Collaboration Without Boundaries

Lately we have been using a new  iPad app called Skitch.  We have been using it to document the last couple of science experiments that we have done in class.  I introduced the app to the students using my new Apple tv wireless connection (which is fantastic and I now use as a document camera and for Google Hangout and for Skype calls) on my SMARTboard.  I showed the students how to take a picture and how to import a picture, then how to label them the photo.  We use this app daily to document and record development of  our experiments and our hatching eggs.  I noticed that some students were more keen and so I have used these students as teachers to other students.  Two other classes in our school are also participating in our current  seed experiment and my students have gone over and taught other students in those classrooms how to use Skitch to document their experiments.

Initially my students were just labeling with single words, but now I ask that they use specific theme words to create sentences.  After the student has annotated their picture I have them save the picture to Evernote with the date and their names in the title.  I can then asily add this picture to their student portfolio and post the picture to our classroom blog, students can also choose to tweet out their pictures or email it home.

Our first attempts

Writing Sentences

Teaching other Kindergarten students

As always before I introduced this app I thought very carefully what skills it would develop.  The other day someone said to me that they could tell technology was my passion.  This statement worried me a little because while I am excited by the use of new tools in my class,  my real passion is to help my students become more capable communicators.  Reading and writing are my passions, I always keep in my  mind how is the technology going to help develop my curricular goals.  New and shiny is exciting but I must remember to try to bring it back to what skills am I trying to emphasis.  While  learning to use the tool is fun and makes the activity different it is still about teaching skills to students.

My next challenge is to have students use the technology in their Student Led Conferences.  Students will be using this app, making words on the SMARTboard and creating Number Stories that they will record on the iPods.  I can’t wait to see my students teaching their parents.

That apps are your newest discoveries?  What apps do you feel help develop communication skills?  How are you/do you imagine using Skitch?

      Since we are on a Twitter theme I thought I would ask another Twitter friend to explain a wonderful collaboration which is happening between kindergarten classrooms which knows no boundaries!  Mardelle (@mathmurd) is a BC  kindergarten teacher I have gotten to know on Twitter.  She is very involved in the #kinderchat which happens as a ongoing discussion on Twitter and has its own dedicated chat on Monday nights.  She  is a collaborator, explorer and risk-taker, my kind of gal!!

Mardelle came up with this wonderful idea about how to use Skype in her classroom and how to encourage others to try it too.  The thing I love about this project is the freedom of it.  Mardelle has set up the structure and the group and we all use it as we like.  Because of the connections made through this group we organized and participated in a collaborative  experiment with eggs. 

The following post is by Mardelle from her blog, Weeds are Plants Too.  She kindly agreed to post it to our blog as another example of collaboration that is happening within schools and classrooms.

Thank you Mardelle!

picture by kopp0041 on flickr

As a kindergarten teacher, I am on a constant quest to find authentic, engaging avenues for Play to bring to my current group of kinders.   I am a little crazy about it, truth be told. I have exhausted the patience of the colleagues I work with, facing glassy eyed “She is talking Play again” looks. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the world of Twitter,  and a Personal Learning Network (PLN) that is as intensely taken with the importance of Play as I am?

Enter #Kinderchat, my 27/7 PLN.   

There are endless ways to Play,  and that is at the heart of the  #Kinderchat PlayProjects.  Connecting young children to a world of play has never been easier.  Twitter, Family Facebook, GoogleEarth, Voicethread, GoogleDoc Storytelling, SkypePlay – the world is at your fingertips, inviting you to connect in a way that is just right for the children in your care.

I currently find myself the curator of a Play Project that is just right for me -  SkypePlay.

If you are new to Skype, it is an online, visual telephone call. Teachers use it to connect their children to experts, authors, and to other classes.  In Kindergarten, I found that the large group gathering was nice every now and then,  but that children just wanted to come on up and have a face to face chat, connecting through conversation, and exploring a curiosity about who that other kid is,  and what are they doing where they are.  

In a nutshell, Skypeplay gives children a peer to peer audience for their play that provides immediate interaction, collaboration, and conversation.  

And so, a network of Kindergarten classes are connecting, building relationships, exploring geography, and discovering that while everyone might have their own place in the world,  we all love to play. 

Why on earth (no pun intended) would you need to play with children via a screen when you have kids right there in your room to play with?  

Well, why not?  That is my short answer.  But I get it. We need to ensure that the world of Social Media is not just a gimmicky thing we throw at kids because we think it is cool.  

So.  Here is a story from my room.  Three boys started building a 3D structure.  As it grew, and design ideas were tried, discarded and refined, their excitement grew.  Other kids in the class came over, said “cool” but got back to their own play as fast as they could.  Then our Skype Phone rang,  and a brand-new-to-us class wanted to play.  When our new friends came online, they were overwhelmed with excitement – “WOOOOOOAH!!    What is THAT!!!”  My boys beamed, and strutted with pride, and then spent their time explaining the structure, the components, the time frame (“We have been building for two days, but expect it to take 90” ) while the other kids questioned, listened, and planned for themselves.  How many curriculum outcomes do you see there? 

Teachers in the project have facilitated discussions about tornados, snow and no snow, gardens, worms, mountains, oceans, islands. We have giggled over “Giant Face Boy!!”  and wondered if we are in the future because it is after lunch here, and before lunch there. I have seen a boy make eye contact with a child a world away when he has struggled to do that with the child beside him.  We have talked Skype manners and internet safety. We have classes plotted on a flat map, on a globe, and we have soared over towns and cities via Google Earth.  We have been  Alice in Wonderland, stepping through the Looking Glass.  

And it has opened up a world of play.  Literally. 

Our Innovation project is about the power of connecting with folks in alternate ways. Karen ( @LirenmanLearns) is a twitter friend who has been involved in several chats and events that I have been involved with. We keep bumping into each other out in cyberspace and hopefully we will soon be meeting face to face and working together on a writing project. Well last night was amazing! At 6pm PST (9pm EST) 6 Grade 1 teachers met and brainstormed about how we could support each other teach in our teaching of writing. It was like a cyberspace staff meeting, but way more fun than most staff meetings I have been to. We planned, we giggled, we shared! I was going to write a post about it but Karen did such a fantastic job on her blog Learning and Sharing with Ms. Lirenman I thought,  “why recreate the wheel” so I ask her if I could repost her post here and she kindly said yes! Below is the post that Karen made on her blog and she was willing to share with us.  I could not have explained it better myself. Thank you Karen!

@jaxbeachteach @MrsMartel2 @soltauheller @LirenmanLearns @mrswideen Loved chatting with all of you! I took a pic twitter.com/CYarzy/status/… — Christine Yarzabek (@CYarzy) March 29, 2012

My question is, have you ever used Google Hangout?  What potential do you see for its use?  And yes, I will look into why it didn’t work at my school, and how I may (if possible) get it to work.  I mean really, can you imagine seven grade one classes learning and sharing together!

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?

Great Teachers Are Great Learners – AITSL from Innovation Unit on Vimeo.

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?

So you know how when something sparkly goes by and it catches your attention? I have been accused of being a squirrel and have to say it is true!  Trying to remember what I know about good primary teaching I have been keen (does anyone use that word other than teachers ) to try new things in my class.  Well this project has amplified my squirrel-like behaviour, every time I talk to one of my team members something else comes up and I want to try it.
I LOVE VoiceThread – last year I used it as reading portfolios for my Grade 1′s.  I am using the free, educator account so I have limited storage space and this did become an issue with a class set of portfolios.

I love that is was easy to use, I can add photos, video, type or write on slides. I also like that this tool gives students the opportunity to reflect and comment on their own work. It is also a easy tool to collaborate with others on.

(I did not created this VT, it was one of the first online collaborative projects that got me hooked).

Well a couple of weekends ago I learned that VoiceThread had a free app for the iPad/iPod!

This week we have been working with it in class. We introduced it on Monday and I have been working with small groups. After our first session we brainstormed ways that we could improve our VoiceThreads.  We talked about planning, using a clear, slow voice and the brainstorming included the idea that we had to have a quieter classroom when recording (how wonderful!). The students have jumped right in, creating all kinds of interesting threads. We are still learning, but we are getting better. I am excited about using this tool to develop oral language, similarly to StoryRobe.

So shiny!

We work in a small, rural district with not so many educators but lots of jobs.

In our district many people wear many hats, like most places, we all take on responsibilities beyond our classrooms, our schools and our communities.  We are all coaches, youth activity leaders, hockey managers, members of boards, community event coordinators, volunteers and teachers in our communities.  We all know that it takes collaboration for good things to happen.

One of my other hats is on the Professional Development committee in our district, while this post isn’t directly related to our project it does fall under the category of collaboration  and possibilities so I thought I would share a small documentation of the day.

This Friday, November 18 was a School-Based Professional Development Day  and Eagle View Elementary School joined together with Port Hardy Secondary School under the theme of Collaboration Possibilities.

Last night I was reading Byran Kuhn’s lastest post about ideas and his quote “size matters” struck me. We are both large schools in our community, together we are stronger educators. I am hopeful when the action plans that came out of the day are started  new learning will happen for everyone in our communities.