Starting Right

Sheryl Forsman has just started blogging with her first grade students.  Before she started blogging, she spent a lot of time thinking about why she would blog and what she would do if she had a blog.  How do I know?  Just look at this list that was one of the first entries on her blog.

 

20 Uses for Our Classroom Blog  

Why did we create a classroom blog and how will we use it?
1. document our growth across the year
2. inform families of what we are doing
3. expand our audience
4. collaborate with other first grade bloggers
5. use another form of writing
6. learn about writing for an audience
7. learn about digital literacy
8. document favorite events of this year
9. integrate writing with other subjects
10. write book reviews
11. write journal entries
12. respond to class assignments
13. free choice writing
14. develop keyboard skills
15. communicate with each other
16. collaborate with reading buddies from other classrooms
17. collaborate with teachers from the university as blogging buddies
18.post pictures of our work
19. learn about visual literacy through the design of our pages
20. to have fun!

 

What a great list.  What a great way to start.

Busted!

I’m not as good as Clarence Fisher, who can get kids expelled in another country, but I did feel a bit like Dick Tracy.  

 

A few days ago, one of the students in my classroom received a comment that was not very nice.  It made fun of her writing ability.  In case you are not a regular reader of my six year old students’ blogs, I don’t edit their writing, but instead let it be an online portfolio of their developing ability to write.  The particular child who received the comment has not yet made the connection between sounds and letters in her writing.  

 

Because I use Classblogmeister to host my classroom blog, the comment came to me for approval before it was posted, so I was able to delete it and she was never the wiser.  Her self-esteem is still firmly intact.

 

If it had been one of my students who had written the comment, I would want to know about it.  The student did not have a name that was familiar to me, but I went to the Sitemeter I have posted on my blog.  One of the options is “referrals”.  It gives the URL from which the person linked to my blog.  Since I knew what time the comment arrived in my email, it was easy to check and see where the referral had come from near that time.  I followed the link to another Classblogmeister blog, with the offending student’s name and the teacher’s email address clearly there.  The teacher wrote me back thanking me for the information, saying that she would be “definitely dealing with it”.

 

I am currently blogging with my fifth class of students, and this is the first time I can recall getting a comment from someone outside our classroom that was inappropriate.  A pretty good record, but it is good to know that if I do get something unsuitable for publishing, I can do something about it.

Look, It Can Dance!

We had a great time today with a new tool I discovered on a site recommended by Kelly Christopherson.  Pictaps is first of all a drawing tool.  It gives you choices of shapes or lines, choices of colour and choices of line thickness.  It starts you with a basic body shape outline, but you can change this shape to whatever form you like.  After you have completed your “creation” it turns the drawing into a dancing video which you can embed on your blog.  My students were absorbed drawing their own monsters and even more captivated when they got to watch them dance.  Even the ones who got the “error” message (I think twenty-four was too many on the site at once) were happy to try again, and in some cases again.

 

I can’t get it to embed in WordPress, (suggestions welcomed) but you can check out Deigan’s monster, Dancing Bob.

 

 

 

 

Proving It

Last spring I blogged about a research project that Etty Rosen, a researcher from Israel, was doing about my classroom blog.  She sent questionnaires to each of the parents in my class, asking them to rate a wide range of items including Internet access, visits to our blog and involvement with their child.  She recently finished compiling the data, and was kind enough to send me a copy of her spreadsheet.  Some of the results are below. It is interesting to note that three years ago, less than one third of the children in my classroom had Internet access at home.  That has changed dramatically.

 

The results are overall very positive.  Obviously, I wouldn’t keep blogging with my students unless I felt it was valuable, but it is nice to have some research to back up what I think is happening.

The Write Stuff: The Trailer

Patrick Lewis, a professor at the University of Regina and an extraordinary storyteller, and I are doing a presentation at the K12 Online Conference this fall.  If you have never “attended” this conference, it is a great opportunity for learning at any time in any place.  The sessions are posted online so that you can download and view them at your convenience.

 

Patrick recently completed this trailer for our presentation, The Write Stuff:  Pre-Service Teachers Mentoring Grade One Bloggers.

Alphabet Antics

Clarence Fisher first introduced me to the idea of “writing the textbook” online a couple of years ago. This year, I am making a small attempt to do this through a primary wiki called Alphabet Antics. Together with other kindergarten and grade one classes (there are twelve members so far), my grade ones are recording and posting their learning about letters and their sounds.   My students enjoy seeing the videos or other content that they have contributed, but they are also fascinated to see the content from other classrooms.  Imagine that there are other children in far away places who are learning about the same thing as we are!  Their eyes grow bigger.

 

If you are a primary teacher and would like to be involved, come join us.  We’re learning together.

I Love Classblogmeister

I really do. My new class of six year olds (actually some are still five) has begun their blogging adventure, and I have been reminded about how exciting blogging with this great tool can be.

Last week I held my Grade One Parent Night, and I used the blog of one of the students from the year before to demonstrate the dramatic change in children’s writing in the first grade. The parents were riveted by the fact that their child would have a similar online portfolio. During the presentation, I mused aloud “if you have some free time tomorrow at 1:00, come and give us a hand getting started with our blogs”. Four adults showed up (actually, I did too so that makes five). What a difference it made to have so much help. There is a feature in Classblogmeister that allows students to choose the colours in their backgrounds instead of the provided templates. It is a bit complicated for young students, so I don’t usually mention this feature until after Christmas. With so much help, the students were able to all choose their background colours, select a title, tell an adult a couple of things about themselves to be included in the “about me” section AND write their first blog entry. They were enthralled with what they had created.

By the next morning, someone’s parent had commented on her blog, so we all had to have a look. That led to us to checking everyone’s blog to see how many “reads” each one had had. Thanks to a workshop of teachers from Grand Forks who had talked to my class via the Yackpack on our class blog during the morning and had promised to check out what we did in the afternoon, almost everyone had at least 15 page reads, and one child had 35. Huge grins all around. The child who told me, “I don’t know how to write” and “I don’t know what to say” visibly sat up straighter in his chair when he saw that he had eighteen reads. He is now beginning to think of himself as a writer. The addition of the “page reads” feature was a brilliant stroke by David Warlick when he created Classblogmeister.

This year, David added a new feature that allows the blogs of my “orphaned” students from last year to be picked up by their new teacher. This means that they can continue to blog and show their growth in the same online space—a two-year portfolio. The only thing better would be if their grade three teacher would allow them to blog as well.

I love that nothing is posted online unless I see it first. I love that there is a Classblogmeister Yahoo email group where users can ask and answer questions. I love how responsive David Warlick is to questions and suggestions that users have. But most of all I love the fact that my students have an audience can begin to see their place in a global community.

Flickr Badges: I Didn’t Know!

For awhile now, I have been trying to think of ways to put more of my student’s artwork and illustrations on their blog.  Six year olds can tell much more of a story through their drawings than they can through their writing, especially at the beginning of the school year.  The process that I have always used to put illustrations into a blog article involves me uploading the images to Flickr, and then copying and pasting the html for each image into the appropriate child’s blog.  It is fairly time consuming, so I only do it about once a month. 

 

Last month when I was at the Microsoft Innovative Teacher’s Conference, I mentioned to Darren Kuropatwa what I would like to do, and he suggested that I try using a Flickr badge.  I had seen these badges on a lot of blogs, but did not know that you could set them to only display photos with certain tags.  So, at Darren’s suggestion, I made a tag for each child that contained a reference to my class, the year and the child.  For example, mcas08jg is the tag for one of my students with the initials jg.  I already had several pieces of artwork from each child, so with a combination of photos of collages they had recently done and pictures that we had saved from Kidpix, I set up a badge for each child’s blog.  Once I had made some decisions on the first one, it only took me a minute or two to make and insert each of the rest of them so that each child now has their own badge on their blog.  The kids loved seeing their pictures and were fascinated by the moving parts of the badge.  Now I am all set for the next school year.  As my new students create more pictures, I can tag them as I put them on Flickr and they will automatically be added to the badge.  Thanks, Darren!

 

If you have used Flickr badges before this will be a yawn to you, but it was new to me.  I’m pleased that my students will get another way to display their work online.  Audience has been a great motivator for their writing, so I know it will be for their visual art as well.  

Learning Networks: My Thinking Thoughts

Kelly Christopherson asked a good question to his Twitter network recently. He asked, “How has your definition of PLN changed since you joined a social network?”  Here are my thinking thoughts.

 

My school division has been supporting PLC’s for several years.  For the first few years, teachers could choose what to focus on and who to focus on it with.  I spent a lot of time with some other grade one teachers from other schools, dissecting our Language Arts Curriculum, and creating rubrics that sifted through the gobblety-gook and helped to measure standards that were originally written in very imprecise language.   It was a stretching, but satisfying and practical group to be a part of.  Unfortunately, not everyone found these opportunities for learning to be as helpful as I did.  Because some people were not taking advantage of the time, more restrictions were created about where and with whom you should have your PLC.  During the next school year, all PLC’s will be held with staff at our own school, on one of two school division approved topics.

 

While I appreciate the time to and value of getting together with other members of my staff and discussing ways that we can work together to improve instruction, I feel that my primary learning comes not from my discussions with them, but from my online interaction.

                       

 PLC’s Shouldn’t Be Limited in Time or Place

While I see the other members of my school-based PLC every day, we only discuss our PLC topic in any significant way a few times a year.  On the other hand, I am in contact with the thoughts of people in my online network almost every day.  If I have a question or an opinion, I can count on others to answer or set me straight.  I get input from other teachers every day instead of at pre-ordained times.  It can be early in the morning or late at night and is not limited to being in a building at the same time as someone else.  Many times, I know that there is no one in my school who can answer the question that I have, but I know just the person in another province or country who will know the answer and who will happily answer it, just as I would if I had an answer for them.

 

PLC’s Can Include Diverse Thoughts

Through online contacts such as my RSS feeds and Twitter (well, sometimes), I am exposed to the thoughts and ideas of people who are really thinking about education and change in a way that I never would without their prompting.  They daily challenge my opinion and help me to be a better teacher.  I am a “how-to” thinker and, like most primary teachers, including those in my school-based PLC, I think in practicalities rather than in big ideas.  My online network allows me to be exposed to those ideas and thinking about how I can use them.

 

The Topic Doesn’t Have to be Prescribed or Even Clearly Stated

While I understand the reason for prescribing the topic of our school-based PLC’s (data), there are a lot of other things that I want to learn about.  I guess this is the difference between the “P” standing for “Professional” and “Personal”.  At school the topic of discussion is set and we are expected to report to the superintendent what we have discussed and what we will discuss the next time. In my personal learning, I can switch my learning topic with the movement of a finger and come back to a previous topic whenever I want to.

 

So there you are, Kelly.    My thinking thoughts.  My online learning wins hands down.  

What Would You Do With Ninety-Nine Years?

My grandfather has filled those years with learning. 

 

When he retired from farming, he decided to take up pottery.  He bought himself a kiln and a potter’s wheel, and taught himself how to do it.  After awhile he wanted to try something new, so he took up wood carving.  The items he carved weren’t simple, basic shapes, but animals and people.  He learned what kinds of wood worked best and how to look at the wood and see its potential.  Many carvings later, he decided to look into building bird houses and butterfly houses.  He confided to me that people would actually pay up to fifty dollars for one of the butterfly houses and smirked as he said that that gave him enough money to get the materials for two or three more.  

 

He wondered what it was like to tap maple trees and get syrup.  He tired that and was successful.  The next year he decided to try it with poplar trees, which are much more plentiful in our area.  This, too, was successful.  Growing giant pumpkins, raising fish, gardening — all things he has learned to do since his “retirement”.

 

A few years ago, when he was already in his nineties, he asked for and received a spinning wheel for Christmas.  He got some wool from one of his grandchildren who raises sheep, and taught himself how to card it and spin it into yarn.  Then, he needed something to do with the yarn, so he learned how to knit.

 

At his birthday party last night, I asked him what he would like to do next.  “Paint”, was his response. 

 

I think his interest in learning is part of the secret of his longevity.  What an example of a life-long learner for all of his many, many descendents. 

 

Happy birthday, Grandpa!  I can’t wait for your 100^th next year.