aside from the fact that their writing in general improves every time they write, how can I assess the comments that are sent to other blogs?   

Last Friday was a school holiday, and one of Mark Ahlness’ students, Alec, took the time to send seven thoughtful and encouraging comments to my children.  I did email Mark to tell him about it, but otherwise, how would Mark even know that this out-of-school interaction took place? 

I have way more questions than answers.  Maybe I need to add to that self-assessment tool.   

It’s Not About the Technology

Several people, including Dean and Darren, have posted “Day in the Life of” slideshows.  When Dean asked Darren, Clarence and I to speak to his class at the University of Regina via Elluminate, I decided to follow their example.  As my sister often says, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.   Since my students are much cuter than I am, I decided to make it a day in one of their lives instead of my own.  I chose the student who was the first one in the door in the morning.  He got a little tired of my constant picture taking, so although he was still reluctantly humouring me, I branched out to some other students who were more than eager to take his place.   

I have had teachers ask me if my students ever write on paper.  Of course they do!  Almost every day!  Because of this, I wanted to show Dean’s students that technology is not always the best choice as a teaching tool. It is just one of the tools that I can choose from when I am planning the best learning option for my class.  It can, however, give us opportunities that no other tool can such as opportunities for connection, for an audience and for transparency.

I used two videos in my pesentation as well, one about comparing capacity of containers and another about how to kick a soccer ball.

 

Six Year Olds CAN Self-Assess

Since we just finished report cards and parent-teacher-student conferences, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-assessment.  I have tried this often in the past, but met with little success.  Part of this has been the age of the children that I teach.  Six year olds in general think they can do anything, and the self-assessments that they have done for me have, with the odd exception, reflected this.  Also, in retrospect, I realize that I created too many different self-assessments, so that the children never felt comfortable with one before I had moved on to another.

Primary self-assessments usually ask students to reflect on their strengths and then colour in, for each area, one of three pre-made faces: one with the mouth turned up, one with the mouth turned down and the other one that I never know what to call (the mouth isn’t turned up or down, it’s just straight across).  I have prepared self-assessments in lots of curriculum areas, but have always been discouraged by the fact that almost every child had a paper full of coloured happy faces.

Despite my lack of success, I have really wanted to make this work.  This past fall, borrowing heavily from the work of Dawn Kesslering, I designed a new self-assessment tool that included components from all the strands of our language arts curriculum and our math curriculum as well as some personal and social indicators.  When we used the tool together last fall, it took us about forty minutes to complete, and I had to explain for each of the thirty-one areas what each of the faces would mean in that context.  When we had our conferences, I asked the children to share two things from the tool that they were good at and one thing that they wanted to improve.  The parents and I smiled at each other over their heads as they explained how good they were at subtraction (we hadn’t done any yet and none of them understood what it was) or how well they left spaces between their words when they wrote (very few of them did).

We redid the same self-assessments last week just before our conferences, and I was amazed at the honest and accurate reflection they were able to do.  Only one or two students still felt they could “do it all”.  What really surprised me, though, was the way they were able to pick out areas that really were strengths for them, and zero in on areas that they wanted to improve during the conference with their parents.  Lesson learned.  I can’t wait to see how they do in June. 

Then there is the intriguing fact that out of thirty-one items, the twins, in separate interviews, picked out exactly the same ones to show their mother. . . 

Why Am I Here in WordPress?

For the past three years, I have been reading the blogs of many people in education that have insightful, powerful things to say. The blogs of people like Dean Shareski, David Warlick, Clarence Fisher…well, I could go on, but the purpose of this post is not to give you a list of my RSS feeds. The thoughts of these people, most of whom I have never met face-to-face, have helped to shape my own thinking and push me to be a better teacher. I consider myself to be a doer, not a thinker, practical rather than philosophical, so I valued the fact that they shared online, but never thought I would decide to have my own blog.

I have had a classroom blog for my grade one students for about three years, and I have noticed that occasionally things slip into it that are not really classroom blogish, but rather show my learning more than that of my students. I don’t think this has been a totally bad thing, but I have sometimes felt that it was a kind of schizophrenic voice, hopping back and forth between the children and myself. More and more often lately, I have been tempted to write about something that on second thought didn’t really belong there.

So here it is, Rena. Thanks for the push. I’m not totally sure what I want this space to be, but I’m looking forward to seeing what it evolves into.