Kids can totally blow you away …
Yesterday we used a blog to facilitate our SODA (start of day activity based on Tony Ryan’s Thinkers Keys). The students worked in their groups to come up with their ideas. Then they commented on the post to record their ideas.
All the groups worked well and came up with fantastic ideas. I have developed a sheet that sets out exactly how to do their commenting.
Then I showed them the process I went through to moderate their comments (and incidentally demonstrated why I wanted the particular layout in the comments) and published their ideas.
Then last night when I was doing some more work I happened to notice that there was a comment awaiting approval. When I checked it out I was totally blown away.
While we have been learning about critiquing (voicethread) I’ve not talked at all about commenting like this in blog posts. This was totally student initiated – and Drew is a 7 year old, Year 3 girl.
It’s so inspiring when you see your students starting to respond independently like this.
this is terrific. we must get secondary teachers on the technology boat, or all your good work with your students goes out the window when they reach high school, which is such a shame! i especially liked how you inserted your pictures here – what tool did you use for that?
cheers,
kelly
Hi Kelly – i host my pictures at Flickr and then just paste the embed code into the blog post.
Thanks for your comment
thanks for that. i take it you made up the instructions page in publisher or another processing program and then saved as a jpg?
had a conversation with one of my year 9s today – he has come from an intermediate with their own tv station, and is used to editing video, so i have him helping me make some video of us blogging and using our wiki…if i can just get it edited and uploaded i’ll be happy! i digress…what i meant was these kids are coming to us (high school) from you guys who do all these wonderful, techno-based, real-world activities, and then they do…chalk & talk. we are trying to change it though!
I use OpenOffice or Google docs for most stuff but yeah – basically – i have the sheet printed out – along with the other page with the WALT (We Are Learning To) and both are in A3 size and up for the kids to see.
I talked about this with another teacher the other day. It would be too easy to just forget innovation because other teachers may not take it up. Innovation is very hard because you have to be dynamic and progressive and on to it the whole time.