An idea so simple

I have about 4 kids who if I get 2 sentences of writing from them for any reason, it is a miracle.  So the other day, I decided to do something unusual. I took a Flickr photo set about a dog named Dominoe (thanks to Alan Levine http://cogdogblog.com/) showed them the pictures, did some pre-planning and had them write a story about the dog. It was the usual, “I don’t know what to write.” “I’m done (after 2 sentences)” until I told them we were going to the lab to write our stories and they had to write a minimum of 100 words. For a 9 year old this might seem like a lot, but word count is now their favorite tool, they are having contests to see who has the most words! Ahh small victories.

Let the Blogging Begin

I have set up all the kids blogs, and hopefully they will be inspired to get their theme picked and play around with wordpress a bit over the holidays. (that is the hope anyway, I really don’t want to dedicate class time to choosing themes…) Then we are going to move pretty fast into posting on our blogs our writing, and journals. I really hope that it will cause kids to take more care with what they are writing. I am doing some workshops with my staff about blogging and literacy. I guess I’ll have to dig up some research too.

Blogging with 9 year olds

Well, I am biting the bullet.  I have started creating blogs for my grade 4 students. We have practiced using glogster to get the idea of how to log in, create, save, comment get messages. There is a big learning curve. Now its full wordpress, wish us luck. My timing is intentional, don’t give them anything to do but change their theme and play around a lot over the Christmas holidays. Hopefully they will get some of the basics figured out on their own. I am finding that most of them are pretty adept at figuring things out and they are happy to help each other, and show each other (and me) tricks they learn.

I do miss teaching music, but I love doing things like this too.  These are skills that these kids will take with them for years to come. Once we get blogging down, maybe we will try some digital storytelling. I might have to register for ds106 and actually do it. I have a tendency to sign up for open courses and then never do the work.

Blogging Guidelines

I am doing a workshop next week for our teachers on blogging with kids, my plan is to use this post as a working document to set up some very basic guidelines for how to go about beginning the process of blogging with students.  Please feel free to comment, as that is the joy of writing with a purpose.  Here are my thoughts so far about how to start.

1. look at some well designed and well managed class blogs as examples. A few that come to mind are: http://huzzah.edublogs.org/ and http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337 Have students do a See, Think, Wonder activity paying careful attention to content and comments.
2. establish blogging guidelines as a class.  Here are some things to think about:

don’t post personal information about yourself, your family or your friends – keeping kids safe online. I would dedicate a large chunk of time to this if it hasn’t already been done. Kids need to know that anything they post online is there forever.

make your content worth reading, interesting and error free (punctuation, spelling etc.)

respect copyrights for text, pictures and other content

keep your comments on topic, make sure they add to the conversation and are not silly, no text language (i, lol, bc…)

be positive, if you disagree be polite.

3. Create your class blog, there are good instructions here: http://theedublogger.com/2010/01/05/week-1-create-a-class-blog/
4. Start by writing the posts yourself and having your class comment on them.  They will need email accounts to do this, or you could set up a few class accounts with common passwords. (I have tried this with just one class account, and the system gets bogged down if you comment as a class lesson) Remind students not to use their whole name in comments either, they should pick a nickname to use all the time. The first time, you should read the comments before they submit them, so its a good idea to do it all together. It will help to set the tone.
5. Start slow, you could have each student take a day/week to write a post on the class blog as “student of the week.” Then classmates (and the world) can comment on the post. This will give you time to become familiar with the interface and you will likely learn a few things from the students.
6. Once you are confident that students understand and follow the guidelines, one at a time you can create student blogs linked to your class blog.

Making Progress

What can you do with one block a week:

• set up blogs for French Immersion classes to have conversations with native speakers.
• Introduce intermediate students and teachers to Google Docs so that they can do group projects all together and at the same time.
• Show kids how to make their own cartoons and write their own story lines
• show teachers how to use Delicious so that kids don’t have to find URL’s
• teach kids how to use Garage Band to write their own songs.

I am grateful to our administration who sees the value in using one block a week for this purpose.  The laptops are in constant use, the lab is booked solid, kids are learning, teachers are learning and things are starting to move in a positive direction. Now if they would only give me a computer in my classroom things would be grand!

Video and Blogging

I finally gave up and posted the video’s I promised the kids unedited. Editing video can be a full time job! Clearly the sound could be better, and as a music educator I know that, but I also have a life of my own.  Video is linked under Music K-7. Enjoy.

I’m also getting ready to help one of our French Immersion classes get ready to learn about blogging so they can share with a class in France.  My initial thought was that I should set the blog up in French, but then I realized I wouldn’t be much help to the teacher. For now it’s in English, I imagine we can switch the language as we get used to the interface.

Google Documents Presentation

We had great success using google documents presentation to make a collaborative presentation with the grade 6 and 7 class of Mme Yuen.  Each student added one slide to the presentation and using a common theme created a unified look.  It was easy and fun for the kids, and has them thinking about using it for class projects that they have to do in groups.

I’m having fun doing technology mentoring, it is so easy to make kids smile.  The best comment yet was from a grade 4 student who thanked me profusely for “getting to touch a computer at school.” It is a bit of a sad commentary really, this is the world our children live in and yet they come to school and we ask them to step back in time.  Maybe it won’t be so bad if I have to move back into the classroom, I’ll still be the “fun” teacher because I don’t know how to function without computers and I certainly won’t expect my students to.