Learning, Teaching & Technology

The majority of this session is a set of resources in a wiki that includes a nicely scaled set of activities geared toward initial users or experienced users of classroom blogs. There are well-designed webquests that I could have teachers do in a self-paced session on there own or as part of a course I teach. In going to the SlideShare link I was able to follow along with the presentation. Now that slideshare.net allows us to add a voiceover podcast I hope to post more of my teacher materials on this site as I think the audio is a very helpful addition.

I had a few classblogmeister pioneers last year and the most use was by a 2nd grade teacher and a 3rd grade teacher. We sat down together in the lab one day with David Warlick’s book “Classroom Blogging” and followed the directions. We each went home and “played” a bit more and very quickly they had created classroom blogs with access for each student. We were a bit nervous about young students having the patience to fill in text boxes, type in scrambled spambot text and manage it all; we shouldn’t have feared any of it as they were undaunting in their efforts to publish and share their work. One blog from last year can be viewed at: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=137726.

As Anne mentions, David Warlick manages the hosting and the software development of this tool on his own and he also encourages teachers to join a classroomblogmeister yahoo group that is a wonderful place to connect with other teachers, ask for help and participate in the community of learners who are attempting to incorporate blogs into instruction.

Thanks to the pioneers in my school this year I have more interest in classroom blogging. Many were hesitant to put in the work if it was just a technology thing, but in a course on Writing taught in the district last year a teacher shared her blog, the student’s excitement and that for her it was the best way she had ever found for sharing student work with parents. She found is was saving her time as the parents weren’t asking so many questions in emails and extra conferences; not to mention it was the first time parents were interacting with their child’s writing!

I have sent elementary teachers in my courses to this session, but I hadn’t fully reviewed it myself. I had referred teachers to Anne as I had read enough of her blog to know that the important aspect to her was the pedagogy, not the tool. When I work with teachers I ask them to explore some new web 2.0 learning sites and then respond with first “Why?” they would use a tool, followed by the practicalities of how and when that fit with curricular planning. To me, this path fits with Anne’s chosen definition of pedagogy:

The strategies, techniques, and approaches that teachers can use to facilitate learning.

I spent some time today on the pbwiki Anne created and compared her work to work I have done in using wikispaces as a similar tool. While I had tried most of the tools, some have evolved and changed as we now have AnimotoforEducation and Google Page Creator has become Google Sites. How great that the sites and options keep evolving! I didn’t know about Newspaper Clipping Generator, The Talking Cat Generator and the http://www.fodey.com site had some other options to explore.

This session has given me even more material to put on a wiki I have started that has resources for teachers at the elementary school. Some have been pioneers at moving to web 2.0 tools and they love to have places to learn and share with each other. The more we can create set of resources online, the more teachers can teach each other and refer back as they need a refresher on a particular tool.