I've chatted with a few people about the power of Twitter as an ongoing personalised PD platform, and the incredible network of inspiring educators you can connect & share with on there.
I've compiled an annotated list of resources to help you get started if it's something you're keen to explore.
Find the list here.
Showing posts with label Communicating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communicating. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 May 2015
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Launching a Class Blog
It sounds like a big deal, but it's not.
It sounds like it'll require a ton of new skills to learn, but it won't.
Every class I walk past is already doing a pile of things that could very easily move on to a class blog, meaning the habits & behaviours to support it already exist.
The key things to remember before you even begin to think about the tools & techniques are the simple ones that come naturally to us as educators.
People, and communication.
With that as our focus, where to begin? The platform's easy - both major blog platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) work more or less the same way, and they're free to join. If you've ever written text on a computer before, you've already learned the controls. We can catch up after school early in the term and lock it down in a few minutes. We'll look at organisation in a minute, but let's look at the more important part first.
It's a place where you can document classroom activity, and share ideas & resources with your students. It's also (and probably more importantly) somewhere to allow students to interact online. This is important because they are going to interact online anyway. If their first experience of it is lying about their age around Year 4 to create a Facebook account, we've all seen how well that usually turns out.
What if their first experience of it was documenting a science project in Kindy? A wise voice guiding how they word their posts together? An actual face-to-face conversation about how to choose photos to accompany the post? Photos that show what they'd created, rather than just what the kids themselves look like? Opportunities to share their own little voices, but in a supervised, moderated way that contributes to an online community that's very deliberately positive, constructive, and purposeful? How are those children going to approach independent online activity as they get older? Will they be as hot-headed and haphazard as the first group of kids I described?
This is where they need structure and guidance. Being social and interactive in electronic places is 99.9% ethics, critical thinking & social skills. What's left is the technology. Ignore it, it gets easier to use all the time. This post here by educator Kim Cofino when she was the Digital Literacies Facilitator at the International School of Bangkok is a brilliant starting point for some guidelines for blog use in schools - both for posting and commenting. Take it, share it, tip your hat to Kim, and modify it to best suit your school and your class.
The best place to begin is to decide on how you want the people around you to communicate. Pick something that you can do by habit. Maybe you'll post your class plan for the following day with relevant materials linked every afternoon so kids and parents can be prepared every day. Maybe you'll take some time at the end of every week to reflect on what you've learned as a class. Maybe you'll share & follow an important news story each week, and open it to discussion.
Also pick a project to document. Something that can evolve over time, and that will benefit from being visible. Growing something in science? Building something in Art? Shaping & forming narrative?
At the end of the day, what this can do for you is make the learning in your class visible, enable communication & collaboration, and save you time. The trick is using it to replace things you're already doing, rather than add them on top.
It sounds like it'll require a ton of new skills to learn, but it won't.
Every class I walk past is already doing a pile of things that could very easily move on to a class blog, meaning the habits & behaviours to support it already exist.
The key things to remember before you even begin to think about the tools & techniques are the simple ones that come naturally to us as educators.
People, and communication.
With that as our focus, where to begin? The platform's easy - both major blog platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) work more or less the same way, and they're free to join. If you've ever written text on a computer before, you've already learned the controls. We can catch up after school early in the term and lock it down in a few minutes. We'll look at organisation in a minute, but let's look at the more important part first.
People.
This blog can become the online extension of your classroom. It has the power to eliminate that single most frustrating conversation between children and their parents - "what did you do at school today?" "...nothing."It's a place where you can document classroom activity, and share ideas & resources with your students. It's also (and probably more importantly) somewhere to allow students to interact online. This is important because they are going to interact online anyway. If their first experience of it is lying about their age around Year 4 to create a Facebook account, we've all seen how well that usually turns out.
What if their first experience of it was documenting a science project in Kindy? A wise voice guiding how they word their posts together? An actual face-to-face conversation about how to choose photos to accompany the post? Photos that show what they'd created, rather than just what the kids themselves look like? Opportunities to share their own little voices, but in a supervised, moderated way that contributes to an online community that's very deliberately positive, constructive, and purposeful? How are those children going to approach independent online activity as they get older? Will they be as hot-headed and haphazard as the first group of kids I described?
This is where they need structure and guidance. Being social and interactive in electronic places is 99.9% ethics, critical thinking & social skills. What's left is the technology. Ignore it, it gets easier to use all the time. This post here by educator Kim Cofino when she was the Digital Literacies Facilitator at the International School of Bangkok is a brilliant starting point for some guidelines for blog use in schools - both for posting and commenting. Take it, share it, tip your hat to Kim, and modify it to best suit your school and your class.
Communication.
Think about the amount of communication you do daily. Communication with your students - verbally, visually, and through sharing. Communication with parents. Pragmatic stuff, purpose-driven stuff, interesting stuff, fun stuff. Why not bring that all to one central channel? Organise what you post into little categories to keep it neat, but otherwise it's a one-stop shop. It'll time and date stamp everything for you, which makes record keeping much easier.The best place to begin is to decide on how you want the people around you to communicate. Pick something that you can do by habit. Maybe you'll post your class plan for the following day with relevant materials linked every afternoon so kids and parents can be prepared every day. Maybe you'll take some time at the end of every week to reflect on what you've learned as a class. Maybe you'll share & follow an important news story each week, and open it to discussion.
Also pick a project to document. Something that can evolve over time, and that will benefit from being visible. Growing something in science? Building something in Art? Shaping & forming narrative?
At the end of the day, what this can do for you is make the learning in your class visible, enable communication & collaboration, and save you time. The trick is using it to replace things you're already doing, rather than add them on top.
Attach Yourself to People, Not Apps
A quick share today.
I've chatted a little bit with the staff I'm working with directly about the power and importance of building a professional network online. It broadens and diversifies the expertise you can access, and is a brilliant way to find colleagues with similar professional interests worldwide.
Rebekah Madrid (@ndbekah) from the Yokohama International School posted a wonderful little article this week about the importance of focusing on those human connections, not the apps we use in the between-spaces.
If you missed it in-line above, here's the link.
I've chatted a little bit with the staff I'm working with directly about the power and importance of building a professional network online. It broadens and diversifies the expertise you can access, and is a brilliant way to find colleagues with similar professional interests worldwide.
Rebekah Madrid (@ndbekah) from the Yokohama International School posted a wonderful little article this week about the importance of focusing on those human connections, not the apps we use in the between-spaces.
If you missed it in-line above, here's the link.
Friday, 6 February 2015
Welcome!
Hello Dalmain team!
I'm Joel Birch from Winthrop Australia. I'm here every second Thursday (the even-numbered weeks of term) to help you work with technology for the learning that happens in your classrooms. This blog is here to serve a couple of purposes - firstly, to document what we get up to with the people I work with face-to-face, and secondly so I can share other useful bits and pieces with you. This way, everyone benefits.
This can take the shape of helping plan & execute some activities & projects with your kids handling tech, boosting your own skill in making & managing things with your computer & web spaces, setting up and running an online presence to build links outside your classroom, and ideally a mix of all three.
My focus isn't iPads, apps, Smartboards, or computers. My focus is on teaching & learning. I talk verbs first, and tools second. Thinking about how you use tech in this way makes sure that whatever you end up doing in your classroom is enabled by technology, not centred around it.
So that we can hit the ground running on Thursday, we'll need to get some planning locked and loaded. Below are a series of links to planning documents for the first batch of staff. We can fill them out together over the course of the next few days.
Laura
Kaylie
Emma
Peter
Olivia
Suzanne
I'm Joel Birch from Winthrop Australia. I'm here every second Thursday (the even-numbered weeks of term) to help you work with technology for the learning that happens in your classrooms. This blog is here to serve a couple of purposes - firstly, to document what we get up to with the people I work with face-to-face, and secondly so I can share other useful bits and pieces with you. This way, everyone benefits.
This can take the shape of helping plan & execute some activities & projects with your kids handling tech, boosting your own skill in making & managing things with your computer & web spaces, setting up and running an online presence to build links outside your classroom, and ideally a mix of all three.
My focus isn't iPads, apps, Smartboards, or computers. My focus is on teaching & learning. I talk verbs first, and tools second. Thinking about how you use tech in this way makes sure that whatever you end up doing in your classroom is enabled by technology, not centred around it.
So that we can hit the ground running on Thursday, we'll need to get some planning locked and loaded. Below are a series of links to planning documents for the first batch of staff. We can fill them out together over the course of the next few days.
Laura
Kaylie
Emma
Peter
Olivia
Suzanne
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