Encouraging Whanau Comments

As part of my Spark Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher inquiry for 2016, I'm looking to increase the blog comments my learners are receiving as a way of motivating the to write.  The use of blogs provides an authentic audience for my learners, but I feel that the most powerful motivator will be the learners own whanau regularly looking (and commenting) on their blogs.  Earlier in the year I sent home bookmarks with links to the learners blogs, but wanted to take this a step further by providing some instructions on how to comment as well as some suggestions for comments.

Late last week, all learners in my class took home a laminated sheet providing this assistance as well as a notice for parents/whanau about a blog commenting competition we have having in Room 15 this term.  This laminated sheet includes:

• a photo of the learner
• the address of the learner's blog
• a QR Code linking to the learner's blog
• a piece of art the learner created (and were most proud of - learners selected this themselves)
• instructions of how to comment on a blog
• some suggested ideas of what to include in a comment
• a link to a "how to comment" video
• a QR code linking to the "how to comment" video

While this sheet was in English, it is my intention to look at having this sheet translated into Te Reo and other Pasifika languages.  The sheet was created on Keynote, and I plan to share a template file (in Keynote and Google Slides) for other teachers who may wish to use this sheet.

It is my hope that more parents/whanau will be visiting and commenting on their child's blog over the coming days/weeks.  To further assist, I've used an inbuilt tool provided by Blogger (thanks +Dorothy Burt) giving them a clickable link to the "how to comment" video I have created.  

This feature is available under "Settings - Posts, comments and sharing" and displays on the learners blog like this (after the viewer has clicked on the "Comment" link:

I'm looking forward to seeing if there is a noticeable increase in whanau commenting as well as seeing how my learners respond to receiving (hopefully) more comments on their blogs.  For viewers of my blog that would like to leave a comment on some of my learners blogs, they are available here (and will count towards the challenge).

 

Presenting at GAFE 2016: Visible Learning

My second presentation, once again with colleague Matt Goodwin, is entitled Visible & Engaging in a Digital Learning Environment.  This presentation details how we prepare for learning in our classroom and how learners access their learning.  We also discuss and showcase Manaiakalani Google Class OnAir.

And so we start typing .... another Explain Everything tool is introduced!

As often occurs, another professional conversation with a colleague had me thinking about another use for Explain Everything.  She is having learners use the keyboard and typing onto the iPad, particularly for those learners who struggle with writing.  To date, my learners haven't used this tool but I do think its a great first step into publishing their own writing via Blogger, which I hope to achieve by the end of the year.

To this end, I am introducing a new slide to the Reading Activity project this week.  I do try to introduce a new one each week and have a bank of 15 slides now that I can pick and choose from for different learners or groups.  This also helps with variety and engagement with this activity.  The new slide asks learners to copy/transcribe the words from one page of their book.  To scaffold this for my learners I've created some laminated keyboard cards which shows the letters in lower case.  I remember from last year that many learners struggled to find the letters on the Upper Case keyboard.  One of the updates I'm most looking forward to is the introduction of the lower case keyboard for the iPad as this will negate this scaffolding.

As with any new activity I will introduce this to the learners as a whole class first on the Apple TV so they can see how to change the size of the text box and how to put a space between words.  I fully expect to take this activity further and over the coming weeks learners will have the opportunity to type some of there responses as well as handwrite others - I think the combination will give them an opportunity to practice both their skills.

Blogging with 5 year olds

As we countdown to the end of the school year, my class have received their own blogs as preparation for moving to Year 2 next year!

The blogs were created with a few days of the term left, so I decided to take advantage of this and have the learners do a post using the Blogger app on their iPads.   This was a scaffolded lesson and we started by thinking about what we have particularly enjoyed about having iPads to help us with learning this year and unpacked some of the required vocabulary.  Learners created their own stories in their writing books and then used this to create their blog post, together with a photo of themselves taken with the iPad.

The class used the Blogger app for the first time and we went through each step as a whole class, with me demonstrating on the Apple TV and the learners then completing each step.  The Blogger app is really user friendly and I only had two children that tried to rush ahead and published too early - as I am an administrator for all the learners in my classroom I was able to quickly fix this.

I've also added some additional posts to my learners blog, celebrating the learning we have completed this year, as this will become part of their history at Pt England School.

A selection of my learners blogs are available here (linking to their very first individual blog post):

Oalii

Atlanta

Casshius

Nature

Francis

(NB:  These learners are currently Year 1 and will be Year 2 in 2015)