Collaboration Without Boundaries

I have had parents, teachers and students all ask me why I have Kindergarten and Grade 1′s blogging. I even ask myself in the beginning of each year, when the learning curve is steep and I feel a bit overwhelmed by new students, this same question. My answer to this has varied slightly as I read and connect with other teachers around the globe who also use this tool but my main goal continues to help students learn to write.

In Kindergarten and in Grade 1 we are learning the basics of writing and the purposes for writing, blogging gives us both opportunities. Communicating with the world is the main reason children write, these communication tools are changing for my young students. Through blogging they can see how powerful writing can be and a real purpose in writing for an audience. Their blogs are also a showcase for their learning . Their progress is clearly evident on these blogs, students can see it, parents can see it and I can see it. The interesting thing I find is that several students have been extremely motivated to use this tool to write while other students clearly enjoy the paper and pencil form. Why? I am not sure but I do always see an importance for giving students choice while offering a variety of forms of communication.

In my Sunday morning coffee/google reader/twitter/internet session I found this interesting post with some great links. Henrietta Miller’s blog Techie Brekkie was particularly interesting in her post about Blogging in a Primary School and one of her links include this great video from Rachel Boyd Why let our students blog? Rachel has said it well on this video I am sure I do not need to recreate this wheel. Thank you Rachel for sharing your ideas.

Do you see blogging as a useful way to teach writing skills? What challenges or concerns do you have with this writing form? Why you think some students are more motivated to communicate digitally than others?

One of the aspects that I love about digital portfolios is the idea of live recordings of students completing assessment activities. I have used the livescribe pen to record writing and thinking that students are doing with me (running records), independently (journal entries) and with other support staff in the school. We have also used our iPods/iPads to record oral reading, take pictures and record thinking or events that happen in our class.

Recently we have been working on equations in our class. As part of my assessment of the student’s understanding of addition and subtraction I gave them number sentences and students were to come up with “stories” that described what the equation described. We came back together as a group and shared our stories with each other and recorded them using the iPods.

Students were very respectful during this session listening and learning from the other students so the recording were quite good. I also would recommend using a tripod to record. I then took the footage and edited in iMovie to create these little clips which are posted on our class blog (HERE) and if students wanted to they could post them on their personal blogs (HERE). I will then take these clips and file them in their Evernote assessment portfolios as well they may choose to post them on their personal blog portfolios. I will then ask students to reflect on their story by writing or discussing them with me.  This activity created an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning, me to evaluate their progress of this concept and parents to get an direct view of their child’s undersand.
Here is an example of what we did;

How else do you use recording devices to collect data about student’s progress?  How do you have students do self-reflection about their learning?  Do you have any ideas of ways to capture student learning?

During this project I am working to create digital portfolios for students.  This journey began in conversations with Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.  Silvia helped me on my first big collaborative project with her students in Florida and my Grade 1 class during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were hosted in Vancouver.   She started me thinking of ways to capture student progress using technology.  KathyCassidy also spent a far bit of time talking with me about this project – Thank you Kathy!  After discussions with these ladies and others (many through twitter – did I mention I love the educator community on twitter )  I decided that I would have 2 types of portfolios.

The first portfolio  highlights student’s work that they choose.  This portfolio will be comprised of the child’s Kidblog.   My hope is that students will post writing, post photos, projects and audio recordings of the student’s choice and begin to reflect on their progress.  These blogs have been started and we are getting there, it is not as simple as I had anticipated it would be, but that is what this project is about – learning.

The second type of portfolio is an assessment portfolio that will be for my evaluation purposes and shared with parents as an evidence of their child’s progress.  This portfolio will be hosted by Evernote.  These portfolios are also coming along nicely, the sorting of notes is becoming easier because I am getting better at tagging and naming notes.  I love the ability to email myself notes, recordings or pictures from other devices and  I have also been trying to use googledocs forms to collect data on students quickly and easily.  It is also nice that the notes and recordings made with the livescribe pens can be sent quickly & easily to Evernote.  Currently these portfolios are more summatize than I would have liked and I had hoped that this digital collection would help to guide my teaching more.  I think that more familiarity with the tools I am using for collection will help to make it easier for me to think of ways to use them for collection of students’ progress.

There have been other unexpected pieces that have proved to be very beneficial during this project.  The personal reflection on my teaching during recordings and I also like that I can have support workers make notes/recordings in Evernote on the students in my class that they are working with.  These notes are easily accessible to both the support worker and me, easily reviewed and discussed when needed.

These portfolios provided a strong reminder to me this last month.  While I know the importance of student choice for motivation this note provides me a clear and immediate reminder of this.  This reaffirms my belief that children need to be  given choice about their learning and when they are given the freedom to feel in control of their learning they are excited and motivated to learn.  This note will remain in this child’s portfolio as a reminder of how I need to appeal to his interests and engage him.

These photos are worth a thousand words.

What suggestions do you have for simple ways to have students record their learning?

How are you using portfolios to show student progress?

How do you make use of portfolios as formative assessment?

This past week was a very exciting time for me and my own professional learning.  In our class this week, we brought out our 3 class ipads, a few lap top computers, one  ipod and the live scribe pen all at once!  I was concerned, would students share without complaining, would those not using a piece of technology stay on task,  would everyone in our class be moving their learning forward? So what happened… complete class engagment!  Patterns were being explored with pattern blocks, and with the glowdraw app on the ipads.  Numbers were being written and recorded using various means of technology and reading was being practiced as students engaged with each other reading math story books, as well as reading the picture and label directions on various web sites.  My favourite moment was watching the live scribe pen in use.  How intriguing to see a young student so excited to write the numbers from one to ten, say them and then listen to themselves saying the numbers they had written!  There was no problem for this young student in learning to use the start and stop functions on the live scribe paper, nor was there a problem learning how to jump over (fast forward) the recordings so they could skip the recording of me giving directions and proceed right to listening to themselves!   For me,watching this student be so engaged in figuring things out, was priceless!  Not only did I get to see and hear what the child knew about numbers, I was able to listen to myself giving directions and reflect on how clear/unclear I was when instructing. Ahah… another use for the livescribe pen!  So what does this mean for next week?  It means I now need to learn how to download and post the contents of the pen, to our blog so others can see and hear also!  Happy learning everyone!  How are you learning about your method of delivery of instruction in your classroom?  Is this something we need to monitor if our students are learning?  

Happy livescribing!

Christina

So today we tried the livescribe pens!

I introduced this tool early in September to my K/1 class but have been hesitant to use it. Why? How will it work? Is this a tool that my students will make good use of?

Well today we tried.

I gave the pen to 2 students who are keen writers. One student is in Kindergarten and the other is in Grade 1. Guess what they did? Well they wrote!! Exactly like they were meant to. Their hearts were keen, their efforts amazing! I am wondering when I am going to learn to just trust the process. It will happen, it will work. To borrow a much used phrase “Just Do It!”

P.S. I had no idea that she was recording…….