Thinking About Learning

My school is in the midst of a blogging revolution!  It all began with one 5th grade teacher who was willing to try something new, (thanks, Emily!) and now it’s the latest craze.  The students in all six 5th grade classes, four 4th grade classes, and even one 3rd grade class have their own blogs.  That’s over 220 blogs in our school!  The goal is to blog at least once a week.  The students love it because it’s fun.  They stop me in the hall in the mornings to ask if today is their day to blog.  Teachers love it because it motivates their students to write, it ties directly into their curriculum, it builds literacy, it improves technology skills, and it provides a great way for students to reflect and share what they’ve learned.

I’ve put together a wiki with some good blogging resources that I hope will be useful.

Curriculum Connection:

All subject areas: Digital books are a great way to express learning.  I have used PhotoStory 3 to do make digital books in the past, but I discovered a really awesome digital class book created by some 5th grade students in Georgia with KeeBoo software.  Check this out: Our ABC Book on Blogging .

What a week! Have you ever worked on a project where turn after turn you encountered a roadblock? That is exactly what happened to me this week. I have a 4th grade teacher who is working on National Board Certification. She asked me to videotape a small group discussion lesson for her. As I have previously mentioned, I don’t have a digital video camera. When I inquired about using the school news team’s camera that had been recently dropped and broken, I was assured that it would work sufficiently for the task. I went and video-taped a superb lesson, but when I tried to capture the video to my computer, the screen showed up with 1/3 of the area blue, and there was a file error message. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper!

I shared my troubles with my principal, who authorized me to purchase a new camera. I was encouraged to buy one with built-in hard drive memory. Okay, I admit, there are lots of things I just don’t know a lot about. Turns out that HD cameras have their own file type that isn’t compatible with Movie Maker. (Now you tell me!) Also, the cameras in my price range don’t have an external mike jack. I bought what I thought was a decent camera for the money, and taped this teacher again. Great video…terrible audio quality.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I was fairly peeved by this point! I called my former partner, Ron, from the Global Horizons class to borrow the old Sony camera(which I knew had an external mike), and I scheduled a time for a 3rd videotape session.  FINALLY I was able to get a video with quality audio, and the lesson was superb! My next challenge is to learn how to effectively use my new hard drive video camera.  I’m going to need a DVD burner next!

Curriculum Connections:

Literacy: One of my 5th grade teachers found this great lesson on learning to write details in descriptive writing: Looking for Details? It’s a fabulous lesson for teaching sensory imagery.  Her students posted their writing on their blogs.  Check out this great student work sample: A Snowy Day.

One of the highlights of my week has been to have the privilege of getting two more 5th grade classes started on student blogs. We are using 21 Classes. It’s exciting to expose students and teachers to the possibilities of blogging! The potential for the expression of student learning and literacy development through blog writing is virtually an untapped resource in elementary schools. Students love to blog. It gives them a real world audience for their writing. It also allows them the opportunity to express their opinions and interact online with peers in meaningful ways. Blogs can enhance instruction in every content area. These students are excited about blogging, and it’s a great way to motivate them to write.

Curriculum Connections for Blogs:
Science: Write lab reports for experiments, discuss the application of the scientific method to various science activities, post research findings.

Math: Describe new math processes learned, post answers to word problems.

Social Studies: Commentary on current events, post research findings, compare and contrast events in history, summarize historical events, write biographical information about key historical people.

ELA: Book talks; describe specific story elements such as character analysis, setting, or plot; write poetry; personal narratives; demonstrate reading skills such as fact and opinion, cause and effect, compare and contrast, or figurative language; write biographies or autobiographies.

It’s a great feeling to finish a huge project!!! We have been working about a month on these digital stories. We celebrated today with a popcorn party as we viewed our stories. Even though it proved to be a very time-consuming project, we used many different technology tools to produce real world products. The knowledge that they were producing stories to share with a world-wide audience made an impression on my students. Tomorrow they are going to post entries describing their stories on their individual blogs on blogmeister. I’ve already put a link to the stories on our blogmeister homepage. We hope that people will take time to post comments about the stories. My students are just beginning to learn how to write effective comments. I developed a lesson about crafting comments for my 5th graders after viewing Lani Hall’s fantastic presentation, “Second Nature-Extending Dialogue in the Blogosphere,” during the K12 Online Conference.

Here’s the thank you video, Wes!

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Yesterday was such an awesome day with my fifth graders! Thinking, technology, collaboration, collective problem-solving, and learning were playing a symphony in our class. My students have been working on creating digital stories. After using Open Mind to plan and write, they’ll use PowerPoint to put the stories together before using Photostory to narrate and create the video. They have finished the writing and have been working on the illustrations. They had a choice of drawing their pictures in Paint, Smart Notebook, or on paper. (Yes, paper! Some of my more artistic students felt like they had better control over colored pencils than a mouse.) The 3 types of illustrations required different methods of insertion into PPT, so they had to learn some new tech skills. The pencil and paper kids used a digital camera to take pictures of their drawings. The room was quietly humming as they helped each other learn how to insert their images. After they finished, they edited and peer edited some short paragraphs they had written after researching some inventions of the late 1800s. They have begun to post them on their individual blogs and comment on each other’s posts. We are slowly beginning to utilize Web 2.0! I was so proud of the ways they were interacting with each other to learn and generate products. It was a good day in our Global Horizons classroom.

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