always learning

Over the last semester I’ve worked with several groups of students on a variety of globally collaborative projects, and each time we complete a project, I ask for student feedback.

Usually, I like to post these right after we finish, along with a description of the project, but somehow time has gotten away from me. So, in the interest of sharing student feedback, I have included the highlights from 3 of our major projects: 1001 Flat World Tales, NetGenEd Sounding Board (following the same process from the Flat Classroom Project earlier this year), and Life ‘Round Here (following the process outlined after last year’s experiences), in this one post.

Interestingly, as I looked back at all of the feedback, there was quite a bit of overlap. Even though these projects were completed by different students in different grade levels, many of them shared the same takeaways.

We learned:

• how easy it is to communicate with people in different time zones and in other countries using technology.
• writing feedback for other students makes you think and helps you practice your Writing Workshop skills – it’s like using Writing Workshop in real life.
• to accept other people’s ways of working and how to put our ideas together through cooperation.
• to work together with partners better to complete our goal even if we were making mistakes.
• we have a lot in common with our global partners.
• sharing our work online made me aware of what we were saying.

We liked:

• that we got to work with different people from other classes that we didn’t know how to work with, so we learned how to work with them and adapt to their way of working.
• getting to know my international partner by reading their introduction and feeling like I know my partner even though they’re not in my class here at school.
• how we could write about what we wanted to because it’s more fun to have your own choice for what to write about. I’m more of an expert on what I like.
• that because it’s online we can watch it again and show it to our family.
• that we were able to be creative with a partner.

Suggestions for improvement:

• It would be nice to go on the wiki regularly and leave discussions to communicate with our partners.
• I would like more practice being a peer-editor, especially on revising writing instead of just spelling and grammar.
• I’m wondering if we’re going to use another wiki next year because we already know how to use it. I would like to do the project again next year because we’re experts (whole class agrees).

Final Thoughts

When I look back over this compiled feedback (and others from earlier this year), I am so happy to see that these students are becoming 21st century learners, as we have defined here at ISB. They are actually noticing and discussing their opportunities to collaborate and communicate globally, to be creative, to use a variety of technology tools in real life situations, to learn from their mistakes and to share their learning with others. These are the kinds of experiences we want all of our ISB students to have!

One other commonality that really stands out is that all of the students would like more opportunities to participate in similar projects. They feel a sense of accomplishment and growing expertise in these new modes of learning and would like more classroom experiences which include global collaborations. It seems that our students are ready for these kinds of experiences to be embedded throughout the curriculum at all grade levels.

What do your students think about their experiences with global collaborations?

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!

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

After spending a year getting to know elementary students and elementary teachers (it’s definitely quite a switch from middle school), I’m finally starting to feel like I know what kinds of projects are appropriate and achievable in the elementary classroom. All of the projects I completed with our amazing teachers last year really helped me focus and refine my goals for this year – keeping things simple is definitely the key.

For this year we’re looking at staying small and making consistent connections with global partners. Ideally, we would like to find classroom partners that are willing to connect with us on a regular basis over the course of the entire school year (Sept 08 – June 09).

We would like to develop personal learning networks for our students where we can deepen understanding of classroom curriculum while learning how to communicate authentically and appropriately online. We want to make sure that the use of web 2.0 tools deepens their understanding of classroom content and also helps them feel connected to the world around them. Sound interesting? Read on! And if you’d like to participate in one of these projects, please leave a comment!

Amazingly, I have a willing and enthusiastic teacher on almost every grade level ready to fully collaborate with me this year. We are planning to go deep with the students and to really focus on building 21st century literacy skills in a consistent and authentic approach.

Here’s what we’ve gotten started so far:

Grade 5: Students Teaching Students

The wonderful Chrissy Hellyer and her fellow new ISB teacher, Aly McAloon, will be kicking off the school with a classroom blogging project that will eventually include a regular podcast focused on the Lucy Caulkins Readers Workshop.

We’re starting simple with a whole class blog and students as contributing authors (like Betsy and I did last year in the Grade 3 BlogPals project). Once the students start feeling comfortable in their blogging as a class, we’re going to link Chrissy & Aly’s class to start making connections across the grade 5 quad, and eventually they will connect with other classes internationally (Jane Lowe’s class is already on board!).

Our next step will be rotating groups in each class podcasting about their reading strategies to help teach their younger classmates how to be good readers (Melanie Holtsman and her teachers are ready to connect with us, thankfully, since they are total experts in the world of Lucy Caulkins).

I love the idea of embedding multiple tools into one class project and developing a classroom routine where students are not only in charge of their own learning, but also sharing that learning with others.

We would love to connect with another grade 5 class (or two) that would be interested in becoming co-learners along with our students for the entire school year (Sept 08 – June 09)!

Grade 5: Student Portfolios in Spanish

Our Spanish teacher, James, has been experimenting with tons of fantastic web tools over the last school year and now that he’s on the report card committee, he’s looking to find alternate ways of assessing student learning. So, we’re piloting electronic portfolios (in the form of blogs, for now) with one of his grade 5 classes.

James has already been embedding multiple tools into the class blog he’s been running for a year now, and now he’s ready to let the students be the authors on some of those posts. The goal is to keep track of student learning throughout the school year by creating a category for each student. Each time the students have a piece of work for their portfolio, they will post it on the class blog (as contributing authors). By the end of the year, parents will be able to click on their child’s category and see the progression of their work over the course of the year.

Grade 5: Our Online ESL Classroom

Our wonderful grade 5 ESL teacher, Diane, began blogging and podcasting with her students last year. We saw such an amazing leap in their oral and written language as soon as they realized they had an authentic audience for their work that she wants to continue to provide that opportunity this year.

Although Diane only sees her students for short lessons every other day (we run a Sheltered Immersion ESL program), we have been able to organize specific collaboration projects that focus on issues ESL students are concerned about. We have set up a few open ended blog posts to get them writing and connected with other classes (including Anne Mirtschin’s) about moving on to sixth grade.

This will probably be a more infrequent collaboration, on a topic-by-topic basis, but it would be great for our ESL students to connect with other language learners (or native English speakers) on topics that are important to them.

Grade 4: BlogPals

My fantastic colleague Sonja Merrell, who participated in the 1001 Flat World Tales last year, is back for more 21st century learning this year! She has decided to start the school year off with a class blog, which she will use as a communication portal for her students and their parents. There are a few students in her class that participated in the BlogPals project with me last year, so they will make great student leaders as we venture further into blogging with Sonja’s class.

We’re going to start off the year using the blog as a discussion tool, to build the school-home connection and to get her students thinking about their learning in a more interactive way. Over time we will have each student as a contributing author to the blog, just like we did with BlogPals last year.

We are looking for one or two grade 4 classrooms that would like to participate in this type of year-long adventure with us!

Grade 2: A Window to Our World

Another amazing colleague, Susan, who took a huge leap with me last year when we had our grade 2 class connect to another grade 2 class in the US via a Ning, is back in action this year! She loved the idea of working with a Ning and found the  “walled garden” concept perfect for her second graders. It was amazing to see how quickly they took to this new learning environment – posting questions and answers, commenting on individual student pages, and sharing their learning as a class – all in second grade!

This year Susan would like to do something very similar, but preferably with another international school class, if we can find one. She wants to focus on intercultural understanding and connecting with class that would have a greater mix of nationalities (she’s not limited to an international school, but we thought we might have better luck at getting a very diverse class if we were able to find another international school interested). Last year she had 20 nationalities in her class of 23 students, so finding a class with a similar makeup would be ideal for her.

Grade 1: ESL Learners Speak English

Our enthusiastic grade 1 ESL teacher, Erin, started using VoiceThread in her classroom last year as a way for her begining ESL students to practice their English in an authentic environment. We had a great time connecting to another international school in Spain, thanks to Nancy von Wahlde, and we’re planning to re-connect again this year.

Erin maintains a class blog, mostly to communicate with the parents, where she posts her VoiceThreads that the students create based on their classroom units of inquiry. We’re planning to start out with an introduction to each student so that our partner class can really get to know each person as an individual. Over time the students share a bit about their lives in Thailand, the school, and other grade 1 favorites.

Ideally, we would love to connect with a classroom that is able to communicate with us on a regular basis – maybe once a month – and that would be willing to continue these conversations over the course of the year.

Kindergarten: Kids Draw!

We have one set of co-teachers in Kindergarten this year. Sandy and Akiko are team-teaching one class of 24 kindergarten students all year – and what a class they have! It’s amazing to see the way Sandy and Akiko build on each other’s streagnths as we begin working with these little students and technology.

We started out the year with a short unit on drawing, where the students were asked to draw a picture of themselves on paper (for a unit entitled “All About Me”) and then draw the same picture on the computer (using KidPix). We discussed what was the same and what was different about drawing on paper and drawing on the computer. Interestingly, although almost all of them though drawing on the computer was more difficult (we still need to work on those fine motor skills), most of them liked drawing on the computer better.

After this short unit, Sandy, Akiko and I realized we have lots of room to grow with drawing and technology. We’d like to revisit the concept of drawing on the computer over the course of the year and build in some thoughtful reflection, ideally with VoiceThread, where students can talk about the context of the picture, and the skills they learned while drawing.

It would be great to partner up with another kindergarten class that’s interested in sharing learning through drawing!

What do you think? Are you interested in collaborating with one of our classes?