Our Student Blog Journey. On your mark, get set, start with paper. What!?

We are on the Kidblog journey! Very soon we will each have our own live blogs. This was the plan all along but the plan was quickly put into motion when we had a few students head off on vacation after Christmas.
Typically when students go away I send a travel journal with a few activities for them to do while they are away that they get to keep after as a vacation keepsake. This time I decided to give them the option of a paper travel journal or doing it on their kidblog. I gave them a quick how-to and they were off. You can check out their awesome travel blog posts here. Also take a look at the conversations that were generated in the comments section. Very cool.

When I introduce student blogs there are some safety and ethics conversations that need to happen first. We start with a conversation about what exactly a blog is, what all the different parts are about and what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. Much of this vocabulary is new, like posts, gadgets, commenting, global audience and digital citizenship. The children need to make the connection between what they say to someone in person and what they say to or about someone online as being the same thing. They need to understand that just because they are posting to their blog on their own doesn't mean that what they post does not affect other people. And they need to understand that unlike when they write in their notebook which stays on the shelf, when they post to their blog it is for a global audience. All of this comes with great responsibility that they need to understand and take seriously.

Next we tackle blog design. I want them to take time to think about catchy, thoughtful titles, writing posts that have purpose and make sense and the fun things like gadgets and backgrounds. I have found that they take more time with this and can focus on it better if we do it on paper first. They create a paper blog, doing the fun design parts first, and then will write and edit their first blog post on paper. We discuss the elements and process expected for writing a quality blog post. Once that is complete we will discuss and create criteria for quality commenting and use sticky notes to leave comments on each others paper blogs.

It may sound like a drawn out process but I feel very strongly about the teaching that needs to take place around digital citizenship and using social media responsibly. In this day and age, we need to take online safety, responsibility and respect as seriously as we do in our classrooms and hallways.

I have adapted some of these ideas from @pernilleripp.

Brilliant Children

You know those moments when a young person just amazes you? We had that today.

Yesterday afternoon I was at a meeting for all the early years technology coordinators in our school division. One of the teachers shared a few links she thought were neat. There was one that I thought would be cool to try with our class and we happened to have computer today so I decided to go for it. I spent about 5 minutes or less showing the kids the basics. Click here, type your name, pick some of these and go! This is when the magic happened. They thought it was a neat website and jumped right in. Every single student in our class created a story with actions, characters and more than one page! Some added in extra details, some focused on the actions, all of it was awesome. As our time came to an end I was bombarded with proud requests like:
"How do I keep it?"
"Can you send this to my parents?"
"I want to  make another one!"
"I want to keep adding more sentences!"
Yes please! We will definitely keep exploring this one! This time we were trying it out, the students hadn't done any pre-planning about their story. Another time I will have them plan out a beginning, middle and end before creating. But sometimes it's fun to jump right in and play first.

I managed to grab a few samples to share. You can check them out by going to this link and using any of these codes:
LPP697 (Adam's story)
NWE077 (Kaz's story)
AUP417 (Alexis' story)
ADM774 (Anthony's story)
SDT043 (my story)

Lots of New Books!

Well, not really lots of new books but it seems that way! Lately, many of our students have been discovering new books and authors that they love. The best part is that they are talking about these new books they love and the demand for them is spreading like wild fire! I must say, I am very happy to see something other than "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" floating around here!
We were talking at the end of the day about how we could share our new titles with our virtual audience using a web tool. A simple blog post is fine but a list we could add to continuously with our favourites is even better. As we were scrolling through the blog looking for a tool we had used in the past that would work for this, there it was, at the bottom of our page - our Shelfari! Of course! What better way than our Shelfari!
Mrs. Tresoor and I have been scheming about some "not a boring book report" tasks the kids could do when they are finished reading a book. I found this blog post that got me thinking about the cool ways students could respond to their reading. We want our students to be more accountable for what they are reading. We also want them to share what they are reading with their peers, just like they have been today, because we know how powerful peer opinion is when it comes to choosing a book. We both started with a "Now I am Reading..." chart in the room where students put a sticky note of the book they are reading. When they finish it, they give me that sticky note and put a new one with their title. Today alone, 11 sticky noes were handed in for new ones! Awesome.



The pile of sticky notes from TODAY alone!

 One of the "not a boring book report" tasks we have been planning to introduce was to write a book review on Shelfari (or chapters.ca or amazon.ca etc). Previously I have used our Shelfari myself, adding books that I read with my students, that my students read, that I read professionally and personally. This is probably why it sits there at the bottom of our blog, lonely and ignored. Now that I have used it with my students, they are more aware of it and will be much more likely to scroll allllll the way down there!
You can check out our Shelfari by scrolling down, all the way down (perhaps I should move it???) to the bottom of our blog. Or, you can click here. You will notice not all the books are children's books. I also post some of the personal reading I do here. I think it is important for my students to see me as a reader and see the books that I read when I am at home.
Stay tuned for the book reviews coming soon to our Shelfari!

Publishing Tools

Just as we are getting back at it, 2 great links came my way via my Twitter network. Both relate to some great new ways to publish student work that we are going to look at this term. These come from GlennW and Mrs Ripp. You can check out their full posts by clicking their names. Some of the most exciting ones in my eyes include:

• Flipsnack - A free site with Premium features, Flipsnack will quickly convert uploaded PDF documents into a cool virtual magazine with flipping pages and it’s easy enough for even adults to figure out. You can view and share the online version in a variety of ways including Facebook, Twitter and html embed codes.
• Issuu - Issuu is another tool that kids can use to upload almost any document format and create a virtual flipping book. Like Flipsnack, you can share or embed whatever you upload.

Mrs. Ripp's post was about alternatives to a "book report" and more interesting ways students can be accountable for their reading:

• Blog about your book; reflect, ask questions, see if others have read it.
• Create a wordle about the word associations you had with the book
• Sell the book to your classmates, how can you get them to read it - written or oral - try this even if you did not like the book, can you still convince others?
• Write a letter/email to the author (even if no longer alive). Tell them what you thought of their book.
• Create a VoiceThread discussing your book's message.
• Pretend you are the author on a Voki and tell us about your newest project.
• Use Shelfari to post the book and then explain why you chose to post it.

A Proud Teacher and Welcome 2012!

Welcome to 2012! We all had a fanatstic break that came just in time. Yesterday we talked a little through the day about the good things that happened over the holidays. In some cases, I already knew what had happened for my students because they blogged about it over the holidays :) Nothing could have made me more proud and satisfied than to see my students wanting to write about authentic life experiences on their holidays! This makes the time and effort that goes to setting up and maintaining tools like student blogs worth it. Yesterday we got another surprise when Mason put through a post about his trip to Palm Springs. It was a surprise because I didn't know he was away but more so because he made an Animoto of his trip! Another proud moment because he is a) blogging on vacation, and b) using a tool (Animoto) that I have shown him but not necessarily used with him. He remembered it and figured it out on his own.

My holidays were fantastic, so much happened! I love it when Christmas is right at the beginning of the break because it leaves a whole 2 weeks for travel, visits and projects. This year it was visits and projects. At our house we are doing a big renovation and our whole main floor has been gutted! This means no kitchen and no bathroom, yikes! I was also able to spend time with my 4 nieces and nephews from Kenora snowmobiling, skiing, skating and at the circus (at the Manitoba Museum). Mixed in with all of this were some visits with friends and quiet mornings (away from the renos) with my new Steve Jobs book. It was great to come back to school feeling refreshed and ready to get going with some new ideas.

Have a great 2012!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Bird's Hill School Me to We Club

Today a group of kids from our Me to We Club were invited to attend the Media Literacy Week kickoff event at the Manitoba Museum. The theme of Media Literacy Week this year is Digital Citizenship and how we can use digital media with children in a positive way, how we can use digital media to make the world a better place and to create change.
You can see more about our Me to We Club and our video presentation from today at our BHSFreetheChildren blog.
Here we are being interviewed by CBC!



-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

The Faces of Five

I just added a photo to the right side bar of our blog. Since it is a little hard to see, I am posting it here as well. I made this using a very cool tool called Shape Collage which is exactly what it sounds like. A shape that is a collage of photos!
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

We Went to Fort Whyte...

As we mentioned a couple of days ago, we went to Fort Whyte. It was fantastic! We decided to use Voki to share what we saw, what we learned and what we did while we were at Fort Whyte. This activity was a blast!
When we got back to school, we brainstormed our ideas and took a photo of it with our iPods so we could save the ideas for the next day. When we were ready to write, each table had an iPod to reference the brainstorm session. We wrote our reflections in our Writer's Notebooks and made sure to include what we saw, what we learned and what we did at Fort Whyte. Each of us recorded our reflection using a digital voice recorder, created our avatar on Voki and uploaded our reflection.

Here is a sample of how it turned out!





Click on your name to see your Fort Whyte Voki.
Anna, Brayden, Noah, Brody, Matthew, Taylor T, Taylor P, Alyssa S, Alyssa P, Hailey, Haley, Cole, Carter Y, Carter F, Jayden, Madison, Morgun, Brooke, Keanna, Araya.

Caterpillars

Just in case you missed it, we got our caterpillars last week! We have a whole page on our blog about the growth and changes we see in our caterpillars. The tabs for our pages are along the top of the blog, below the title, "Mrs. Dent Scarcello's Class". Just click on the tab that says "Butterflies" and you can see them grow with us!
As we watch them grow we keep our observations in a Butterfly Observation Journal. We have also been talking about the butterfly life cycle, metamorphosis. Today, we made the life cycle using Kidspiration. Here is a sample from Madison.

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Baby Eagles

Mrs. Malkoske's class left us a comment with questions on our Growth and Changes blog post. One question was "when do you think the eagles will leave their nest?" We answered their question but we were really just guessing an answer. Some of us thought they would stay for 1 or 2 more weeks and some of us thought they would stay for 1 or 2 more months. We started talking about how scientists make educated guesses and decided that we should look further into this to make a more educated guess. Some suggestions from our class were to:

• "google it"
• "bing it"
• look it up on wikipedia
• look in a book
• ask somebody

We looked it up on google and found that the bald eagle will stay in it's nest for 11 or 12 weeks before it can fly away. We also found out that the eagle is in it's egg for 35 days before it hatches. Since we don't know when these eagles were born we don't know exactly when they will leave the nest. We have been watching them for 2 weeks so at the most they will be in the nest for another 8 - 10 weeks.
Phewf, thanks for the question Mrs. Malkoske's Class, you really got us thinking after lunch! We are also looking forward to following the Peregrine Falcons who live in a nest at a hotel in Winnipeg. This webcam is set to start streaming tomorrow at http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/falcon/.

This is a map with the locations of the animal cams we are following.

View Animal Cam Locations in a larger map
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello's Class :)