Miss W. and her Smartboard

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?

Cross posted with “Technology in our classroom”

Students were asked to mention why they enjoy blogging, how it helps them and to give some hints for teachers new to blogging about to start with their own students.  I did this after a post by Sue Waters in The Edublogger asking for teachers to share their experience in blogging and tips for using with students. 

 I didn’t moderate student comments until today, so no-one could read the previous comments and get some clues about what to write.  I felt it was very interesting to see the words like fun, savvy and people appearing fairly large in the wordle.

Please also read the students’ comments here at http://wyatt67.edublogs.org/2008/06/18/students-what-does-blogging-mean-to-you/

Photo source

I have been blogging since January, the class since February, some students since March and today I created the final blogs for individual students. Some students in the class decided they didn’t want their own blog after I mentioned a few rules.  These were:

• Both the student and I are administrators until someone does something wrong - that person will then become  an editor.  As a class we have done a lot of work on being internet safe and also looking out for each other as part of life skills.  Hopefully I will not have to demote anyone!
• They will have to write comments on blogs belonging to students in our room as well as those on our blogroll from other parts of the world.
• They will have to make sure they respond to people who write comments on their blog.
• They will have to write at least one BTN report on their blog every month and one post about something that interests them every month.  So at least two posts per month.
• They cannot publish a post until they have emailed me, I have viewed the post and sent an email back to them with my approval for publishing.
• All photos must be sourced, preferably from Flickr Creative Commons or permission must have been gained from the photographer via email and acknowledged on the bottom of the post.

Am I being too tough on my students in grade 6/7? 

I know this means a lot of work on my behalf reading posts  before they are published and emailing back to students suggestions for improvement eg spelling and grammar. But at this stage of their blogging experience, I am prepared to put in the extra time.

Today I thought it would be appropriate to jump ahead to challenge 14 - Turn your blog over to your readers.

Since beginning to blog in January this year, I have tried to get staff enthused about using Web 2.0 especially blogging in their everyday classroom activities.  Until a couple of weeks ago, I had been unsuccessful.  I had had a few staff watch me while I was commenting or writing blog posts during my time off and preparation lessons. (I usually use a computer near the photocopier as more traffic comes that way) A couple had made comments about how interesting that looked but they wouldn’t have time to do that with their other commitments.

But last week I held a blogging session after school for about an hour.  Four staff including the school chaplain turned up.  I had organized with a couple of my students to stay behind and help in the session. From my point of view it went well and the staff have been asking for more help with avatars and blogrolls which hopefully we will do next week.

But if you don’t have enough time to actually write your own blog, I would have thought every teacher could spend just 15-30 minutes once a week or fortnight in writing comments on students blogs.

So my question is:  How do we get staff involved in commenting on blogs onto which our 21st century students are putting so much effort to gain a wider audience than their own teacher?

As many of you will have read in previous posts, this has been a steep learning curve for me this year.  I have been trying to allow my students to join in the challenge of using new aspects of Web 2.0 tools.  I teach all grade 6/7  classes over the year in eight week blocks and one area of history we must teach is historical inquiry.  I mentioned to the other grade 6/7 staff that I would be prepared to assess this aspect of history.  How to do this using the newer technology? 

I decided a wiki would be a great way of allowing students to present the information they found as part of their inquiry.  I began the course teaching them the historical process:

• big question to answer
• smaller questions to help gather the information
• locating sources both primary and secondary
• gathering and organizing the information
• justifying and evaluating the information - does it answer the question?
• presentation of information to an audience

Students usually only have an audience of the teacher but I wanted to broaden this to other students, teachers and members of the community. Part of the curriculum is looking at the local community and I felt this would fit in perfectly with using a wiki to organize and present the information.

Students began by brainstorming what they knew about the history of their municipality. We then decided on the big question. Students worked in pairs and chose an aspect of the municipality they would like to find out about.  Some discussed it with parents and relatives and chose their topic wisely because they knew they would be able to get some information from them. As a class, we then brainstormed where we might be able to find sources for information.  We ended up with a list of about 15 primary and secondary sources.

I then set up the wiki with a basic page of our municipality and a link to a timeline of history in the area. Another wiki page included which students were researching which topics, then finally each pair of students had their own page on which to put their information.  Students then had to get permission from parents to become a member of the wiki; I suggested at least one person from each pair be a member.

Students then began gathering their information. Emails were sent, phone calls made, visits down town to go to shops to run interviews, head to library to find books and of course using the internet.  About two weeks before the end of the course, we discussed how we were going to assess the wiki work and students came up with a rubric that I then posted on the wiki.

 The wiki is going to be an ongoing project with each grade 6/7 class adding to it throughout the year.  Also towards the end of the year, I will advertise the wiki within the community and see if other members of the district can add to the information.  There is though, a place where this can happen now, but as we know, unless something is advertised, then rarely does anyone else know about it on the net.

Already some of the first group of students added information to other pages on the wiki and gave clues as to other sources the students could be using for their research. Students have been emailing me to get help and ask questions and one day when I was ill at home, I actually got on the wiki and was emailing back to students about problems they were having. Students have also been working outside of school hours on their pages of the wiki.  Those students who did not get permission to use the wiki, have had to hand in their work as a word document so they can still be assessed.

My next post will be about the challenge the students had in this first group. Two of the questions I asked them in their assessment lesson were:

• What did you find was a challenge in this assignment?
• Should Miss W teach the class about using a wiki or is it better for students to try things out for themselves? Give reasons.