Hmmm….. The warts will show up big time, this week!
Student Achievements
…the warts
- One of our most prolific bloggers in grade 6, accidentally (I still dont know how) deleted his blog
- logged in to the http://ms1001tales.wikispaces.com site to only find that another of our grade 6 boys had managed to edit the ‘gorgeous’ front page and put his personal photo and ‘about me’ page on there. Horror of all horrors!!! A quick ‘edit this page’ deleted his ‘about me’ page, but I quickly emailed Jeff Whipple to ask him to restore the original front page. It is now as it was!!! Whew!
- attempted the impossible with grade 4 and 5 students and failed miserably, despite having the help of two year 9 students and a student teacher. Tried to finally enrol remaining students onto the 1001tales wiki, asked them to place comments on to the Thai student blogs and required a post of them. One boy ended up under the table!!! And it seemed as though out of this class of 28, I had 20 students hot on my heels requesting help. The wiki enrolments were fraught with problems too. Next week, will be a much simpler task. Groan!!!! Not such digital natives after all!!
- Anzac day public holiday, a strike half day and a teacher professional learning day, meant I missed my 9/10 classes and the posts for collaboration nation will have to wait until next week.
…..and all
- year 8s were successful in commenting on student posts from Costa Rica, and again I heard squeals of excitement from students when they got their first comment back
- year 7 students were settled into their blog tasks, which allowed me to commence their ‘camp in a sentence’ into a voicethread. Will finish next week, and each student will embed the VT into their blog post.
- Grade 6s wrote a post on Anzac Day
- Heather Blakey managed to rescue the deleted blog!! Thanks a heap Heather.
Personal achievements
- Jess and I used Thursday as a TPL (Teacher Professional Leave Day) to reflect on our accomplishments at laying the eplanks in a virtual classroom floor and to plan our future directions. Added to our wiki on eplanks re our achievements. Discussed how we could get more staff on board web2.0, and proceeded to interview a secondary English teacher and podcast her opinions and comments, and then enrolled her for a blog, much to her excitement. All steps taken will be podcast and available soon.
- worked with some individual primary school staff helping them with blogging mechanics
- ‘Walk in walk out Wed’ = first session. Two staff attended but we worked together on their needs (email problems, music grabbing for network use etc), and placed work on our intranet. A very productive session!
- enrolled for the after school online session with Marcus Torres in May. (He is visiting Australia)
- took part in the online session with Oz/NZ teachers using flashmeeting.
Student blog of the week
- Goes to teddaoo, a year 8 student, who has worked so
hard at establishing a social network. She has made so many comments on other global student blogs, and the red dots are finally appearing on her cluster map! She has also completed all tasks that have been set her.
- Have not attempted my google reader so my favourite blog post of the week will have to wait
8 responses so far ↓
I like the way you are focusing on one topic, blogging, with all your students. It seems to me that (eventually) you will have young mentors and assistants to help the others;D Glad all the deleted files were recovered. Amazing week!
Anne,
Warts and all you are doing fantastic things with your students. You are an inspirational teacher not afraid of giving things a go. I love hearing what you do.
P.S. I will be introducing you at ICTEV.
Well
some week are like that, unfortunately.
But I know you will keep going at it and the fact that you highlight that one student with energy and creativity … that is what it is all about, right?
Kevin
Warts and all it sounded like a great week, exhausting maybe but also exciting and very satisfying
Like us, the kids will learn a lot from the mistakes they make – you are doing so much to help them develop the skills they will need. Keep up the good work.
Jean
Hi Anne
That’s what I call an interesting week! Just think how boring it would be if you never attempted those things. Definitely an inspiration – even with the warts!
That was quite a week! Thank goodness for being able to revert to an earlier wiki page.
I had heard you mentioning eplanks in passing one day. I took a stop at the wiki. Very interesting. I bookmarked it and plan to revisit it over my summer break.
I think all of those “warts” are great learning experiences – and that’s what it’s all about!
One bit of advice about the wiki pages – I learned earlier this year that you can actually lock pages, meaning you can have a wiki with tons of members, but lock down the main page so no one can change it (meaning there would be no way for your student to edit the main MS 1001 Tales page if it was locked). The setting is under “list pages” and it’s just a link called “Lock page.” Saves a lot of headaches when working with a big group!
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