always learning

It’s that time of year again. The time when all fifth graders start worrying about moving up to sixth grade. The transition from top of the elementary school to bottom of the middle school is not an easy one to make, as I so clearly remember.

So, as part of our CoETaIL course 2, Chrissy, Diane and I have developed a fun, quick and simple project to help ease the transition to middle school for our grade fives. Last year Diane and I did a very similar project with her ESL students and it was a huge hit!

One important facet of the project is to realize that all fifth graders around the world are going through the same challenges, so, as one aspect of the project, we have created a very simple VoiceThread (and wiki) and would love to have other students contribute and share their concerns:

We would absolutely love it if you and your students would be willing to share their thoughts about moving on to sixth grade with us! If you’re interested, please add your info here or leave a comment on this post and we’ll contact you directly.

There are a few things I particularly love about this project

• The emphasis on natural conversation, which is really difficult for grade 5 students when working from a script and recording themselves (as you can hear when listening to our excellent, but very scripted grade 5 podcasts).
• The focus on bringing in our students’ individual cultures and personal experiences by asking them to reflect on a specific inspirational saying in their first language. I have this vision of the conversation our students are having with their parents when they ask them about inspirational sayings and how this can help them deal with the challenges they might face in life.
• The looks on the students faces when they realize kids all around the world have the same concerns as they do, that we’re all the same in so many ways.

Just in case you’re interested, here’s our UbD unit planner for grade 5 core classroom and ESL pull-out:

Established Goals

ESL specific

• Extend oral language through conversation
• Build confidence with oral language, especially in a conversational format

Grade 5

• Retain natural fluency during presentations and/or recording
• Build confidence to engage in spontaneous dialogue based on focused topics

Both

• Develop and uncover strategies to cope with life changes, through the lens of transitioning to sixth grade

Enduring Understandings

• Conversational language is crucial to efficient and clear communication
• Conversational dialogue requires all participants to be responsive
• We all have cultural teachings to draw upon when facing difficult situations

Essential Questions

• Why is conversational language important to communication?
• How can we improve our conversational language?
• How can the words of wise people help us discover changes we can make within ourselves?

GRASPS Task

Goal: You will produce a podcast that showcases strategies, teachings, inspirational sayings and experiences to help fifth grade students succeed in sixth grade around the world.

Role: You will work in teams to research, author, record and broadcast your podcast

Audience: Students moving on around the world though iTunes, class blog, and the internet.

Situation: You are moving on to sixth grade and need a variety of strategies, teachings, inspirational sayings and experiences that will help you succeed.

Product Performance: Your podcast will be posted on the class blog and on iTunes. A successful podcast will include:

• Strong, clear speaking voice
• Modulated voice with emotion and emphasis
• Teachings or inspirational sayings that can directly provide guidance for students transitioning to sixth grade
• 3 strategies linked to an experience that sixth graders will have designed to help fifth graders succeed
• A written script with proper grammar
• Engaging language, intro & outro, and audio enhancements.

Extension:

• Video podcast
• Adding still images to the podcast
• Personal podcast

Six Facets of Understanding

Explain: After completing a self-assessment of your oral language (through GB recording), explain which areas you, personally, need to improve upon, why and how you will you have improved.

Interpret: Share an inspirational saying via the class blog (in translation if not in English) and describe a personal experience when this saying was beneficial. Sayings could include personal images, or audio recordings.

Apply: Collaborate with partner classes around the world to produce a VoiceThread describing the challenges and opportunities of moving on, as well as find commonalities among all students.

Perspective: Listen to a “real” podcast or book about a life change (anything that can be found and is appropriate). Discuss as a class, or in partners, how the broadcaster or author coped with the change using strategies, inspirational sayings or teachings.

Self-Knowledge: Personal Action Plan: Begin with a personal reflection of a similar experience to determine your successful coping strategies, develop an action plan to put those strategies, along with the new ones learned during this unit, into practice next year.

Empathize: In partners, role-play the first day of school – one person is the teacher, one is the student. Reflect on the experience with your partner.

Final Thoughts

We would love for you to join us in this project! Please feel free to leave a comment here or add your school to the wiki. We’ll be working on the VoiceThread during the last week of May, but please feel free to add your comments whenever you’re ready!

Here at ISB we use the Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop model of literacy instruction. We have been fortunate to have the wonderful Maggie Moon consult with us on a regular basis over the last two year.

One of the best things about working with Maggie is that she is open-minded about what literacy can mean and how to ensure we meet the needs of our students in today’s world. Last year we started on a path to define digital literacy and to see how we can fit (at least some) aspects of digital literacy into the Workshop model (which does not reference anything beyond the traditional view of reading and writing).

This year, with the addition of Jeff and Tara, we are continuing to push forward and have begun to develop a full Writer’s Workshop unit focused on digital literacy. Our plan is to implement this unit in September of 2009 in grade 5, with Tara, Jeff and I co-teaching in our 7 grade 5 classrooms (that’s going to be an interesting logistical nightmare, since they all teach Writer’s Workshop at the same time and there’s only 3 of us and 7 of them…)

We are only in the initial stages of the planning process, following the Understanding by Design format, and I would love to get some feedback from you!

Here’s what we’ve got so far (we’re using a Google Doc, so planning updates can be found here):

Personal Narrative with Blogging

Enduring Understandings

Students will begin to understand:

1. Purpose and audience for communication determine the appropriate media choice.
2. Design and layout impact the quality and effectiveness of communications.
3. reflect on, organize, analyze, interpret, and synthesize information effectively communicate and create ideas.

Students will begin to understand:

1. Writers attempt to have a story unfold in a show, not tell, fashion through well-chosen details that make a story come alive

Essential Questions

How do I effectively communicate?

GRASPS Task (still working on the wording here, essential the entire blog will be the task)

Build Understanding Through the 6 Facets:

Explain: Reflective blog post: After collecting entries: try various stories to see how it goes – select a story and improve it, why did you choose this story?

Interpret: personal narrative practice, once you’ve selected your story, what is this story really about?

Have Self-Knowledge: Author’s message – the way you write and present the story shows the significance of the story to the reader. Reflective writing after – why did you write this story this way, how does it reflect you? What was challenging for you? What do you understand about yourself from writing this?

Have Perspective: Reflection: who is your audience, why/how would you change this story for a different audience (how do you change the way you write based on your audience?) – during revision, write the same story for a different audience – how do you change your writing for different audiences.

Empathize: after the blog post is up, how do you respond via the comments (to something that you don’t have a connection with).

Apply: Design your blog post for your audience, choosing images, paragraph spacing, headings, etc (choosing an image that shows depth and connects to your post)

Practical:

• Allow students the choice to either write in Writer’s Notebook first or directly on the computer
• Have students write in MS Word before posting online (to avoid technical issues)

Mini-lessons:

• Teacher models same sort of writing as the students are doing. Write a portion of personal narrative and then show how you would change it for a different audience. Give students the choice of who their new audience is.
• What does good blogging look like? (synthesis, analysis – not just copy and paste)
• Students link to other sites in his/her writing (for example, if you snorkeled on Phuket, link to a Phuket site)
• Students reflect on why he or she is choosing this piece of writing.
• Commenting and how to make it constructive. Set a minimum expectation of how many comments a student must write on someone else’s writing.
• Students incorporate comments from others and make revisions to his/her own writing based on these.
• Final reflective blog post linking back to prior drafts, comments by their audience that helped change their minds, and reflect on how the interaction with their audience helped improve their writing.
• Choosing and inserting an image, citing sources for images

Timeline:

First 8 instructional days: brainstorming in the writer’s notebook, across those 8 days, choose 2-3 stories to post on the blog (reflect online why they chose those three) – these posts should be in draft form, then students will choose 1 to stick with and take through the writing process (reflect online why they chose the final story)

Final Thoughts

One of the reasons we’re doing this as a discrete unit is so that teachers can see how it will fit within the Writer’s Workshop model. We’re hoping to do it early in the year so that teachers and students can take advantage of this new model of writing throughout the year. Personally, I hope we’ll end up using these blogs as ePortfolios by the end of the year, but I don’t know if that will happen.

What do you think? How does this look? What are we missing? What needs to be revised?

Three of our wonderful grade 5 classrooms (Chrissy, Robin and Ali) have been collaborating all year on a Reader’s and Writer’s workshop project with 4 other schools around the world.

We initially made the connection because we were looking for a meaningful, year-long, collaboration based on our curricular focus for the year (Reader’s Workshop). Luckily, we were able to find four schools using the same curriculum structure to teach reading and writing.

We started the year (and the project) by sharing student writing and reading and commenting on each other’s blog posts. However, one of our major goals for the project was to develop a weekly, entirely student-produced, podcast focused on reading strategies called Students Teaching Students.

Considering none of us here at ISB have ever done a regular podcast with students, we knew it might take a while to get it off the ground, but we wanted to make sure it was meaningful, appropriate, and authentic use of the technology to enhance our curricular goals.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve finally gotten the podcasting part of the project off the ground. It was surprisingly easy!

Here’s what we did to get started:

Chrissy, Robin, Ali and I spent some time brainstorming the steps that students would need to go through to produce a thoughtful podcast on a weekly basis – and how to make it practical within our laptop cart teaching environment.

We decided that we would use our student book club groups for the current Historical Fiction unit as the podcasting groups. Each week one group would produce a podcast during Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop time. To help ensure they are able to produce their podcast independently, we provided a checklist of steps.

Once we had the process organized, we introduced the idea to the students over two lessons.

During the first lesson we listened to a sample podcast (I chose a language-learning podcast so that students would be able to focus on the introduction and the features of the podcast instead of the content).

As we listened, students were asked to think about the different features of the podcast. They then brainstormed in teams what makes a good podcast. We came up with this list:

• Exciting, catchy, but short, musical introduction.
• Music is quiet while speaking.
• Clear introduction of each speaker, all guests, the “big idea” of the podcast, this episode number & title, and the topic of this episode.
• The speaker uses enthusiasm and excitement in their loud, clear voice.
• Use first names only.
• The show should sound like a conversation between podcasters.
• Keep it interesting for the listener.
• Stay focused (when writing your script & when recording).
• Everyone in the group needs to have a speaking part in the script.

Once we had an idea of what a good podcast sounds like, we talked about the quality of the intro and outro music. Students were given the challenge of creating their own intro and outro music for the entire class’ podcast based on the criteria we brainstormed:

• catchy
• calm – not distracting
• not too loud
• fades out at the end
• fast-ish to get listeners excited
• include a catch phrase (optional)
• relate to our topic – gives a feeling for our topic
• less than 30 seconds (including any catch phrases)

They spent about 30 minutes using Garage Band (which they had previously learned about in music class thanks to another fantastic teacher, Vince) creating either an intro or an outro (in small teams or individually). At the end of the lesson, we voted on which songs would be used for the entire class.

Once we had our music for our class podcast, we were ready to practice creating a podcast to learn how the different tools work and to go through the process of brainstorming an idea, writing a script, producing a podcast, and exporting the file into proper format.

We spent an entire language arts block (1.5 hours) going through the process, following the checklist. Here’s how we broke it down:

15 minutes to brainstorm an idea for the podcast. All groups had to create a podcast for students learning how to be a better reader using the different Reader’s Workshop Strategies they had learned that week. Once they chose a strategy, they had to be able to explain it and share how it helped them read their current book.

45 minutes to write a script following this basic outline which we brainstormed and agreed upon at the beginning of the lesson:

• Welcome to Room 229’s Historical Fiction Podcast Series
• Episode Title: This is Episode 1
• This episode is brought to you by:
• Introduction of podcast (what is this podcast about for first time listeners)
• Introduction of cast (speakers)
• Introduce the book (or series of books) you’re reading
• Introduce the Reader’s Strategy that you’re going to be talking about
• Describe the strategy
• Explain how you used the strategy to help you read this book
• Share examples
• Closing
• Looking forward to learning with you next week

20 minutes to record their podcast (no editing due to time constraints).

At the end of the lesson, we listened to all the trial podcasts to share constructive feedback for each group.

I was very impressed with the quality of podcasts that the students were able to produce in such a short time frame, especially for their very first experience!

Since this trial run, student podcasts have been produced in small groups, one group per week, during the Reader’s Workshop time. We even decided to create our own channel on iTunes to share our podcasts with our global partners (and anyone else who’s interested in Reader’s Workshop strategies)!

Overall, this was a surprisingly easy project to put into place. I’m always a little intimidated and nervous when I try something new, but this ended up being even easier than I expected. Garage Band is so easy to use, the students were so excited to share their learning, the book groups were such a natural fit for creating podcasts, and uploading the files to a podcasting host (G-cast) and then creating the iTunes channel were a breeze!

Although we’ve only really just gotten started, I can already see how powerful this process will be for our students. Since I’m a newbie at podcasting, what else should we be doing?

When I arrived at ISB last year, one of the first major projects I started with two of our wonderful grade 5 teachers was student blogging (um, and did I mention that we started blogging at the same time as participating in Chris Craft’s Life ‘Round Here digital storytelling project?). I had come from a middle school position where every student in the school (grades six – eight) had their own individual student blog and was ready to continue that experience here.

What I didn’t know was that none of the teachers or students really had any experience blogging prior to my arrival (oops!). So, while they (both the teachers and the students) were absolutely fantastic at going with the flow and experimenting, I realized quite quickly that individual student blogs may not be the appropriate “first step” into the world of web 2.0 – especially at the elementary level.

So, over the course of last year I started to figure out an easier, more approachable, entry into participatory writing and reading online. I started with a grade 3 class, whose teacher, Betsy, was so flexible and ready to learn with me that we had so much fun getting this started with her students.

One of the major features of this smoother entry into blogging was having just one class blog that all students can contribute to. Instead of setting up each student with their own blog, they can all have their own username and password (which they love) to author individual posts on one class blog. Being able to leverage one free G-mail account to create individual accounts for each student was a huge step forward for us as well – taking away the need for student e-mail is definitely a huge stress-reliever (for both the teacher and the parents). Finally, adding a global component and pre-organized authentic audience really helped make our student writing purposeful.

After that much more successful, and far less stressful, experience with Betsy’s class, I knew it wouldn’t be long before another teacher wanted to try something similar. And, just as I expected, my amazingly collaborative colleague, Sonja, approached me at the very beginning of this year to start a reading and writing project with her grade 4 students.

We started off much the same as last year’s grade 3 class, with one important difference: we focused on the importance of quality commenting before we gave the students their usernames and passwords for the class blog. We spent several lessons exploring our blogging buddies blogs, learning how to write an appropriate and fair comment, and building our understanding of blogging as conversation.

Interestingly, as soon as this class got started with their collaborative blog, more and more teachers have been asking me to help them set up a blog with their class. Just this week, I helped another fourth grade teacher, Kristen, set up her class blog and was amazed at how quickly her students were able to pick up the basics. At this point, I’ve got the introduction to blogging organized into five lessons (slightly revamped from last year’s version):

Lesson One:

For our first lesson we spent some time examining other quality blogs, looking mostly at Anne Davis’ excellent Blogging: It’s Elementary WebQuest (just for the blog links, mostly). Each table group had a chance to look at one of the blogs listed on the process page and followed a Visible Thinking routine called: See, Think, Wonder. Each time we had a focused discussion at the table groups (starting with the question: What do you see?) we came back to the full-class and shared our observations, thoughts and wonderings. This was a great way to help students understand the basics of a blog and the concept of blogging as writing.

At the end of this first lesson we developed a list of things we know about blogs:

• Blogging is free
• People can leave comments on a blog post
• People can see other people’s comments on a blog post
• If you are the author of a blog, you can edit or delete anything on the blog as long as you have the correct username and password
• A lot of blogs have things in common: pictures, comments, links, dates, archives, calendar, videos, opinions, recent posts, author’s name, conversations
• A blog is like a website EXCEPT that blogs invite conversation, opinions and ideas while websites usually just tell their ideas without any feedback
• Even though many blogs have the same features, they have different information
• Authors put links on their blog because they think their readers will like them
• Blogging is like a conversation with other people – some people you might know, some people you might not know
• Bloggers want their reader’s opinions
• Everyone in the world can see our blog
• Blogging is reading and writing

Lesson Two:

For our second and third lessons, we watched two public service announcements from the US. We start with a PSA called the Bulletin Board to focus on online safety:

We watch the video all the way through once, then have a “turn and talk” moment to see what we understand about the video after the first viewing. Next we watch the video very slowly, stopping at every event to check for understanding. Again we have a “turn and talk” moment for students to share their revised understanding. Finally, we watch the video all the way through and share what we’ve learned. We start creating a class list of questions we can ask ourselves before we post and things to remember about staying safe online, which will be finished after watching the second video during lesson 3.

Lesson 3:

This lesson focuses on responsible behavior and discussion is prompted by the PSA called The Talent Show:

We follow the same procedure as the second lesson, watching once all the way through, then stopping to ensure understanding and finishing with a full run through. At the end of this lesson, we complete our class list of questions to ask ourselves before we post anything online. Here is what grade 4 developed:

• How will this affect my reputation (what people think of me)?
• What will my friends or family think about me after they read (or see) this post?
• Could someone find me (in real life) based on this information?
• Who is going to look at this, and how are they going to interpret my words?
• Is this inappropriate, immature or bullying?
• Could I hurt someone else’s feelings with this post?
• Would I say this to the person’s face?
• What could be the consequences of this post?
• What will I cause by writing this post? Be culturally sensitive.
• Would I want someone to say this to me?
• Do I have a good reason/purpose to do this?
• Is this something I want everyone to see?

We also make a quick list of safety and responsibility tips to help us remember to follow the blogging guidelines outlined in our permission slip. Here is what grade 4 came up with:

• Only post things that you would want everyone (in school, at home, in other countries) to know
• Think about the future – what will people think a few days, weeks, months from now, if they read your post;
• Don’t share personal information like: last name, mom’s maiden name, address, telephone number, password, birthdate, username, passport information, license plate number, picture of your face, full name of yourself or your friends
• Choose a complicated password for others, but easy for you to remember
• Think before you post
• Use only your first or an avatar (made up name that represents you)
• Don’t talk to strangers. Get a parent or an older brother or sister to help you.
• Only say nice things about other people.
• Treat other people the way you want to be treated.
• If you think you will regret it, don’t post it
• If you wouldn’t say it to a person’s face, do not post it online
• Use appropriate language and good grammar and spelling
• Think about your readers feelings (embarrassing) when you post online
• Be culturally sensitive
• Only post things that you can verify are true (no gossiping)

Lesson 4:

We usually model the process of writing a good comment, and then create a comment as a piece of shared writing with the class. After this process we develop our own list of quality comment characteristics. Here is what one grade 4 class came up with:

• Constructive, but not hurtful
• Think about the author and their purpose for their post before leaving a comment
• Comments are always related to the content of the post
• Personal connections to what the author wrote
• Answer a question, or add meaningful information to the content topic
• Follows the writing process – it’s like a mini piece of writing.
• Use a comment sandwich: start with a positive, add  constructive feedback, then finish with a positive.
• Make your comment sandwich thick and tasty! Lots of meaningful, meaty thoughts that relate directly the content of the post to keep the blogger satisfied!

I love the idea of creating a comment sandwich – having the visual for the students has been extremely powerful, and focusing on commenting as part of the writing process has improved their commenting considerably (not as many “good job” posts as we had last year).

Lesson 5:

Once students are comfortable with the process of leaving meaningful comments, and have returned their parental permission slip, we introduce them to the actual process of writing blog posts. The basics of logging in, creating a new post, putting your post in the category for your name, and submitting for review. Usually we have the first post be a short introduction to the student.

I love the fact that having a category for each student makes it appear as if each student has their own blog (by listing the name categories in the sidebar) and that no posts will be published until the teacher can approve them after moderation. Such an easy and safe way to begin blogging!

That’s it! That’s how we’re starting to set up class blogs in grades 4 and 5 at ISB. So far we have 6 different classes set up:

• Merrellzone, grade 4
• 220 Thinkers, grade 4
• Room 202’s Blog, grade 5
• Room 227’s Blog, grade 5
• Room 229’s Blog, grade 5
• Denby Espanol, grade 5 Spanish

I’m sure this is just the beginning! Most of these classes have already decided that if and when students are ready, they will be given the option to have their own individual blog.

Our next steps:

One thing that we still need to work out is how to embed the practice of blogging into the daily routine. We work with laptop carts – four per grade level, 12 laptops per cart – so teachers do not have 1:1 access and often have to schedule specific time with the carts. The organization and pre-planning necessary to naturally and easily use the tools can be cumbersome and frustrating for some teachers. Right now we’re thinking about using a rotational strategy – allowing small groups to use the laptops each day for regular reading and writing online.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to introduce blogging to elementary students? Or how to make rotational blogging and commenting practical and realistic for our teachers?

Mac Youngin by shapeshift
Playing on the Computer by fd

This is the third year in a row that I have helped a group of students be a Sounding Board for the Flat Classroom Project (well, the first one was technically the Horizon Project, but who’s counting?). Although the first year was with grade eight students, both last year and this year I worked with grade 5 highly able students on this “special” project. Each time I participate in this experience I learn something new, and this year was no exception!

Because the content of these projects is of a very high level for elementary students, I coordinated a time with our wonderful grade 5 teachers to pull out a small group of highly able students from each grade 5 class. The great thing about making this a quick and easy “pull out” project is that students from different classes get the opportunity to work together – mixing and matching beyond their homeroom groups.

I structured the project almost exactly the same as last year, allowing students to form their own groups, choose their own project to peer-review, and teaching them the basics of wiki editing. Due to some scheduling conflicts we only had two one-hour lessons to complete the entire Sounding Board experience (note to self: two lessons is not enough!).

As usual my little group of grade 5 superstars did fantastic work! They worked extremely well in their small groups or partnerships,  making the most use of the limited time that we had. They were helpful and polite and coordinated their work extremely well (especially considering they are only 10 years old). Most of the groups had one student looking over the Flat Classroom work and another student with our Sounding Board wiki open, brainstorming and editing together, using both laptops productively and purposefully.

After our two sessions were over (thankfully we finished our feedback just in time), I was able to snag just one more short lesson with this fantastic group to get their opinions of how the project went. Here’s what they shared with me:

General Feedback:

• Time was too short – we needed more time to read and understand the student work as well as to provide more detailed feedback to the students.
• We liked choosing our own groups. Some would have preferred larger groups, others liked partners. Being able to choose our own groups helped us work the way we felt most comfortable and with the people we can do our best work with.
• We recommend that all groups must be made up of students from different classes.
• It would have been great to mix grade levels – to include fourth, third and second graders as well. The fifth graders would have liked to teach them about the project and get their feedback as well.
• Although the 3-2-1 format was easy to follow, we would like it to be more open-ended to allow for more student choice in response style and amount.
• We would really like to participate with the bigger project! How can we be a part of the Flat Classroom project instead of just a Sounding Board?

What we liked:

• We liked being able to use the computer to give feedback instead of writing by hand because it’s easier and faster.
• We liked how we brought many classes together, not just one, because it helped to have lots of different opinions and we could see how different people are taught in their classes.
• We liked that we got to share our opinion about their work, because usually only teachers get to do that.
• We liked that we didn’t do the whole thing all in one day – better to break it up over different days – because we only missed part of our normal lessons. Spreading the project out over a few days also helped us be more laid back because we had more time.
• It was good to do in the Learning Hub instead of the classroom, because it helped us stay focused.
• We liked how we had different subjects to choose from.

What we learned:

• We learned about cooperation, if you don’t work together you won’t get anything done.
• We learned that it’s important to read all of the information to really understand what the topic is.
• We learned that people from different countries can work on the same project in different time zones.
• We learned how to summarize big ideas into short sentences.
• We learned a lot about new technology, which was really cool.
• We learned how people’s perceptions of other people can change based on their social networking profile pages.
• We learned more about Google’s different applications.
• We learned about online safety, using avatars and blocking pop-ups.
• We really respected the Flat Classroom participants because they put so much effort and work into all of it.
• It must be challenging to do that kind of project because they can’t talk face to face.
• We’re surprised at how much they were able to do because they were in totally different countries (which we could tell by the references in their work).
• We’re proud that they found out different ways to communicate with each other to create their project.

Our wonderings:

• We’re wondering how they got to know each other.
• We would like to talk to some of the members of the Flat Classroom project – would anyone be interested in Skyping in with us?

I’m so impressed with their thoughtful feedback! And I absolutely loved that their first instinct to learn more was to request a Skype call with some of the members of the project! How about it Julie, Vicki, Anne or any of the other teachers? Would some of your students be interested in chatting with our fifth graders? I’m sure they have some interesting questions!

Although I know this project is challenging for them, I am consistently impressed in their ability to grasp the most important facets of the experience. I’m always amazed at the way their brains just soak up all this new information like human sponges! Their thoughtful reflections and learnings just reinforce to me that this is an excellent experience for them – one that may be very different from their day-to-day classroom life.

I’m looking forward to working with yet another group on next year’s project already! Now it’s time to get to the judging!

Candy Jars by uBookworm

Over the past two and a half years I’ve been focusing on helping teachers make connections with other classes around the world. For the most part, our collaborations have been about general topics – book reports, water, persuasive writing, enhancing oral language, things that almost any classroom teacher would be able to connect with, and they’ve been great!

But this year, inspired by Clarence Fisher’s ThinWalls project, I’m looking for something new, something deeper. A real connection based on shared goals and common assessments. Something that will last longer than your average globally collaborative project. A classroom connection, based on specific curricular needs, that will last an entire school year.

I’m fortunate to be working with so many wonderful teachers at ISB and around the world that are willing to be patient and wait until we find just the right classes with just the right needs. They are willing to build these collaborations from the ground up, focusing on student learning, and taking the time to plan meaningful and authentic experiences for all involved.

One of these projects is our fifth grade Students Teaching Students podcasting and blogging collaboration around the Lucy Caulkin’s Readers and Writer’s Workshop.

In order to ensure that all classrooms involved share the same goal for the project, we are following the Understanding by Design model of curriculum planning. And to make sure that we’re all in it from the ground up, we’re planning via a Google Doc. Although I’ve used Google Docs at school with team members a lot, I haven’t yet used them for curriculum planning across time zones and schools. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

So far, all of the project participants are listed on the Doc, with contact info and class details carefully noted. We have determined the basic focus of the unit and are starting to share tips and advice with each other. Over time, I’d love to use the Doc (or a Calendar) to plan common events or activities.

For example, here is what we have so far for this project (all a work in progress):

Enduring Understandings:

• Good readers use strategies to deepen their understanding.
• Good readers read fluently and with expression, paying particular attention to the conventions of grammar.
• Authentic audiences encourage good reading and writing.
• Collaboration and communication both inside and outside the classroom will prepare students for being productive citizens within our global society.

Essential Questions:

• How do I use reading strategies to deepen my understanding?
• Why is fluency important?
• How does my audience influence or affect my reading and writing?
• How does collaborating with others help me to learn?

Assessment:

• Student self reflection
• Teacher self reflection
• Class blog as portfolio

GRASPS Task:

Goal: Your goal is to entertain your audience with personal stories about reading strategies
Role: Broadcasting team: On-Air Personality/Show Host, Producer, Writers, Mixing Team, Manager
Audience: Peers at ISB, both younger and same-age, partner classes around the world
Situation: You need to teach your audience effective reading strategies
Purpose: To collaborate with your  team to effectively communicate reading strategies to a wide audience

Supporting activities ideas to build understanding (brainstorm):

• commenting quality – rubric for commenting
• specific points in the year where you pick an earlier piece of writing that you rework and link back to old version to see the growth

Planned activities to support learning (brainstorm):

• Introduction to online safety
• Introduction to blogging
• Introduction to GarageBand/Audacity
• Podcasting a written piece for fluency
• Posting a podcast
• Read a story from a book for practicing fluency to be podcast later
• Developing quality commenting skills
• Collaborative teaming to develop a podcast focused on reading strategies
• Reflective pieces of writing on the blog

I love the idea of being able to plan a curricular unit for several classes all from one Google Doc. This is my idea of collaboration – everyone literally on the same page and working towards the same goals. Although I’ve done quite a few of these projects before, I usually ended coordinating via e-mail and never really “flattening” the planning process – I inadvertently usually had all planning go through me.

This type of process, with the project clearly outlined, is the way I would normally plan a project with a classroom teacher face-to-face. How amazing and easy it is to now do the same thing, anytime, anywhere, with a Google Doc!

I’m hoping that this transparency in planning, and the clarity in goals for the unit, will help us stay focused throughout the year and enable us to dig deeper with our students.

What do you think? Have you ever used a Google Doc to plan this way? Have you ever had shared curricular goals that are ongoing throughout the year with another class, in another country? How did it go?

I just had a fantastic meeting with two of our wonderful grade 5 teachers, Sandra and Diane, to brainstorm ways to naturally embed 21st century literacy skills into our (Lucy Caulkins) Readers’ Workshop (RW) units of study for next school year (Reading is a school focus for next year). The grade 5 team is looking for easy ways to promote student discussion about reading strategies and to deepen their conversations about the content they are learning while they’re reading.

Here’s what we came up with (and I would love to hear feedback):

The grade 5 students will create a Students Teaching Students podcast focused on helping other students learn and use quality strategies for reading. This is an educational podcast teaching other students how to become good readers using RW strategies that they learn over the course of the year.

This strand will continue throughout the whole school year with different sections of grade 5 (we have 7 grade 5 classes) leading different units of RW. All podcasts can be uploaded onto a common 5th grade reading-focused blog and added to iTunes for parents and other teachers to subscribe. The podcasts can also be shared with the 4th and 3rd grades so we have a built-in authentic audience (and we help vertical articulation too!). The project will be started with our first RW unit and continue throughout the year.

To allow for new teachers (we will have 4 new grade 5 teachers next year) to get comfortable with the process, we can differentiate: some classes can start with just listening to the podcasts, then when ready, students come in as “guest stars/speakers” on the “show,” eventually we can have many facilitators from all classes.

The project can be broken into 3 stages:

Stage 1: Focus on strategies.

Students Teaching Students podcast begins with 1 or 2 of our grade 5 classes to develop strong student facilitators and provide a model for good student-produced podcasts at ISB. The first stage is to focus on what strategies they are learning in RW and teach other students how the strategies help them become good readers. This can be a regular, short, podcast focusing on the critical aspects of RW they learn each week – the podcast station can be set up as a “center” in the classroom.

Stage 2: Focus on the content being learned in RW.

Have “guest stars/speakers” from other classrooms on the “show” to talk about the content they are reading and how they use different strategies to learn through reading. Student facilitators from the first two participating classes will lead these discussions on a weekly basis.

For this to work well, we will need to develop common prompts, thinking strategies and questions so that students will have a “handbook” for excellent podcasts. Eventually this could be entirely managed by students.

Stage 3: Focus on building excitement about reading.

Add book talks, book reviews, etc, using these same tools (or perhaps VoiceThread and other tools) to deepen learning about content, to make connections to other student readers, and to share more about what we’re reading. Start regularly connecting with students in other schools around the world to discuss and improve reading skills and strategies.

What do you think? How can we make this idea even better? Has this already been done (which would give me a great model to start from)? All feedback appreciated!