always learning

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?

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!