Maybe I'll try podcasting in the classroom?

I have never podcasted before.  I have used Audacity to record my class doing different reader's theatres which they love because they can hear themselves but I have never published these.  While reading Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts by Will Richardson this semester I have had so many wonderful ideas!  One of them was to use podcasts to as a final assessment for my annual poetry anthology unit I do with my 6th graders.  I wrote the lesson this week and now I am super excited to implement it.  The kids will create their little bare back book like they have the past two years in my classroom but this year they will become digitally published poets for a local coffee houses' XM Radio Station!  I think this is going to be a fantastic way to introduce podcasting into our curriculum and I am sure the kids will come up with numerous other ideas on how to use podcasts once we have conquered this one!  My clear outcome for this is to have students write poetry and reflect on their work by picking out their favorite poem they have written to publish as a .wav file.  What other outcomes would work for podcasting? 

Wikipedias: A Student's True Collaborative Creation

So, I finally just finished my first Unit Reflection and got it approved by our professor!  It was very exciting because I find it very difficult to write the reflections.  It comes in handy for this week's blog on wikis though because part of my reflection was about how instead of having my students write Scientific Journals in my final unit plan like I had planned I had them create a wiki!  The class finished up their unit on energy with this project I designed with the main goal of instilling the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources.  They did a lot of research on these and created PowerPoints on the energy sources they thought that Fairfax County should use to be more environmentally friendly.  While they were presenting their PowerPoints we created a bar graph to show what each group chose.  Once they had all presented their projects we picked the top 3 resources from our bar graph.  They ended up being natural gas, solar, and wind.  We went on to learn about how to create wikis.  They even made an authors page and wrote about themselves.  Here are examples of their final collaborative wikis on our top 3 resources!  I thought they turned out great. 

Last year I used wikis in my classroom when we created an online database of Revolutionary War Heroes.  This turned out really well and the kids were able to learn about all of the people they needed to know!

So, do you have a project coming up where you could really test student knowledge about what they have learned?  Remember to think about your goal before beginning.  What do you want the students to learn? 

Student Review within Blogs!

A fantastic way to introduce students to blogging is to use your class' Blog Tool within Blackboard 24-7 and implement a test review session!  My outcomes for this activity were to introduce students to blogs and to also have them review for their Revolutionary War Test.  I had the kids go through their interactive notebooks and their study guides to try to develop challenging questions for their peers.  Once they had a good list of questions and answers they were allowed to go onto their Blackboard site and begin to post questions.  Once they had posted the questions they had written down their next step was to go and begin answering their classmates' questions!  I think that having the students drive their own review is very beneficial, much more than me asking the questions and them finding the answer. 

One thing to remember while implementing this within your classroom is that this is not just a "free time" for you!  This is a true test/assessment of what students have learned and what they still need more work on.  Sitting at your computer and watching what they write (questions and answers) will show you how students are doing.  Also, it is sometimes fun to write your own question which ensures that students continue to take their review seriously because they know you're watching! 

So, how could you implement blogging into your curriculum?  My outcome for this was for the students to review, but what would you want?  Perhaps have students share comments and thoughts about projects.  The science fair is coming up...wouldn't it be cute to have the kids write about their projects for all of their classmates to read and comment on with praise and other ideas to make projects even better?!  Always remember to think of your goals before you begin. 

Frustration within Collaboration

I was at a training this week and they showed a few videos to us to help promote thought about resistors of change in the workplace. Well, we had our laughs and learned a day's worth of techniques on how to help these people make it through the necessary changes to make schools successful. The more I thought about one of the videos though, the more it reminded me of people using technology.

This week's blog is titled, "frustration within collaboration," because sometimes when you put forth so much effort into lessons and want your entire team to use it, it can be frustrating when they leave out the entire part where technology is involved! When the current movement within most school districts is collaboration it starts getting you to think about student equity, and when your teammate leaves out part of the lesson it's really not fair to the kids that don't get to experience that! Especially when the part they leave out is what you consider the best, most meaningful part, the technology!

I am afraid I don't have a solution for this. I just know you will enjoy this video and understand that you're not alone in this frustration. Keep collaborating, keep trying to get your coworkers involved and keep integrating technology into school! Someday they will stop resisting and finally see the light and how necessary it is to teach students how to use these technologies.

Reading and Discussion Boards

There is a big difference between blogging and discussion boards.  Blogs are much less structured than discussion boards and can be about many different topics.  This week, I am going to share how I use discussion boards within my 6th grade classroom.  In the picture below you can see what my student's discussion board looks like which is implemented within Fairfax County's Blackboard site.

We use this forum to discuss the different books that I read aloud to the class.  I'm sure you know the feeling of not having enough time during your Language Arts block to have good discussions about reading.  There is just too much to fit into one day!  Reading, writing, mini-lessons, shared writing, guided reading...the list goes on!  Using the discussion board helps solve the problem about letting all of the students share what their thinking is about their reading. 

Another reason I use discussion boards is for my kid's book clubs.  They can go on and discuss their book and their projects with each other easily from their home computers. 

So, what do you want to use discussion boards for?  My goal was to have better communication about reading but what do you want to accomplish?  Ask yourself these questions before putting this into practice in your classrom. 

Welcome

Hello! My name is Megan and I will be using this blog to share lots of different ideas about how teachers can easily integrate technology into schools.  Technology does not need to be something that is overwhelming and requires a lot of extra preparation and work but it does need to be well thought out.  Within each post I will be asking you about your outcome.  What do you want your students to learn?  Once you think about the different affordances of technology you can successfully implement all of the different ideas that I will be sharing within this blog.  Technology can be used in so many different ways to help students become good users of information which is what they need to do in this information age!