Collaboration Without Boundaries

I have been pretty excited about using the Collaborize Classroom platform for my online Literature Circles in partnership with another school. My students have a completed a few Collaborize Classroom “Icebreaker” activities that focus on appropriate online discussion behaviours and how to respond to a classmate’s post. The “netiquette” activities were created by Catlin Tucker, a teacher in California but were available to me through Collaborize Classroom’s Topic Library; downloading to my classroom page was simple and I could edit the document to suit my needs.

Initially, some student responses were short, off topic and contained “text talk.” One of the activities involved students agreeing to follow specific online discussions rules and express their opinion about the rules. A few students were disappointed that there was an “avoid sarcasm” rule but it created a lively online discussion thread. Students were able to voice their affection for sarcasm with others but they also were able see that sarcasm was not going to move online discussions “forward.”

Here is a student response to “the rules” of online communication: “When you keep a postive attitude and follow the rules that are applied then you are  going to keep a good online conversation going. I like the rule that tells you to use people’s names because then you know who’s talking to you or who the message is directed to! The hardest rule is probably keeping an open mind because not everyone agrees and it usually becomes a huge online fight..”Posted By XXX on 04/05/2012 08:42 PM Reply

I recently started using Collaborize Classroom to create my own assignments and have found it to be quite easy. I have been very careful about creating assignments that require students to:

1.  read or view something
2. think about what they have read/viewed
3. respond in writing

My students are getting better at writing and expressing their ideas in such a short amount of time.   I noticed a big improvement (quality and quantity) in student’s written responses when I required them to type their response into a googledoc or word document, proofread it and then copy & paste it into the reply box. Students  found it helpful to use sentence starter prompts when replying to another person’s post.  I found the sentence starters to be an effective way to reduce the number of “Good job Eric/Erica!” comments. For the time being I decide who each student must reply to so that no one is left out. Maybe I will use some sort of stickpin app this week to make choosing easier for me and totally random. Is anyone familiar with such an app?

I have found Andrew Churches’ wiki invaluable for Digital Taxonomy rubrics.  I love the recent edition of Starter Sheets for various Web 2.0 tools.  Starter sheets introduce a tool or technology, provide  step by step processes for getting started, offer ideas for using the tool in a variety of settings and also provide an alternative web-based option.  This is a resource you will want to check out!

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?

This evening I received a call from a Kindergarten student at home!  It wasn’t about when swimming starts (it’s on our class blog GoogleCalendar which her family is subscribed to), it wasn’t about birthday cupcakes, it was about blogging!  She is a very keen student who loves to read and write.  Tonight she wanted a little coaching because she couldn’t quite remember how to insert a picture into her blog post tonight (6:30pm!!!).  With a little help from her dad (who she helped out with the techie words) together her dad and her were able to post a picture of a penguin and she was able to create a post.  That is an amazing home/school connection where a child is teaching her family about what she is learning at school and they are learning along with her.

Some days my job is really amazing!

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?

The students in my class love to collaborate. Since we started blogging nearly two years ago we have made many connections with other classes in different parts of the world. We’ve written stories together, compared our schools and communities, and have even taken dance lessons over Skype. We have just finished our most recent collaborative project called, Our World, Our Stories.

Our World, Our Stories was a 7 week project that I was fortunate enough to be involved in. The students in my grade 2/3 class had the opportunity to collaborate with students from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Belize, and Ghana.

We learned about life in different parts of the world by sharing with each other about a different topic each week.

Week One: Typical School Day
Week Two: Recess Activities
Week Three: Food
Week Four: Our Local Environment
Week Five: Traditional Stories and Festivities
Week Six: Traditional Song
Week Seven: Group Song and Story

We shared our posts and wrote comments to each other on our group blog. The students commented on similarities, differences, and always had many questions to ask their global buddies.

For our final week the students and teachers recorded a song called, Make New Friends and recorded the audio to go along with a wonderful book written by Mem Fox and illustrated by Leslie Staub called, Whoever You Are. The students really understood the message that no matter how different we are, we are all the same. An extra special surprise was that Mem Fox and Leslie Staub both left wonderful comments on our final post.

This was a very powerful project, not only for the students, but for the teachers involved as well. I feel so lucky to have made connections with these teachers. I learn from each of them, and the other educators in my PLN (Professional Learning Network), every day. My students have seen how we collaborate together, how we plan, how we solve problems, and how we celebrate our successes.

The most amazing thing to me is the fact that, here we are a little school of 50 students, on a small island (that can’t even be seen on many world maps), and my students don’t feel isolated. We had a wonderful discussion on Friday about our “classroom”. We decided that our classroom isn’t defined by its four walls. Our classroom is a global classroom, a place where we learn from and with other children and teachers all over the world.

In our class we love to blog. We have a class blog, blogs we collaborate on with other students around the world, and the students all have their own individual blogs as well (the grade 2 students just started their own blogs last week).

One of the reasons we started to blog was so that we would be able to communicate with our parents, families, friends, and others who would read our posts. We wanted a way to share the wonderful learning that was happening in our classroom with the people we care about and the world. We also wanted these people to be able to participate in our learning and have discussions with us through blog comments.

We have made amazing connections with students and teachers from around the world that we now call our friends, but we haven’t had as much success with getting our families and loved ones involved. In an effort to strengthen that connection we decided to make November, Family Blogging Month.

Through my PLN on Twitter I was able to talk with other educators who have done the same thing and learn from their experience. Linda Yollis (@lindayollis) from California and Kathleen Morris (@kathleen_morris) from Australia are two of the teachers that helped me to figure out how to make Family Blogging Month work for my students. Linda shared links to her Educational Bogging Wiki and class blog which both discuss Family Blogging Month. You can also see a post on Family Blogging month by Kathleen and her teaching partner Kelly Jordan here.

Following their lead, I made a blog post describing Family Blogging Month and also sent a similar note home. I used Jing, a free screen capture program, to make a step by step “Commenting How To” for those that might not be familiar with commenting on a blog. I also made sure that the students would know how to help their families at home.

So far, Family Blogging Month is off to a great start and hopefully is the beginning of an even stronger school and home connection. The students are really excited about getting their families involved and love seeing their comments when we check the blog each morning.

Have you done anything similar to this before?
Do you have any other ideas for getting parents and families involved using technology?

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…….

My piece of our project is mainly about digital assessments.

My original idea was for students to create a digital portfolio of their learning that parents could access that was an authentic display of their child’s  progress. After much discussion with colleagues, fellow teachers on twitter and much research I realized that I needed to create 2 portfolios.

The 1st portfolio will be created by students and will be embedded in their Kidblogs.

I love kidblog.

It is simple, easy to use, free and most importantly easy to use for Grade 1′s. I am hoping the Kindergarten students who have joined us will also find it simple. Kidblog is not as flashy as some blogging platforms but I like it. I plan to use this blog as a collecting place. Students will learn to embed various online applications, add photos and add audio recordings. This blog will also be a record of each student’s writing progress. Parents and families will have access to this blog at home anytime. In all of this process my students’ safety is my primary concern. Parents have been informed all along the process. Each child has signed school AND specific classroom permission forms in order to create these blogs. We will also be reviewing and following our Blogging Guidelines

The 2nd portfolio is designed to be what I am calling an assessment portfolio.

This portfolio will also be digital, but it is my goal to work smarter, not harder. I plan to use

as my platform.

I have created an anonymous notebook in Evernote for each student. These portfolios will not be available to parents online, but will be accessed when we meet to discuss their child’s progress.   There is an option that I can share these portfolios with parents using email but I haven’t investigated this option much yet.  These notebooks will be tagged with each child’s initials so they are easily pulled up when evaluating or discussing progress.  This portfolio will include each student’s blog as well as audio recordings, photos, pdfs, livescribe pencasts and notes on progress.  As well as these assessment portfolios being evidence that is collected by me, I am hoping to have students choose evidence of their learning themselves and add a self-evaluation piece.

Wow!

Even just writing it all down makes it seem a little overwhelming. 

Is it going to be perfect the first time? No!

  Am I looking forward to learning, changing and working through this process?  Yes!

Do I need a little help from my friends? Yes!!

Please comment and let me know how you are using these tools in your classroom.  Please share links to your examples of student portfolios or how you are using technology to work smarter, but not harder.

Today Jillian’s English/English First Peoples 10 class and my Kindergarten/Grade 1 Class collaborated to help K/1′s write their first blog posts. Unfortunately we had some tech problems but we managed.

It is so interesting to see the differences in the two imovies Jillian and I created.