Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom

I am currently in the process of introducing my new Grade Two students to blogging. As this is a new concept for many students and parents I have prepared two handouts to send home to families.

They are an Introduction to Blogging note and Guide to Getting the Most out of 2KM’s blog note.

Feel free to check out the PDF versions of these files by clicking on the links.

Sue Waters has just written an excellent post about blogging in the classroom. She talks about the progression you would generally follow with blogging from

1. having students simply comment on your class blog posts
2. having students write  posts on the class blog
3. having students set up their own blog

Sue notes that with each of these steps comes an increase in student engagement. From my experience I believe this to be very true.

I like to follow the above steps however, as my students are only in Grade Two, I have only had one student so far who I have helped set up his own blog. This was due to his enormous competence and enthusiasm for blogging.

In my class, the second step of “posting on the class blog” can mean helping me to write a post on the IWB or independently writing up a post on using the classroom computers. In my experience, not all of my Grade 2 students would be able to do the latter but I do like to provide this opportunity to my more capable students as they become more competent with blogging.

*Leave a comment if you have any other ideas about blogging in your classroom*

COMING IN 2010

TECH TOOLS FOR TEACHERS

I am currently collaborating with a fellow teacher, Simon Collier on a new free weekly e-mail that we will distribute throughout the year. Each week the email will feature a useful online tool or website for teachers to use in their classroom. The purpose of this email is to publicise and promote the use of ICT tools and web links to teachers who are not regularly sourcing the available information on the net.  This in turn, hopefully increasing the use of the wonderful education tools available online. The email will be suitable for both primary and secondary teachers and we will provide practical examples of how the tool or website could be integrated into the classroom curriculum.

SUBSCRIBE

We are looking for interest in providing you with the opportunity to receive this free e-mail update each week. Please  follow the link below to the sign up form if you would like to be included on our distribution list and feel free to pass this information on to friends and colleagues.

I will also post information from our email on this blog. So if you already subscribe to this blog you might not want to sign up for the email!

EMAIL SIGN UP FORM

Click on the link to sign up online:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEREZ3JkNVktU3BPUUxOVW9WYXBYVEE6MA

As I previously blogged about, I am about the embark on setting up a class blog for the third time.

Before you set up your class blog, it’s really important to think about what rules and guidelines you will put into place and make sure the students and parents are clear about these. Blogging provides an authentic opportunity to teach children about appropriate online behaviour and this aspect of blogging cannot be overlooked.

I have a page at the top of my class blog where my blogging rules and guidelines are listed. This ensures the information remains static and easily accessible all year.

These are the blogging rules and I guidelines I will establish in 2010…

• Students will only be identified by their first name.
• Posts written by students are checked by Miss McGeady before they are published on the blog.
• Posts will not include personal details about students such as addresses and family information.
• All comments submitted have to be approved by Miss McGeady before they are included on the blog.
• All students must have parental permission to post on the blog and to have their photo published on the blog.
• Parents who leave comments are asked to use their first name only so as not to identify their child.
• All students must abide by the blogging rules that we have established as a class.

I discuss these rules and guidelines regularly with the students and include them on the blogging information/permssion note that I send home to parents.

Two rules I am changing this year concern photos and search engines. Previously, I didn’t publish photos of students’ faces. This made enhancing posts with pictures quite difficult. I have decided that this year with parent permission, I will post photos of students. I believe this is very safe as long as surnames are not published.

Previously I elected not to have the 2KM Blog included in search engines such as Google. Over the past two years, I have found one of the most powerful aspects of blogging to be the global audience and connections we make with others. I believe having our blog included in search engines can only enhance these connections and provide more benefits to the students.

*Leave a comment if you have any thoughts about blogging rules and guidelines *

The school year begins here on the 1st February and for the third year, I will embark on the blogging journey with my new Grade Two class.

As my class will still be called 2KM, I have decided to keep my 2009 2KM blog and customise it to my 2010 class. If you are setting up a class blog for the first time I would recommend calling your blog something that you can reuse for several years. In 2008 I taught Grade Three and my blog was called 3KM blog. In 2009, when I began teaching Grade Two, I called my blog 2KM blog. In hindsight, if I had just called my blog “Miss McGeady’s Class” or something similar, I could have modified my original blog for every new class.

Teaching younger students, I find having a class blog as opposed to individual student blogs an excellent way to introduce students to blogging and appropriate online behaviour. There are some students, such as Riley from my 2009 class who are capable of maintaining their own individual blog although in lower primary years, this is the exception to the rule.

Throughout the past couple of years, I have learnt a lot about how to best manage a class blog and here are my thoughts on how I’ll approach this in 2010.

• Many of my students won’t know what a blog is so I will introduce them to the concept by showing them around the 2009 2KM blog and discuss new vocabulary such as post, page, dashboard, categories etc.
• A pivotal part of blogging is the interaction with others and I will try to convey this to my students. I will introduce my students to comment writing and we will compose comments as a group on some of our favourite blogs such as Mrs Yollis’ Class Blog and Mr Salsich’s Class Blog.
• Successful class blogging involves a home-school partnership. In order to introduce parents to the world of blogging I will provide them with a guide such as the one I distributed last year ”You Guide to Getting the most out of 2KM’s blog 2009“. This year I would like to encourage some homework tasks involving commenting on our or others’ blogs.
• I will begin the blogging process by writing posts myself and having students leave comments. I will then progress to writing posts as a class on the Interactive Whiteboard and writing posts with small groups. When some students become very confident with post writing, I will allow them to write posts themselves which I will check before publishing.

Next time I will write about how I will set up blogging guidelines in my class and introduce students to the world of appropriate online behaviour.

*Leave a comment if you have any thoughts on how to best set up a class blog!*

Always looking for ways to make my life more organised, I became a fan of social bookmarking a year or two ago.

In case you are unfamiliar, social bookmarking is a way of storing, organising and sharing your favourite websites. Instead of having your favourite sites listed in your Internet browser, they are stored online for access by you or others on any computer. Social bookmarking allows you to add descriptions to your saved links and tags (keywords) for ease of organisation.

For quite a while now, I have been using Delicious as my social bookmarking tool. There are a number of social bookmarking services available, although Delicious is credited with coining the term “social bookmarking” and introducing the tag system.

Up until recently, I have been happily using Delicious to store, organise and share my favourite links. With the Internet Explorer Delicious add-on, I found it so simple to store sites as I browsed the net. In addition, searching Delicious for websites often gave me more reliable results than mainstream search engines.

This was until my teacher friend Linda Yollis suggested I try Diigo. As a ex-Delicious user, she made the switch after discovering the impressive features that Diigo offers. After I “took the tour” of Diigo, I made the switch too.

Diigo has all the same features as Delicious in terms of organising, tagging and sharing sites but has additional features that make networking and organising even better. Here is a quick summary of what Diigo has to offer

• Highlighting- you can highlight parts of a site so when you revisit the site you can remember what it was that you were interested in.
• Sticky notes- when you are reading a page you can add sticky notes with your thoughts on the topic. Other Diigo users can also add to this, creating a conversation.
• Annotated links- even if your friends aren’t on Diigo, you can send them a link to a page you’ve saved, complete with highlighting and sticky note annotations.
• Sharing links- you can send your bookmarks to your blog, Facebook or Twitter very easily to increase your sharing audience.
• Searching- on Diigo you don’t have to tag perfectly because when you are searching for sites you can search URLs, full text, titles etc.
• Snapshots- you can create snapshots (thumbnail images) of your bookmarks even if the site is password protected as another way of archiving the information.
• Personal learning network – you can collaborate with others by creating groups to share sites and research with . You can also follow others and receive information on new sites they have bookmarked.

In my opinion, Delicious is a great way to begin social bookmarking however if you’re looking for more features, Diigo is the way to go. The great thing is, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. If you are using Delicious and want to make the switch, you can import all your Delicious bookmarks to Diigo and you can activate the Diigo setting to “Save to Delicious”. This means you can send your new Diigo bookmarks to Delicious automatically. This is good if you aready have people who follow your Delicious account. Enjoy!

Delicious

For a while now I have been questioning the curriculum that is seen in many primary school I.T/ICT/Technology/Computer classes. Many primary school students spend an hour each week in a computer lab learning about Office programs and the like….”how to make a PowerPoint, Word Document, Photo Story etc”.

Now that we have left the “noughties”, these sorts of skills will no longer get students very far.

I believe that students should be taught basic skills in an authentic way and the list of skills that students need to know has changed dramatically in recent times. In 2008, I was involved in creating a Scope and Sequence (list of skills) for my school’s technology curriculum. I now cringe to think of some of the stand alone “skills” I listed in this document just 18 months ago!

Granted, there are many technology teachers who are now moving beyond these “stand alone, software based” skills into the world of Web 2.0, collaboration and multimedia which is fantastic. I also believe that teaching students about technology is not the sole responsibility of the technology teacher and technology integration in the general classroom is essential.

Today I came across a fantastic blog post by Kim Cofino which basically put all these thoughts I had been brewing into words! Check it out here….

Kim suggested a list of skills that emphasise “bigger, more wider-reaching concepts like collaboration across distances, communicating ideas to multiple audiences, or creating something new using technology tools”

Some of the skills that Kim suggested included:

• knowing to hold your mouse over an icon or a link to see what it does.
• understanding that the menus for any program are at the top of the screen, that they are usually very similar, and generally what you find within them (for example: “view” usually means how you see things on the screen and that menu is found in almost every program).
• recognizing when something is lit up (or underlined) on a website, you can click on it.
• knowing that the cursor changes when held over different parts of the screen and what that means (the little arrow turning into a hand over a weblink for example, or being able to stretch out a picture when it turns into the double-sided arrow).
• using tab to move from cell to cell or box to box on forms or websites.
• being able to recognize drop-down menus – and that they hold additional features.
• understanding that right clicking on things brings up more options.

These skills are transferable across almost all computer programs and operating systems. Many of her readers also added to this list with excellent suggestions.

Reading Kim’s post has really made me think about how I’ll approach teaching my Grade Two students in 2010 as well as how I will approach my coaching of fellow staff members. As she says, it is important to make the implicit, explicit.

I also loved this cartoon that Kim included in her post! It perfectly captures the way I’ve (unsuccessfully) tried to explain to many people that I’m not an expert but just have a few strategies that I try when I’m trying to figure something out!

We’re currently on school holidays until the end of January, however it is hard to switch off completely! I received an email about Xtranormal’s new software and have been having a play around today.

I have previous blogged about the great online movie maker “Xtranormal“. Click here to read my post about it this effective and simple tool to make animated movies.

My Grade Two students loved making movies on this site, however being an online application we had a few problems with the Internet being slow etc!

Xtranormal now has a program that you can download to your computer rather than making your movies on the net. It it is a beta software called “State“.

According to the site…

STATE lets you make better movies, faster.

• Multiple actors per scene
• Multiple scenes per movie
• Audio import
• Custom camera placement
• Walking actors
• Actors and locations marketplace
• Voice recording NEW!

A cool feature of this program is that students can customise their actors’ voices with their own.

State is only available for Windows, however talk on the Xtranormal forum indicates that the Mac version may be coming soon.

The downside is, while State is free it only comes with a choice of two actors and one scene! You can pay to download “Showpaks” which are collections of actors and scenes that don’t come with the free version. The Showpaks tend to be around $40 US and give you quite a good selection of actors and scenes. I still think the program could be a useful digital storytelling tool to use in the classroom and the simplicity of it makes it ideal for younger students.

There are State tutorials on the Xtranormal website that you could go through as a class to introduce your students to the program.

Completed movies can be exported as standard movie files or shared on the web.

Here is a short video I made today with the State software.  

Trialling Xtranormal State from Kathleen McGeady on Vimeo.

My class blog has been a central part of our classroom this year for reflecting on and publishing student work while celebrating the students’ achievements in their Grade Two year.

Making global connections has been one of the most rewarding parts of the blogging experience for me and my class.

Two particularly worthwhile connections we have made are with Mr Salsich’s Class Blog in Connecticut, USA and Mrs Yollis’ Class Blog in California, USA. Check them out and  leave them a comment!

While the global world can seem like an abstract concept for 7 and 8 year olds, connecting with others on the opposite side of the Earth have helped my students develop an understanding of the world in which they live. 

One of the most rewarding experiences my students had this year was when we skyped with our blogging buddies in Mrs Yollis’ class this week. Read about it here.

If you want to make your own connections, Sue Waters has compiled an excellent list of various class blogs that you can get in touch with.

Linda Yollis is also sharing her excellent knowledge of all things blogging through a wiki which she says is “a resource for teachers who are interested in starting a blog”. Check it out and sign up!

As we’re now getting into “Christmas mode” at school, here are some sites that might be useful in the primary classroom.

Primary Games has a wide range of flash style Christmas games for kids. Great to use on an IWB or classroom computer.

North Pole is a great site for kids and teachers. There are stories, games and all sorts of interactive activities. Children can even write a letter to Santa and he will reply.

Kelly Tenkely has written a post on interactive Advent calendars which would be great to use with children on an IWB on the countdown to Christmas.

Fanpop has a collection of links to 100 classic Christmas videos. Great to watch on an IWB at the end of the school year (be warned, I have found a couple that have been dubbed in foreign languages!).

Origami Club has some step-by-step animations and printable instructions for Christmas origami such as santas, reindeer, stars etc.

Leave a comment if you have any other good Christmas links.

Google Wave is the next big thing by Google that is currently released as a “preview” for people to try. It has been said to be a mix between email, wikis and instant messenger and has some excellent functions for collaboration. This short video is worth watching to get an overview of what Google Wave is all about and how you might use it.

To learn more about Google Wave check out the site here or the excellent article about it on the SLAV Bright Ideas blog.

Google Wave could be an excellent tool for global projects and collaboration in the classroom and I’m looking forward to its release!