School Year 2008 ~ 2009

I don’t know what my expectations really were for this class, but they certainly have been exceeded. Alice has kept our feet on the ground and our minds bolting forward to the wonder and possibilities of this new generation of learning tools. She communicates her enthusiasm and I would feel safe in saying that we all have learned a great deal that we will take back to our school and use to expand our pratice of teaching.

LibraryThings is something I could play with for hours - and I have already. It is more productive but just as fun as an on-line game.

Voice Thread is going to be a great tool when I get my students working with it. The possibilites to share and communicate with others who share our interests are immense. I want to see what the kids will do with it.

Blogs are something I visited often and admired (Yarn Harlot,

The purpose of my project is to document the work that Becky and I started last year to improve our literacy program. For the past three years I had the pleasure/challenge of teaching 1st grade after teaching 6th for twelve years. It was an opportunity for me to learn where my 6th graders had been, what the learning issues are and the scope of the curriculum. I learned a great deal, including why, I believe, students get so stuck on writing “said.” “Said” is the most frequently used word to indicate conversation in 93% of the stories they read. It stays with them if they aren’t introduced to other ways of saying “said” early. It is the same with the definition of setting, math vocabulary, etc. Now that I will be working with 6th graders again I will reexamine my teaching approach based on the past and see if I am able to more effectively teach 12 year olds.

While I will create both a blog and a wikki, my class project will be the blog, “SacoRiverReaders.” The Saco River runs through our district and by both Cornish School and Sacopee Valley Middle School. It is something physical that connects us every day.

The purpose of the blog is to document what we have done so far, the current year’s work with the Daily Five for both grades, student work and teacher/student/parent reflections. It will also be a place to gather useful resources, house forms and other documentation templates. There are other teachers involved in similar work at Cornish and they will be invited to participate as they are able. Daily Five is a common sense management process for organizing the presentation of reading, writing and vocabulary skills. It is a process for turning the responsibility for using essential skills over to the learner rather than the teacher being the moderator of skill use.

How will I do it? I am not sure. I do know that I want this to be a lively process for this year - weekly updates would be great. The students will be as much a part of the contents of the blog as the teachers. I know the abilities of Becky’s students as they were mine last year. I also know the abilities of some of my new 6th graders. This is going to be a place for them to let their skills and progress shine. They may have ideas for what to include that I wouldn’t possibly think of or perhaps value as they would. I want to work with Becky to bring everything to the blog that will make our collaboration with our students efficient, meaningful, challenging and enjoyable. The work or the children will be the most visible portion of the blog.

What am I going to change in my teaching pratice? I don’t know how to answer that either. Being innovative and pragmatic have been part of my pratice since I began teaching. What I hope the blog will do will be to give greater voice to the students, all of them, as they learn. We value what they think and the effort they willingly invest in their learning.

I will have greater access to computer technology this year and my students will be more independent as users of the Internet and word processing. I will give the students opportunities to pratice the skills they will need for making effective entires and how to be “noble” in their manner of commenting. It will be exciting to see how far we will go with this blog and the connection we will make to other classrooms and teachers who are using Daily 5’s approach.

I was so proud of myself that I finally decided on a project. I wrote the post, switched to another page to verify some information, and of course, deleted the whole thing…

So, here we go again…

The project is two fold - the blog is about the reading work that Becky Carpenter and I collaborate on. As I will be in a different building this year and teaching a different grade level, we will have a lot to share, compare and modify. The literacy management program we use is The Daily Five. We will tentatively call it “SacoRiverReader.”

The wikki format seems to fit my lesson plan format. If it becomes a wikki then it will be accessible to my students, parents, colleague, administration and me.

I messed up and deleted my post! Live and learn?

David Parry’s article, The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom is about good teaching practices, simply put. It is about the RSS tool that enables learners, whoever they are, to begin to gain some control and organization of web content on any given topic that they intend to use for some task. Timely updates on topics of interest are exciting to have access to. Relevant content is filtered, making it more accessible.It shifts the focus away from managing material to evaluating and synthisizing it.

collection of websites all in one feed), which means that on any given day I can receive over 500 new items in my feed reader. This clearly means that I cannot read them all, or even half of them. What a good feed reader does is allow you to quickly scan the headlines, mark the ones you want to read, toss out the ones you don’t, and return either immediately, or at a later more convenient time, to carefully read the ones you have selected.

“So here is one of my big pedagogical and theoretical claims: The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this.” I amnot sure that I agree with this claim. What I do believe is that we have to find efficent ways of processing information. Scanning rss feeds is similar to walking through a street market. As you walk through the aisles of the market you scan for things of interet, eleminating the majority of stuff that you find irrelevant. A few time your senses focus in on something that stands out. These are the times your feet slow and you spend time investigating what you have found. Maybe you will take it home with you because it is just what you need. Maybe it will simple give you more ideas about what to be on the lookout for, a refinement of your search.

I wonder what rss will have transformed into in the next ten years. That is an amazing thought because it is only in its’ infancy now. What will students who learned to use rss at the elementary level be able to do with the yet-to-be-developed offspring?

Maria Nee’s blog is visually pleasing. The information is well organized and presented. I liked the sophistication of her work. So many primary websites focus on “cute” rather than information and clarity because of the grade level and can dilute the impact of what quality is presented.

I read a number of student entries and liked the diversity of presentations. I’d like to see the computer set up she has for students. How much access time do they have? What will the students have the opportunity to do in 1st and 2nd grade?

I would have liked to see more student work on the home page - because it should be about the work and skills of the chlldren.

David Warlick’s 2¢ Worth is a night’s reading in itself. I attended a number of his presentations in Boston about 4 years ago and learned so much from him then. His web tools at Landmark Project are pratical and user-friendly. I remain impressed by his knowledge of the digital age, his promotion of ethical issues and his level of engagement with others. I like reading his stuff - makes me feel like I can get an idea of what is going on.

How will I use bookmarking? I don’t know. Right now I am just learning about the possibilities of this tool and I have to figure out how it will be better than what I already do for organizing.

Knowing synonyms have never been so important, that is for sure.

I have to really spend time with this to figure out how to make this work for me and for my students. I am returning to 6th grade and my style is to see what the kids can handle and then increase the learning as far as possible. While some of them may already know about delicious or it’s counterparts (there are some, right?), I have to work it thorough to see what they can use and doesn’t make me crazy in the process.

I have already worked to keep my files super organized because they are unusable if I don’t. Social bookmarking is fun but until I can make practical use of it, it is still at the level of more “bells and whistles.” How do I make it relevant?

Blogging is something else. It is thrilling, period. To be able to have conversations with the world, whew, doggie.

“6. Teach commenting.

Children have a need to converse and will improve their performance when people comment on their work.”

That is what we are working on anyway, be it through classroom conversation, responses to literature or solving a problem in mathematics.

It really stands out when comments are not thought out. DC is really out there, that is true and you meet him/her anywhere and have to be confronted (polite modleing of how to do it…) - or deleted.

Good manners are good manners. Will this help students learn the need for explaining themselves, giving reasoning? Authentic purpose to communicate? How do I find the blogs and sites that will motivate students to be active learners?

While all ISTE teacher standards are important, the one I can be most effective with this time around is Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. It is a confluence of what I am comfortable with, where I want to go and what I can effectively work on now.

National Education Technology Standards (Teachers)

I want to learn how to use blogs and other tools so that I am proficient enough to work with my students as co-learners. 2008~2009 is my first year back with 6th graders in three years. For the past three years I have been teaching 1st grade. I am impressed with the skills and attitudes of the young students and am assuming that the 6th graders’ skills will be equally impressive as compared to the novelty thrill that we had to get through before learning of any substance could be accomplished. We will collaborate on the learning with 2nd and 4th graders of Cornish, and include colleagues and parents in the process.

This could be extraordinary stuff. What don’t I get to do while I am doing this? Breath? I am not giving up my family, Maggie, Harry or knitting any more.

I believe in learning to use this material which will lead to other computer technology uses we can’t begin imagine. (Thank you, DW.) We don’t know the questions and we haven’t a clue about the answers - but students of today will grow into them.

Spooky, but exciting as long as it is used for the common good. I am just getting how “ravelry” was even put together so that I can use it efficiently. The time factor and tool accessibility is a concern. “Yes, I want to use it - now!” And the response is, “No, it is your recess duty, there is a staff meeting and please monitor the afternoon buses…”

We are planning a multi-grade collaboration through science and literacy that these tools will be essential for over the next two years. I plan to get some tools set up so that they can be used in September to start communication with the class and parents about what is being learned in the classroom and having student, parent and colleague input.

Becky Carpenter and I will keep each other going on this as we are both taking the USM course and collaborate on numerous education projects. This will certainly keep us excited about something in the depths of winter - or Level II assessments.

I particularly want to learn how to embed videos onto my blog and other web-sites.