My 5th grade gifted/talented students have been sharing a blog with the other g/t students in our district. We are all competing in a stock market game and even though the blog has only been “live” for about a week, I am absolutely amazed by how wonderful it is. To all those who have been supporting this move or doing it themselves, I want to share a smile and a nod: now I know what you mean.
Time for the “Great Conversations”
My lesson plans for this project are impeccably written. (I helped write them this summer.) I know what to say and when, with the best possible delivery. However, with the state of today’s market, our students are asking terrific questions that have little to do with our pre-written lessons. As all teachers know, there just aren’t enough minutes in the day to call on every student and listen to every thought…regardless of how relevant. I’m encouraging my students to continue the conversation on the blog. Guess what? THEY ARE!!
Parent Involvement
As far as I can tell, the parents are loving our blog. Often, the students are posting comments such as, “I was talking with my parents and they said the stock market blah-de-blah-blah.” Therefore, students are not just learning from their own parents, but from the parents of their peers… even those who happen to be financial geniuses, in this case.
Unassigned Homework
The students know the blog is open to them at any time. They are really enjoying the high that comes with peer reviewed publishing, just as I do. They understand that more students will read/comment on their posts if they are relavant, reliable and interesting. They are also understanding that the best way to write R.R.I posts is to conduct research. I haven’t assigned extra homework…they’re doing it on their own.
I’m sure I’ll have more to add to this list of reasons why I love blogging with my students. It’s so much better than I ever expected.
After a somewhat disheartening end of the school year and an uneventful summer, I feel the blogger-bug biting again. I apologize to those of you (all 3 of you) who follow this blog, for the 3 month lapse since my last entry. However, I now feel refreshed..humming, “Nobody’s gonna slow me down…oh no, I’ve got to keep on movin’!”
Here are few things I’ve been working on:
Google Teacher Academy NYC 2008:
It’s all over my inbox and my PLN, Google is accepting applications for a November training session. Fifty teachers are accepted, so I’m doing my best to answer the questions with as much thought and creativity as possible. Still working on my video…will post when I’m happy with it.
Student Blog:
Well, it’s more of a completely impenetrable fortress/discussion board. I convinced our curriculum director to allow the technology teachers in our district to create and administer a WordPress blog for our gifted/talented program. Our fifth graders are taking part in the Stock Market Game and they’re using the blog to reflect on their progress and share tips/strategies. I’d love to post a link, but for this pilot program we agreed to keep all of the posts “in house”. It’s a great first step, in my opinion.
Elementary Tech. Teachers Ning:
Thanks to my good friend Maureen, I was invited to join a fantastic Ning for Elementary Technology Teachers, created by Nedra. So far, it looks great and I can’t wait to browse for ideas and share some of my own!
Wikispaces for Teachers
Our teachers had created web pages on www.think.coma few years ago. We thought it would take off like a runaway train, but unfortunately, only about half of our teachers created and updated pages there. We were dismayed to find out over this past summer, think.com paired up with ThinkQuest and changed its format. We are no longer able to link from our school website directly to the pages the teachers created on think.com. Only members of think.com are able to see the web pages that have been designed. I definitely see the purpose of that move, but we were given no warning of the change. If we were to stay with think.com, we’d have to encourage every parent in the district to become a member in order to see the teacher web pages. Do-able, but not probable. Our solution: switch to wikispaces. I trained a few teachers today after school and hope to offer another training later in the school year. Currently, our teachers will use wikispaces as a one-way communication tool. However, I hope to encourage our administration to allow teacher to start parent discussion boards on their pages.
Next Hurdle: Unblocking Sites for Teachers
I’ve been disappointed by the fact that our administration continues to prevent access to certain types of sites for teachers. I understand strict filters are important when students are using computers. However, if we really want to treat our teachers as professionals, we should give them greater access to useful tools. Currently, in our district, all games, social networking sites, blogs, and wikis are blocked. It is possible for a teacher to ask for a site to be unblocked for instructional purposes, but that process takes a few days at least and smothers “just in time” teaching. Our IT director says that he’s uncomfortable unblocking the sites for teachers because of this and similar scenarios: a teacher leaves a computer, forgetting to logoff. A student begins using the computer under the teacher’s username and accesses the restricted sites and “causes trouble for him/herself or others”. He feels it would unnecessarily put our students, or our district, in harm’s way. Our response has always been: we have a solid AUP that covers such things. The student would clearly be breaking the contract and therefore have computing privileges revoked.
So far, we’ve made little progress in changing the minds of our administrators on this topic. Any suggestions?
