Virtual Book Clubs

At my school we are a literacy and technology magnet. What this should imply is that we are using technology to enhance our students literacy experience. The problem is that right now most teachers need training on how to do this. Right now our students take AR quizzes to track their reading. However AR is pretty light when it comes to some of the instructional models that we are used to using to gauge our instruction. As far as AR is concerned it really just assesses our students ability to recall events in a story.

While I think that these lower level exercise have their place the fact is that we can use technology to more richly enhance our students experience with literature. Most recently I was able to connect with a teacher in New Zealand. Here is a link to his class blog.

  http://koda26.edublogs.org

 About a month prior to starting this book club with Mr. Field's class I had the opportunity to join a book club with a few classes in South Carolina. The teacher's I worked with did a really great job of posting a reading schedule and assignments every day. It was through this first experience that I had a great opportunity to see first hand how to do a virtual book club. The experience my students had with this first book club was such a positive experience for them that I knew that I had to do another one. I was very fortunate to stumble across Mr. Field's blog, so I emailed him and he said that it sounded like a fantastic idea. Doing a project with a class or school in another country is one of the things I have always wanted to do, so of course I jumped on the opportunity.

 The first step is have a platform, as far as I'm concerned the best one is Edmodo, but there are plenty of others out there. Next you create the group and email the code to the other teacher or teachers involved and everyone joins. If you don't know how to do it, below is a great tutorial on how to create a group.

 Given how complex many other technology related tools are to use this is a pretty easy thing to do. The next thing you do is pick a book, organize a reading schedule. For our club we chose to read Esio Trot by Roald Dahl. Which worked out well because my class has a pet tortoise. Once they got going my students had some great discussions with their classmates in New Zealand. Not only did they read a book and enjoy it, they also got a chance to learn first hand how some students live and go to school in another country.

The biggest thing I noticed is how eager my students were to participate in these groups. Below is an example of some of the exchanges that happened between our students.

I blanked out the names of the students so you can't tell who they are. This is an exchange between our two classes. We also created Padlets for any really good student generated questions. (See my previous blog on interactives to see what a Padlet is and what it looks like.)

If we are going to expect to engage our students in a 21st century world we have to start engaging them in a way that appeals to them. More importantly we need to teach them how to love reading. Far too often we teach them how to prepare for a reading test and that is wrong. If our kids can learn to enjoy reading they will gain so much knowledge on their own because kids will read on their own. Instead of teaching to assess let's assess how we teach, and make changes to how we teach 21st century learners. 

Interactives

http://dcpspublic.oncoursesystems.com/school/webpage.aspx?id=842265

This morning I was thinking about how my school district purchased OnCourse systems to manage lesson plans, documents, gradebooks, learning schedules etc. It also offered a class website for the teacher to use. Mine is in the link above, hope you enjoyed by the way.

Anyhow I know that most of my colleagues don't really use their website and I thought that maybe it's just because they are not sure how to make it fun for their students to use. If you looked at the URL it generates you will notice that ours is long and complicated, and therefore hard to hand out to parents. So sometimes implementing the use of a website can have it's challenges.

Years ago I started setting my class website as the homepage for students when they log in to the computers. This was great because I could display my instructions for their computer work and change it every week so that it stayed fresh. Plus they were only allowed to use the tabs that I linked in so there was less potential for students to wander onto sites that they did not belong on. But still it wasn't really all that exciting for my students, especially when you consider all the websites that you have to compete with. It wasn't until I worked on a virtual book club with a couple of classes in South Carolina that I saw the potential of interactives like the Voki above. We used these to introduce ourselves to our new virtual classmates and they had a lot of fun doing it.

Now my students are second graders so I had to assist them a lot with these. However if you teach 4th grade and up your students should not have any problems copying and pasting the embed codes into Edmodo or whatever platform they might be using. Here are a few examples from my class.




There is an option to purchase a classroom plan complete with access to all the talking avatars which include historical figures and world figures. Imagine the potential for role playing as a lesson. If you teach middle or high school students this is an excellent way to get them engaged in learning the otherwise mundane subjects of American History, and World History.

The other interactive we started using was called Padlet, which used to be called Wallwisher. The Wallwisher team made some excellent changes to their offering and now Padlet is also an amazing tool that can be for everything from a suggesting box to a discussion board. You can use it for PD or for classroom projects. Students can add links, photos, and files. Plus they embed nicely on Edmodo or other websites. Here is an example of one that if you are reading this I would like for you to comment on. Check back later to this blog because I may add more useful interactives to it later on. And if you have any suggestion for a good interactive to use in the class, post it to the board below.

Created with Padlet

Informational reports 2.0

I seem to remember back in my high school days doing the old five paragraph reports. You know the ones, they had an introduction, three paragraphs, and a conclusion. At the time I remember accepting this as the way to do reports. Still I remember how in school I would always come to accept things for how they were. I accepted because I had no say in the matter, I did this writing robotically and did pretty good. The problem is that I was greatly disconnected.

Now as a 2nd grade teacher and dealing with a whole new breed of 21 century learners, and being a techie nerd myself, I sought to reinvent the informational report. We had a already done the tried and true paper method where we brainstormed, wrote a first draft and revised our work. The problem was that my poor students were bored to death, and who can blame them? I have often argued that in education we far too often don't consider our audience when we plan lessons. We consider the data they produce, we look at the numbers but we don't look at them as individuals. More importantly we don't consider the types of media that they consume on a daily basis. Go to any chain restaurant at 7pm when the gymnastics and soccer practice is over. The kids sitting at the table are engaged, connected, and consuming everything inside the screen they hold. Apparently kids love screens, but they really love what the screens bring them. They can connect to their friends, share pictures, engage in online gaming etc etc etc.

So what does this mean for 2nd grade informational reports?

There are some things you can not change about an informational report, for example it has to be informational. It also has to have an introduction and a conclusion. All good writing no matter what kind has these elements of being informative/ persuasive/ entertaining and they all introduce and then conclude the action.

So what do you change?

You change the format, and believe me there are plenty of ways to do this. For our reports I gave my students choices which is especially good because you have to consider your kids and thier learning styles. My students were allowed to choose from good ole-fashioned paper, pen.io, or www.smore.com

I didn't have a single one use paper. And for those of you that don't know pen.io is really great and convenient because you don't have to sign up, you just write what you want to write and then post the url it gives you. The problem is that you need a place for it to go. If you teach high school it's easy because most of your students are on Facebook or Twitter. But I teach 2nd grade, luckily all of my students are on Edmodo which is perfect for this kind of thing.

I had two groups use www.smore.com which is an online flier generator. I just decided to use it for my students report. The great thing about it is that you can track where people viewed your flier. Two of my girls did a report about Beyonce. After having it up for 24 hours it had already been viewed by close to 100 people on 5 different continents. I can't begin to tell you how thrilled my students were to see this, plus they got exposure to a map which is a social studies bonus. Plus the map is in google maps format so we got to use the street view function to do a virtual field trip around the world.

Below you will find the Beyonce flier. I found that helping my student put these things together was far less frustrating than trying to convince them that them being able to write a proper report was essential to their success in the real world. Consider your audience and make learning wonderful through technology. If you do this I think that you will find you will leave your classroom with feeling gratified, refreshed, and motivated to go back and do it again.