Month 2,October Reflections

Blogging, again.

We are up and running again and have restored most of our lost work. We have just finished our Global read Aloud novel and are now busy looking into the endangered status of elephants and gorillas through the World Wildlife website. We have been skyping weekly with our new buddies from a neighbouring school. It has been exciting to meet with them weekly and share our pictures, blogs, and predictions.

This was my first Global Read Aloud. It has been a lot of hard work, but we enjoyed the book,  made new friends, and learned how to blog. We are going to work with the other school to create a joint final project. If all goes as planned we will make our first 1 minute video on the book.  This is our first inter school collaboration. It has encouraged us to take the time to share and provided  new pupose and deadlines for our hard work.

We have also started to use Book Creator to publish our first ebook on Ivan, and made a slide show with Animoto as a pre-read prediction activity.

I attended the first dinner meeting with @shaeski  on Digital Storytelling and I tried to use ideas from the session during October as part of my commitment to Designs For Learning. Usually I have students write about their reading and then create illustrations to add to their writing. For October, I flipped that. I started each reflection on the book by having the students make a picture to show me what Ivan or Stella felt, who their favourite character was and what their favourite part of the reading was. After we drew we wrote about our drawings. During this time we also did a impromptu write on Halloween. One thing I observed was that my weaker writers did better with the picture to jump start their thoughts. It gave them a tronger, more visual starting point than a word web or a brainstorm, or a class discussion. I think I will use this more often and next time I will extend it by getting students to focus on describing the setting and characters from their illustrations to add detail and enrich their writng.

As November starts we will be having a seies of First Nation workshops on drumming, weaving, salmon, drawing, potlatches and button blankets. We will be writing about our learning and recording our expereinces with video and photographs. I will take most of the footage and pictures as they work. Usually the students journal or blog about the workshops. This year I will have the students make a video or a digital collage to describe their experiences and then use them to present what they learned as well as blogging like we usually do.

Our next project is Remembrance Day. We have made torn paper poppies and we will spend time finding pictures of the war and using them to make a slide show to remember. We will share with the school at our assembly as our contribution to the service.

I am excited to begin November.

 

The One And Only Ivan 6 word stories

Ready to Go!!

 

Sept. 28thWe spent the day getting ready for the #glread12 - The One And Only Ivan. After going to the Digital Stories @shareski dinner meeting I am ready to try a few of the digital story ideas he showed us. We are going to integrate them into our Global read Aloud project that we start October first. We have a a new twitter account and will start using it too. 

October 1 

First up - 6 word stories

We started with 6 word stories or  "twitter stories". We uploaded our illustrations of Ivan to our twitter feed and then added our twitter predictions to the illustrations to share with our new buddy classes.  We are also made an Animoto slide show of them.

We will be meeting in Google Hangout with Mr. Hong's class and Ms. Thiessen's class to share as we read. We are also going to use Weebly to blog about the book. We will be starting them as the week unfolds and we read the first 78 pages. We will also read the blogs those of our buddy readers and share comments with them.

A busy week ahead.

Reflections on Integration

https://mrsdycksclass.wikispaces.com/

In 2007,  I found Wikis.  A way of sharing, publishing, engaging and promoting writing.  We started by writing every day, creating scrapbooks and a class Wiki. The Wiki  gave my class a reason to write and they took off.  This was a class that struggled with written output and the difference that our Wiki made was very evident. We were lucky enough to have an author and a game developer answer questions and chat with us through our Wiki as well. The students loved showing off their work and often took the time to go back and edit or re-edit from home. It surprised me to see students had made changes over summer and that we had traffic from all over the world as they shared their pages. 2007and 2008 were our Wiki years. We loved it. They are still up and my students stop by and visit their old work.

In 2009,  we acquired carts of Macbooks.  IMovie  and iPhoto and iWeb became tools of choice for telling our stories and we made DVDs of our work.  We  have continued making movies and have discovered blogging. Another success! Another reason to write. We blog every day, and since we received the iPads we use Book Creator and MyStopMotion to make movies and publish books. We have a class website, a YouTube channel and a Pinterest account. We are running out of year faster than we are running out of projects.

Technology has become entwined in my daily classroom routine. I don't plan how and when to use technology. On any given day, you will find some of my class filming or doing voice overs as others are drafting and still others are blogging. Some are busy taking photos of their latest artwork or making illustrations for their blogs. Some may even be using the time to finish up some Math or scrapbooking. We have many projects on the go and we are often all in different stages of creating. We have blocks of work time and students help each other, teach each other, work together and  technology is just another tool in our crayon box. If we can't get the Macbooks during specific times we change our day around and use them when we can. We usually work in small groups and some of us take on more projects than others.

I have always integrated technology, and I know many of my peers do not share my views on its importance in the classroom. They see computers as a way to teach typing, to learn math facts, or to research and publish a report. Many want a one on one ratio of computers to students and think of using computers as a acquiring a new skill. They want scheduled weekly times with computers and don't see the need to have ongoing significant access to them. Over the years, I have been steadfast in resisting scope and sequences, marking technology skills, promoting integration and arguing for increased technology funding for elementary schools.  I still believe that elementary school is the perfect place to use technology, as integration is the cornerstone elementary classes are built upon. We need to see technology as an essential tool for elementary students, a means for early intervention and a way to kick start literacy.