Digital Netiquette

My Blogging Plan

      

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Our blogging professor has asked us to come up with a blogging plan for the next month or two. I have decided to share my blogging plan here, in order to maybe inspire someone else with ideas for blogging.

I carefully considered each week, and what the students and I might be learning before deciding on what our blog content should be.

I am truly motivated right now to set my new students up with blogging, and using my classroom plan to model each week’s blogging activity made perfect sense.

Our professor shared an article that said that once a week is a good amount to keep a blog going, especially for someone who is new to the community. Therefore, my plan includes creating one blog entry per week starting on a Monday, and publishing it no later than Friday.

Monday, August 24th

Create a blog entry titled: “New School Year Thoughts”. I’m not sure that will be the title, but I plan to write my thoughts about the first week of school. Maybe I will include some notes and pictures about what the students are doing.

Monday, August 31st

Create a blog entry titled: “Back to School Night Thoughts”. BTSN will be a few days before this week begins. I plan to write any thoughts that I have as a result of giving my presentation and meeting the families of my new students.

Monday, September 7th is Labor Day so I will begin the entry on Tuesday, September 8th

Create a blog entry titled: “Now that the School Year is Rolling”. At this point, two weeks will have passed and I will have a good handle on who has internet access for online homework. I plan to write an entry for the students (and parents) about how we will be doing online homework this year.

Monday, September 14th

Create a blog entry titled: “The Importance of Being Yourself”. This may or may not tie into my classroom blogging activity that is still developing in my mind. I start the school year with a project that includes writing a poem about ourselves. I plan to reflect on the project during this week.

Monday, September 21st

Create a blog entry titled: “Digital Citizenship: It’s part of your school supplies”. At this point in the school year, I would like my students to begin blogging. I plan to use this blog entry as an introduction, and will ask them to blog about something related to the topic.

Monday, September 28th

Create a blog entry titled: “Sharing your Opinions”. This will be used to model opinion writing on current events. I will use an article from Scholastic News (online) to demonstrate the steps in opinion writing. From there, my students will blog an opinion about an article.

Monday, October 5th

Create a blog entry titled: “Book Review”. I plan to write this entry in order to demonstrate for my students how to blog about a book they have read. I will also demonstrate how to upload images if we haven’t done so by now.

Monday, October 12th

Create a blog entry titled: “Playground Pet Peeves”. This will be used as an example for my students to write about issues that have come up on the school yard since school has started. I plan to use this one because it’s a hot topic that will probably invite several comments from student to student. This will give me another opportunity to model proper etiquette.

Care to share some of your blogging plan ideas here?

RIGOR-a key shift in mathematics

I just returned from a three hour training on our new math program. If you’re a multi-tasker like I am, then you have trouble sitting still and listening to someone “lecture” from the front of the room, too. Our district leadership has asked us to be a respectful audience and not work on other things when we are being trained, so there I sat… dutifully taking notes.

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Then, I had an “Aha!” moment while I was taking notes and realized I could turn some of today’s training content into a blog post! Of course, I will add some personal and teaching experience to it, so it will hopefully be more enjoyable than my training was today.

  

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What is “rigor”? What does it look like? What comes to mind?
Here are some of the answers our group came up with:

-taking more time on problems

-going deeper into learning

-maybe getting frustrated with a problem, but continuing anyway

-pushing through a problem

Google’s definition is the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate”. The definition and explanation from corestandards.org states “Rigor refers to deep, authentic command of mathematical concepts, not making math harder or introducing topics at earlier grades. To help students meet the standards, educators will need to pursue, with equal intensity, three aspects of rigor in the major work of each grade: conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application.

When I was in elementary school, I was a master at procedural skills and fluency. I was the first one done on the speed tests for facts, and always received 100% on math tests. And, I was bored to death... always. I remember my teachers saying that I didn’t have to do the “word problems” but I actually wanted to learn how! I loved a challenge, and needed one, too. My childhood experience doesn’t differ much from today’s children's experience which is why the common core initiative calls for key shifts in mathematics. As a third grade teacher, I have students every year that tell me “oh, my teacher said not to do those” when faced with a word problem. So, in 42 years, has nothing changed?

It’s important to teach procedures (algorithms) in math, but that is only one part of the whole picture. Understanding the math concept, and knowing when to apply the procedures is another. Word problems, or real-life application problems is a huge part of overall math competency. It is our responsibility as teachers to give our students opportunities to work through difficult problems, to spend time being somewhat frustrated, and to understand that the process is just as important as the final answer.

Please don’t be discouraged if you don’t possess the skills to give to your students. Maybe you weren’t given them as a student, either. Fortunately, there is a plethora of resources out there that can help you get started. You can learn right along with your students!

Thoughts? Comments? Experiences? Fears? Resources? Feel free to share.

Online Homework Poll

I use online polls and surveys often with my third graders because it’s a quick and easy way to get information, and because they love completing them online. The first time I used one was early last year when a parent offered to bring in complementary food from “The Habit” and I needed to know what the kids wanted to order. Typically I would have them write it up on paper, and I would collect all of the slips. If I didn’t misplace them, I would tally up the items and communicate to the parent. Then, days later when the food arrived, I would try and recall where I put the list. Using an online form streamlined the process, and everything was accessible on Google via any device. After the initial use, I was hooked! Since I did not use one at the beginning of the year, I have been giving thought to what I would poll the students on, and have come up with the idea below.

Student Centered Learning

Today ended our District’s week long K-12 “Edcamp” which I had the privilege of participating in by facilitating several workshops on topics such as Google Apps on the iPad, Genius Hour, Project Based Learning, Webquests, and others. Some of my 55 minute workshops had over 20 attendees, while others had one or two. I prepared some notes, resources, and examples ahead of time, but did not have a set agenda for the training. When the participants arrived in the room in which I was teaching, I did a quick little informal survey (basically asked) to find out what they knew, and what they wanted to learn. I think some were surprised, and possibly felt uneasy that my workshop wasn’t teacher directed, and traditionally structured. One of the teachers even asked me what I wanted her to do first.

After my initial “survey”, I showed the following video to get things going...

I hope you agree that the message was clear and impactful, and begged the question: does this fit your teaching paradigm?

After we watched the video, I shared a bit about my own belief system, and explained how I was going to structure our time together. I proceeded to run the workshop as I do my own classroom. Each teacher was working on something that was meaningful to them, and I modeled being the “facilitator” of the learning environment. I circulated around the room, asking meaningful questions to probe my learners to delve deeper into what they were researching... doing… creating. I paused the session, so to speak, at various moments to ask for comments or inspirations that they wanted to share, and always saved time at the end for reflection.

For two of the sessions, I invited four of last year’s students to come and help facilitate, and fortunately their parents were willing to drive them over to the training site. I wasn’t sure how the attending teachers were going to take being “taught” by 9 year olds, but I was willing to take the risk, and they really are WAY more proficient with these topics than I am! The results were beyond my expectations! The feedback was incredibly positive!

One teacher, that’s known me for many years, took a moment to share with me that she was moved by the way I always involve my students in such valuable learning experiences, and has learned so much from watching me over the years. Honestly... it brought tears to my eyes.

What are your thoughts on student-centered learning? Are you having any issues/obstacles to making the shift in your teaching paradigm?

Blogging with Third Graders

Blogging with Third Graders

This week in edtech#537, “Blogging in the Classroom”, our professor asked us to write 4 blogs entries:

-Any Blog Entry with an embedded image

-Any Blog Entry with an embedded audio file

-Any Blog Entry with an embedded Video File

-Any Blog Entry with an embedded Poll

The first thing I thought when I saw the audio file was...

… but then, I began to think of uses for it in the classroom, and my list started to GROW!

Educational Uses for Audio Files for Third Grade Students (or any relevant grade level):

1. Record yourself reading a book.

2. Create a weekly podcast series.

3. Write and record your autobiography.

4. Write and record a classmate’s biography.

5. Write and record a famous person’s biography.

6. Create and record a poem about a geometric solid.

7. Create and record a song that your favorite book character might sing.

8. Record your answers to assignments/tests.

9. Show what you know about any subject by recording it.

10. Record “what I did in school today” and send it to your family.
11. Record a commentary on what a classmate is doing. (Andrew's idea)
12. Narrate a piece of your artwork. (Andrew's idea)
13. Summarize a chapter in your book. (Emily's idea)
14. Discuss plot, character, setting, and other story elements from your book. (Emily's idea)

For this assignment, I recorded my audio file in a free application for Macs and PC’s called Audacity that you can download yourself from their website. It really is quick to use, and you can find several tutorials on youtube, or if you’re visual, you can read how it works in this pdf.

Still Learning

There’s a lot of things that I said I would never do,

or that would never be “me”

such as living in the suburbs

(I’m more of a diversity kind of girl),

Or... having a cat that

I refer to as one of my kids,

for obvious reasons,

(I made it to almost 50 years old),

and steering the wheel of a twin-engine plane (I’m DEATHLY afraid of heights),

but as John Lennon said…

“Life is what happens when you are making other plans.”

So, now we have yet one more item to add to the list of “Who? Me? Never!”.

 
I think my initial resistance to being a “Tweeter” was that I was happy with Facebook, and I figured, like everything else, once word caught on, there would be a plethora of social media platforms, and I didn’t have the time to participate in them all. Well, as a result of one of my graduate school classes, “Blogging in the Classroom”, I was required to create a Twitter account.

It’s been just about 6 weeks now that I have been tweeting… well, learning to tweet would be more precise. There is definitely a learning curve with learning a new language! Grammar and punctuation appear to not matter. Nor does knowing whether or not people “like” what you say or post, but my classmates and professor have been kind in guiding me through it all.

I really chose to blog about my Twitter experience because I can honestly say that I did not know what I was missing! I have had the best time gathering (“Favoriting” if you will) teaching resources that have me inspired to start this next school year! I have been following some experts in the field of iPad use, and Google Apps for Education. One in particular, Alice Keeler, does not sleep! Either that, or she has a crew of folks who tweet while she is sleeping because she is on there ‘round the clock! I am a huge fan of GAFE, and am always on the lookout for like-minded people who are willing to freely share their successes. Twitter gives me an instant way to easily locate ideas for my class, and even share them with others who might be actually following ME.

Once again, I am forced to humbly admit that I don’t always know what’s good for me.

Image Credits: (Unless otherwise noted-Cambria Tooley)