Primary Media Literacy

Last week, in celebration of Media Literacy Week, I was (via Skype) part of an event held in Winnipeg and organized by ManAce.  The organizers planned a packed evening, beginning with four presenters from different parts of Canada who worked with a wide variety of students (I was the token primary representative) and followed by a panel discussion.  Each of the four initial presenters had five minutes to present their point of view, followed by questions.

Because I wanted to include student voices in my presentation, I used a video for part of what I wanted to say.  In making the video, I was inspired by the great video that the organizers of the event had made–it started me thinking about what media literacy looks like in a primary classroom.

Through the magic of Slideshare, my video is part of my slides below.  Can primary students be media literate?  You betcha!

Early Childhood Resources

Yes, it has indeed been a long time since I posted on this blog.

Recently, I did two presentations at our provincial Early Childhood Education Council’s annual convention.This is a decidedly non-tech convention (I was apparently the only presenter who needed internet access) attended mainly by K to 2 teachers.

My first presentation was the Top Ten Free Technology Tools for Young Learners.  Choosing ten tools turned out to be more difficult than I had expected.  The top few were no brainers to me, but after that, choosing tools that I thought these teachers might use was harder than I had expected.  There are just so many that are possible to use.  I did get lots of questions on Twitter when I posted this link, asking why I had not included Voicethread in the list.  I do think Voicethread is a great tool, and I admire the work other teachers have done, but it has not worked well for me, so I didn’t think it was fair to include it.  The wonderful Amanda Marrinan got up at 3:30 in the morning to Skype in to my session and wowed the attendees with her lovely Aussie accent and passion.

My other presentation, Login for Literacy, was on a topic near and dear to my heart–using technology to support learning in the six strands of our provincial language arts curriculum.  The wiki also includes a few math links as I wanted the attendees to see the potential there as well. Wendy Goodwin graciously shared via Skype about the reader’s theatre we have done between classes using Skype, and some of the other things she has been doing with her teachers.

Several teachers who chose another session popped in to ask me for a copy of my handout, and were surprised to receive a url instead.  It was a weird feeling to be the only person at the conference checking things on her laptop, but definitely good to be reminded that most of the world does not work the way I do.

Are You a Winner?

Are you an innovative teacher?  Would you like to have a chance to talk to and learn with other innovative teachers from around the world?  Are you a Canadian teacher?  Did you answer “yes” to all three of those questions?  Have I got an opportunity for you!

Microsoft Canada has announced the 2009 Microsoft Canada Innovative Teacher Awards.  I was part of this in program in 2006; fabulous is the only word to describe the experience I had.  As one of the innovative teachers, I was flown to Philadelphia and Siam Riep, Cambodia where I stayed in five star hotels (who knew there were hotels where people came in and turned down your bed for you in the evening).  While there, I had the opportunity to network with other teachers from all areas of the world.  It was truly the trip of a lifetime.

This year, interested teachers have until May 8, 2009 to submit their application for a project using MARVIN, Zune, OneNote or Learning Essentials.  Eight Canadian projects will be chosen by May 15, and provided with access to the tool they have chosen to use for their project.  These teachers will then have until October 1st, 2009 to develop their project and use it with their students. Four of these teachers will be chosen to compete in the Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum in Salvador, Brazil, November 3-6, 2009.

Don’t just think about it, do it!  There is no website available with information about this, but as a former winner, I HAVE THE INFORMATION.  If you, or someone know, is interested in participating in this tremendous opportunity, just email me, (Cassidy.kathy@prairiesouth.ca) and I will forward the email I received to you.

Good luck.  I can’t wait to hear what innovative things teachers have done.

Starting Out Right

I’ve done several sessions to introduce teachers to blogging in the past, and have usually walked away wondering how many were going to keep it up. Beyond the technical aspects (which are huge issues if you’re not yet sure how to do basic things such as copy and paste) there is always the worry that teachers will not see the potential, but will just see it as “one more thing” to be added to their already busy day. At a fairly recent session that I did, I guessed that only about one third of the participants would actually follow up on the work we did together.

Yesterday I did a daylong session about using blogging to meet your curriculum with about fifty K–2 teachers. This session was the brainchild of Donna Desroche and JoAnne Kasper, and involved teachers from almost all of the schools in their division. It was one of the most enjoyable sessions I have ever done. I loved it because I went away feeling like all of the participants there would actually use what they had learned. I think it worked well for several reasons:

Preparation – All of the teachers came with a Classblogmeister blog already set up. We didn’t need to take time to go over basics, but could instead focus on making it work in the classroom.

Time – The teachers had a whole day of release time to learn about, talk about and feel comfortable with their blogs.

Ownership – We spent some time talking about how to customize their blog and then let them have time to add widgets, change templates and make their blog their own. I don’t see this as peripheral. I think this is an important step in ownership for teachers as well as students.

Curriculum Connection – As you can see from the wiki that I used, we also spent some time talking about specific ways they could use their blog to connect their students with our Saskatchewan curriculum. When I showed them how to embed a video, and some examples of curriculum-related videos that they could use, I could see their eyes light up.

Ongoing Support – At the end of the day, Donna asked them to talk in groups about ways that they felt they could use the blog in their classroom, and then asked them to email both herself and JoAnne to let her know their thoughts about the day and what further support they needed to help implement their goal for their blog. Some of them took the opportunity to find other classes to connect with and begin a blogging buddy exchange.

Well done, JoAnne and Donna. You’ve created a great model that’s worth following. I can’t wait to see the great stuff the teachers and their students will do.

Using Video to Capture Learning

I’m currently at the iT summit in Saskatoon.  Yesterday I did a presentation called Just Point and Shoot:  Using Video to Capture Learning. My emphasis was on the capturing, not on a polished final product.  I find that I am using video more and more  to help my students share their learning.  The students love using video because even those who do not yet write well can explain and demonstrate their learning and there is then the opportunity to watch themselves over and over again.  I love it because this watching reinforces the concept that they need to learn.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million.  

The wiki for my presentation includes the slide deck I used.  Because the presentation was coming up, I decided to stretch myself and learn a bit about video editing.  With thanks to Dean Shareski for showing me the basics, here is my first attempt at an edited video.  I used it at the end of my presentation. 

Vocaroo, Here’s to You

I’m always looking—looking for new tools that will help primary children to improve their communication skills.  So when a few people in my Twitter network tweeted about a tool called Vocaroo, I knew it was a keeper. 

Vocaroo’s website says, “Vocaroo is a shiny new service for sending voice messages across the interwebs.”  It allows you to record your voice, play it back to listen, and then provides you with a url or the html to embed an icon into a webpage or blog. 

I have had my students do podcasting before using Audacity, and then uploaded the mp3’s to space on our school board’s server, but although I was unable to edit the recording, using Vocaroo was much easier and less time consuming. 

Since reading fluency is one of the objectives in our language arts curriculum, I decided to start there.  In my class we call fluency “reading smoothly”. Last week I had my students each write about their reading and then we recorded each of them reading a couple of pages and posted it in the article.  One of my students wrote, “I can read smoovly. And dis is what it meeings it meeings you dot stop you dis ceep on going. “ Translation: “I can read smoothly. And this is what it means. It means you don’t stop you just keep on going.”  Having a recording of their voices gave my students the opportunity to hear what they sound like when they are reading—to hear whether their reading really is smooth or not.

Vocaroo’s FAQ says that you can record as long as you want, but we found that it would only record for about 15 seconds.  This may have been because the computer, because I tried it again tonight and was able to easily get 30 seconds of recording. 

It is difficult for many primary students to express themselves using text, but most are comfortable using their voice.  I think this tool will have to stay in my teaching aresenal.

Note: I CANNOT get a Vocaroo icon to embed in this blogpost, but you can see one here.

Dabbling with DS and Deaf Dogs

What are we doing playing Nintendo DS in our classroom? 

It all started when Ewan Macintosh came to Moose Jaw last summer.  One of the things he shared was the tremendous improvement in problem solving skills of young children who were regularly using gaming in their classroom, specifically using the game Nintendogs.  I was intrigued, and fortunately my principal, who holds the purse strings, was too.

I checked out a couple of links from Ewan and did some hands-on research of my own since up until that point (I confess!) I had no idea what a Nintendo DS actually looked like.  I should have just asked my students.  When I checked with them, I discovered that despite the fact that many of the families at my school are not what I would call “well-to-do”, all but two of them owned a DS.  Since improving students’ problem-solving skills is a motherhood issue, it seemed like an obvious thing to do. 

Nintendogs is a video simulation of owning a pet.  Players can use the stylus to pet their dog, call their dog with a built-in microphone and buy things for their pet. I did consider using a different game, since the dogs in this game appear to be hard of hearing and not overly bright, but it was hard to argue with the curriculum match and track record of this game.

Our class now owns six DS machines and each dog has been adopted by a group of four students.  We’re being helped out with the reading portion of the games by six students from our reading buddy classroom who eagerly leave their classroom to come to ours.   After an initial 45-minute session to get started, we are now trying 10 – 15 minutes each day.

The game is, of course, providing incredible engagement and motivation for the students, and we will be incorporating lots of dog themed activities into other subject areas.  I want to know whether it really does improve the children’s problem solving skills though, so after doing a fair amount of checking and finding nothing that suited my needs, I prepared a set of five problems (leaning heavily on a Problem Solver binder I have) that each require different kinds of thinking.  I gave these problems to the students before we began and will give them to the children again later to see if there has been a change.

Will using these engaging little boxes help to improve the problem solving skills of my six year olds?  Stay tuned.

Blogging With Our Big Buddies

For the third year, my class is being mentored by a class of pre-service teachers at the University of Regina. From January to April, while the university is holding classes, these second year students will be commenting on the blog entries of my six-year old students. This program has been so successful, that Patrick Lewis, the university professor whose class is participating in this, and I shared about this experience as part of the K12 Online Conference.

Once again, my students are over the moon to have these big “kids” as part of their learning network. They got to meet their buddies face to face digitally last week via Skype, and were eager to ask important questions such as “Do you have a phone number book?”, “Do you like Pokemon” and “I wonder if you’re having a good day?” Patrick took pictures of the “big buddies” and emailed them to me. I printed them off and gave them to the children to keep in their desks. As in past years, these precious pictures come out to be looked at many times each day. I even saw one of the pictures getting a kiss!

My favourite response, though, was by one of my students when I first explained what we would be doing with our blogging buddies and how they would be helping us to get to be better writers. He said, “Maybe we could find out if they have blogs and we could comment to help them out, too”. Out of the mouths of babes…   Apparently none of them are blogging–yet. Well, ELNG 325? We’re waiting.

7 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me

No one has tagged me for this meme, for which I am grateful.  I have been tagged a couple of times for other things, but I have never posted them because I always felt that I would then have to tag others at the end, and that feels too much like a chain letter for me to feel comfortable with it.  I decided to break all the rules and do this meme anyway.  The good part of deciding to do it myself is that I don’t have to tag others.  I enjoy it immensely when other people post their seven things, so here are mine.

 

1.    I grew up in a VERY small town. There were eight students in my graduating class.  Despite there being some very accepting people who lived in the area, I always knew we didn’t really belong because my parents had only moved there when they got married, and not always been residents.

 

2.    I can speak, read and write Thai. (Well, the reading and writing are pretty rusty.)  I lived in Thailand for four years while my husband was teaching in a college, and I was having babies. While I was there, a lovely Thai tutor (Khru Sujitra) came to our home to teach me. I wrote and did well on the “grade six” exam for foreigners.

 

3.    When I was young, Bobby Hull, the hockey player, had supper in my parents’ home. My father brought him home from a cattle sale.   My mother fed him steak. We raised beef cattle, so this was not as ostentatious as it sounds. I’m not much of a hockey fan, but understood that this was a big deal.

 

4.    In a former teaching life, I was a primary music consultant in Regina.

 

5.    I’d like a chance to do my first year of teaching over again. Oh to go back with the knowledge and experience that I have now!

 

6.    I was raised in a veterinarian’s home. It was a common experience for me to watch dogs and cats spayed, to help pull calves who were not coming out when they were supposed to or rub down the bleary-eyed calves that were born by C-section. Despite this, I am really not an animal lover.

 

7.    I like to watch old episodes of Star Trek.

 

If you read this, and haven’t done your own seven things, please do.  I won’t tag you, but I’d love to read them.  C’mon.  Break the rules with me.

 

Boxes for Wikis

 

I’ve been doing some preliminary work for some workshops that I will be giving in the next few months, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the different kinds of educational wikis that I have seen.  Aside from wikis that educators use professionally to share links, here are the kinds that I have thought of so far:

·      Wikis as classroom web pages. I wish I had an example of this to link to here, as I have seen several good ones, but I seem to have forgotten to put them in my delicious account. (Let me know if you use one in this way, and I’ll add it here.)

·      Wikis as collaborative projects between many classrooms. The Holiday Traditions project, the Monster Project, and Alphabet Antics are examples of this.

·      Wikis that invite anyone to contribute to students’ learning. Personally, this is my favourite type. Wikis such as 1000 Names, Responsibilities and the Kindergarten Counting Book allow anyone to be a part of a class’s learning.

·      Wikis that are used by one classroom to record their learning in a space that allows for collaboration. Clarence Fisher’s history wiki is an example of this.

 

All of these are effective ways to share.

 

What about you?  Have you seen wikis used in other ways that don’t fit into these classifications?  My mind likes boxes–I’d be glad to add another.