Miss W. and her Smartboard

Earlier this year, a fellow teacher convinced me to put forward a proposal for a paper to be presented at the ALEA conference in Hobart in July at Wrest Point.  This conference involves literacy and English teachers from all levels of schooling.  I have just been advised that the proposal was accepted, so I will have a one hour workshop to run on the topic:

Blogging safely in the big wide world

What do you think should be the main points I put forward in this workshop?

I would like it to be a practical workshop but am not sure if there is wifi capability at the venue (will check it out this weekend), so will firstly use an off line powerpoint presentation, and hopefully bring some students from my class last year to also participate.

I would like to include other ways of communicating online with examples such as skype, flatclassroom and 1001tales.  Do you know any links to other great examples of collaboration across the world?

Yesterday I sent out a tweet about this and received some links from Anne Mirtschin and John Pearce.

As blogging often is seen as negative, I would like the conference participants to actually get in there and start writing comments on blogs belonging to students to find out how easy it can be to get started.  Do you have any resources for how to make blogging more positive for ‘unsure about technology’ teachers? 

If you have any links for AUP policies regarding blogging, nings and wikis, that might also be handy to use at this workshop.

The reason my fellow teacher convinced me to write the proposal was that I am currently running a student blogging challenge with about 800 students and classes from 13 countries of the world participating.  I ran a similar event in third term last year and had a similar response.  From the first challenge, students asked for a blog to be created and run by their classes and teachers.  Thus was born ‘Bringing us together’.

Original image: ‘How to Design a School Website That People Will Actually Use‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/299768611
by: Judy Baxter

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

As both Kris and Hayden mentioned it is important to put images in a blog post. But most of our students go to google images without realising they could get in trouble for breaking copyright.  Or they see an image in an online newspaper and think they can use that in their blog post without realising the newspaper has probably had to pay a photographer for their image.

So where can students get images that are not copyright?

They can use creative commons images from many sites on the web.  Some of these might be filtered at your school but surely one might be useful. Try out some of these links to help you with images.

flickrcc this site also shows attribution

photobucket couldn’t easily see if these were creative commons or not

behold

a flickrcc search toy

Pics4learning all free images sent in by teachers, students and friends, includes lessons to use

Sue Waters from the Edublogger has written many posts about images using flickr, width of images, inserting images into posts etc .

I have tagged some great pages in my delicious account with images such as behold,  a ning about exploring images in the 21st century and a tutorial about copyright cleared images .

This post has been written on “images in blog posts” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

This post has been written on “tips for using blogs with students” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

Sue tweeted back that I could use a previous post as long as there was a pingback, but nah …. I’ll start afresh.

I began last year using a blog myself (this one) but felt it would be a great way to get students involved in the writing process when school went back.  I spent time trying to find other Tasmanian schools that were blogging but I had no luck in that. This meant it was going to be new to both me and the computer techie guys at school and perhaps to the Education Department (our Premier does have a facebook account I think).

The department wanted me to use the sharepoint but I had heard that the blogging setup on that was not easy to use and would certainly not let the world enter easily. But that was why I wanted my students to blog – to open their minds and souls to people in other parts of the world.

So I settled on Edublogs and the steep learning journey began. After students had shown me they were internet savvy, they earned the right to their own blog if they wished to have one. I wrote posts to help the students set up their blogs;  I set up a few rules about keeping their blog; we looked at tips for other teachers starting to blog with their students; hints for commenting well and so on. 

My favourite tips for using blogs with students would be:

• Make sure they know how to be internet savvy and teach as situations arise with the blogging eg bad comments, attibution of images etc.
• Allow students as much control as possible over their own blogs with you as a co-administrator/moderator etc ready to help or intercede when required.
• Use a classblog to give students ideas of what they could write about or join a student blogging challenge (hint hint, I ran one last year and have started a new one this year to begin in March.)
• Allow students to write about things that interest them, not always work to do with school – allow their talents to shine in their blog eg interviewing people they are interested in.
• Organise with other teachers for students to comment on each others blogs – easily done through the student blogging challenge or having a great list on your blogroll in your sidebar

From September to December 2008, with the help of Sue Waters, I ran an international student blogging competition. This included about 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world.  If you are thinking of doing something similar, then please remember to check out the following:

Advertising – How will the students know the competition is on?

I used my PLN and mentioned to teachers I was in contact with, my idea of a competition.  In my class blog, I put in a google form for students to fill in with details needed about them.  Sue Waters wrote a post in the Edublogger.  We started advertising in early August with the competition to start mid September when I went back to school.

Organization – How will the students know what to do?

On my class blog, there were separate pages for information, links to each participant and class blog, recent post feed from all participating blogs and weekly activities.  Most teachers also wrote a post in their class blogs reminding students how to get the activities to participate.

Comments – How will we connect with the students?

Over the ten week period, I tried to comment on each students’ blog at least three times – firstly to welcome them to the competition and give them the URL for the activities, then if they wrote a post about Blog Action Day and finally when the competition finished. It was easy to keep in touch using the RSS feed that Sue Waters had set up.  We also asked members of our PLNs to visit blogs and often tweeted about some very interesting posts written by the students.

Translating – How will the students comment using different languages?

We had three classes from Portugal taking part and they were mainly writing in Portuguese.  My class blog had google translator widget included and I wrote a post about how to communicate with the Portuguese students. The teacher in Portugal Stora Ines, translated all posts from either Sue Waters or my class blog that related to the competition or would be of help to her new bloggers.

Activities – What will the students write and comment about?

I had taken part in the comment challenge and felt that a challenge every week would be more suitable for students who might only get one chance a week to use a computer at school. As many of the students had been blogging less than thee months, I thought some activities about setting up their blog would be useful as well as writing and researching posts about certain topics that would be global in nature. Some of the activities included creating an avatar, setting up a blogroll and how to make new connections.

Winners – How will we choose the winners?

As neither myself or the other teachers could offer a large prize for an overall winner, the competition was run within each school.  The teacher who had registered was to organize a small prize (up to each teacher) to give to the most improved blogger and the keenest blogger over the ten week period. The winners are now on the blogroll of our new blog (see below).

After the competition – How do students keep in touch now?

Many students wanted to carry on the conversations and friendships, so after many discussion , we now have a new blog run by the teachers and students who took part in the 2008 blogging competition. If you and your class want to join us please visit the new blog and comment under the join us page.

I am about to start a student blogging competition with students from many countries of the world ranging from age eight to sixteen. One of the first activities will relate to being internet savvy and not using a photo of yourself on your blog. 

Most students love creating their own avatars but many of the sites I visited courtesy of this wiki, had terms of service saying students under 13 could not register and those 13 and over had to have parental or guardian permission.

Students also love adding widgets like clocks, counters, flags, translators, maps to the sidebars of their blogs.  Again many of these are only for students 13 and older.  Yet I see many of these on blogs for students in primary grades.

Personally, I use my class blog to show students what they can be putting on their blog, but I also write a post whenever I add something new.  In this post I mention about the age minimum, mainly because my students age from 11-13 so some can use the sites and others can’t. I find the students who can’t yet use say a feedjit map are quite content with their clustrmap.  Come a 13th birthday though and  first thing that student wants is to spend time on their blog adding the new widgets.

When I check the blogrolls and widgets on my students’ blogs, I also point out if they are recommending a site where you have to be 13 or older, when the student is younger than that. I then ask them to remove that from their blogroll.

As teachers, what is our responsibility with regard to students using these sites?

Shouldn’t we leave some sites for students to use when they do turn 13?

Original image: ‘3:30 PM-Web Team Works After School‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/7701596
by: Judy Baxter

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Do your students enjoying blogging?  Do they write fantastic comments on other students’ blogs? Would they be interested in taking part in a blogging competition just for students?  It would involve 10 weeks worth of activities, one challenge each week with some bonuses for those who want to go overboard.

Please visit my class blog to register and watch out for a page there called the Student blogging competition 2008 during the month of September.  Each challenge will be added ready for the students to do.

One question the students have to answer is “Have you told your teacher you are participating?”  This is so each school can award a small prize to the best blogger or most improved blogger in their school.  I don’t have the facilities to organize a world wide prize but hopefully each school could find a little bit of spare cash for a small prize.

So far we have students from Australia and New Zealand registered and a couple of teachers from the USA thinking about it for new students after their holidays.  If you have any good ideas for challenges for beginners or experienced student bloggers, please comment here and I will add them to the challenge.

The teacher from each school can tell me the winner of the prize and I will mention them in our class blog.

Any students who are taking part will be included in the blogroll on my class blog so it will be easy for students to visit each other’s blogs.

Well we are now in the month of August and beginning our study on China and the Olympic Games.  But this week we have had students presenting their work on sumo wrestling that they have researched throughout this term.  Most decided to present using a powerpoint even after being reminded that this meant:

• the powerpoint was just used in the background as a reminder
• you don’t have lots of words on a slide
• you will have to give a talk in front of your classmates relating to the powerpoint

Students took out extra words, found more diagrams, wrote their notes on cue cards and for their first efforts, did a great job.  Presentation afternoon and out came the video camera -  the battery was not fully charged.

“Can we use our phones?”  Go for it. So we had about four budding camerapersons videoing the events. 

I was so proud of students who got up to present in front of the class for the first time this year; a student with a teacher aide organizing an interview as part of the presentation and another student whose powerpoint was run completely from the Smartboard without any help from me. 

But this is now where I have no idea what to do next.

“Do you know how to download from your phones?”  Cords were brought to school and hopefully tomorrow the talks will be downloaded. 

But readers, what do you suggest we do next?  How can we get these videos or powerpoints on the students’ own blogs?  Firstly, we will need parent permission, then do we use slideshare for the actual powerpoint?  But what about the videos? 

I’m at an EDNA seminar at the moment and just learnt about a quick, easy way to give attribution to images from the keynote speaker Frankie Forsyth. Visit this website which allows you to search for creative commons images.  It also gives you the attribution which you need to include with the image on your blog. You may include it with the photo or add it under the photo.

Original image: ‘Tassie devil’
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30805622@N00/351640307
by: Adam Tibballs

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

Steps to follow:

1. Search for photo by putting in a tag eg sumo or Tasmania or fishing
2. Click on photo you want to use
3. Click on “edit image in-house”
4. Click on “Add attribution” if you want it included with the photo – see my picture on the right
5. Right click and “save picture as”
6. Follow normal instructions to add images to your blog

Be careful, though, when adding the attribution to the photo.  What has gone wrong with mine?

Back in May, some students in our class took part in a comment challenge, which was mainly set up for adults.  I tried to adapt the challenges to fit what students could do.  Now that you have had your blogs for a couple of months or more, what would you suggest we could use to run a competition just for student bloggers? 

Remember, we are trying to improve our blogging skills which should include:

• having a great conversation
• improving your reading audience
• improving your blogpost writing skills
• learning about the big world out there

Please tell me some ideas you think we could include in this competition and perhaps what we could have as a prize.  Also how could this competition be judged?  What else have I forgotten?

Just been surfing the web and found myself on the Mundesley Junior School blog.  This poem on one of the posts really had me thinking about what we teach our kids at school and how much teacher directed learning still takes place in our schools.

Photo source : Learning fact and opinion by Old Shoe Woman

The Things We Steal From Children

By Dr John Edwards

If I am always the one to think of where to go next.
If where we go is always the decision of the curriculum or my curiosity and not theirs,
If motivation is mine,
If I always decide on the topic to be studied, the title of the story, the problem to be worked on,
If I am always the one who has reviewed their work and decided what they need,
How will they ever know how to begin?

If I am the one who is always monitoring progress.
If I set the pace of all working discussions,
If I always look ahead, foresee problems and endeavour to eliminate them,
If I swoop in and save them from cognitive conflict,
If I never allow them to feel and use the energy from confusion and frustration,
If things are always broken into short working periods,
If myself and others are allowed to break into their concentration,
If bells and I are always in control of the pace and flow of work,
How will they learn to continue their own work?

If all the marking and editing is done by me,
If the selection of which work is to be published or evaluated is made by me,
If what is valued and valuable is always decided by external sources or by me,
If there is no forum to discuss what delights them in their task, what is working,
what is not working, what they plan to do about it,
If they have not learned a language of self-assessment,
If ways of communicating their work are always controlled by me,
If our assessments are mainly summative rather then formative,
If they do not plan their way forward to further action,
How will they find ownership, direction and delight in what they do?

If I speak of individuals but present learning as if they are all the same,
If I am never seen to reflect and reflection time is never provided,
If we never speak together about reflection and thinking and never develop a vocabulary for such discussion,
If we do not take opportunities to think about our thinking,
If I constantly set them exercises that do not intellectually challenge them,
If I set up learning environments that interfere with them learning from their own actions,
If I give them recipes to follow,
If I only expect the one right conclusion,
If I signify that there are always right and wrong answers,
If I never let them persevere with something
really difficult which they cannot master,
If I make all work serious work and discourage playfulness,
If there is no time to explore,
If I lock them into adult time constraints too early,
How will they get to know themselves as a thinker?

If they never get to help anyone else,
If we force them to always work and play with children of the same age,
If I do not teach them the skills of working co-operatively,
If collaboration can be seen as cheating,
If all classroom activities are based on competitiveness,
If everything is seen to be for marks,
How will they learn to work with others?

For if they…
have never experienced being challenged in a safe environment,
have had all of their creative thoughts explained away,
are unaware what catches their interest and how then to have confidence in that interest,
have never followed something they are passionate about to a satisfying conclusion,
have not clarified the way they sabotage their own learning,
are afraid to seek help and do not know who or how to ask,
have not experienced overcoming their own inertia,
are paralysed by the need to know everything before writing or acting,
have never got bogged down,
have never failed,
have always played it safe,
how will they ever know who they are?