ejourney with technokids

 It is just on 7 months ago, the students and I, under Heather Blakey’s tutelage, commenced our classroom backyard blog.

Yesterday, I was priveleged to present an online in-service to interested staff in Victoria. Elluminate was the software used, and this allowed audio interaction, application sharing and other collaborative work. My presentation, outlining our journey with blogging, commencing with our classroom backyard blog is shared with you in the slideshare below.

 Please note that some schools may have the slideshare site blocked.

 

 How exciting is this!!! When you look at the links on the RHS of this blog, you will see a new heading called technostaff - technobooks, technoliteracy, technoart, techn6maths, technoscience and of course one that has always been there technolote.

So, our journeys are broadening in depth with more passengers coming on board. At the end of June last year, I started blogging. My teaching colleague, Jess, was already experienced with blogging. A few staff registered for a blog but did not it up in earnest.

After  6 months of experimentation, we were ready to start the students with individual blogs.  Years 5-10 were introduced to personal blogging in Feb 2008.  Several weeks down the track, students are getting into their posts. Digital cameras are borrowed so photos can be taken for their blogs, posts are compared, comments researched and shared, and a great atmosphere of connectedness and pride is taking place amongst students and other connected community members.  Now we have 6 more teachers taking up the challenge - ranging from science, maths, literacy, art and cooking. This is exciting for all concerned.

Jen Wagner wrote a post re the necessity to take baby steps in introducing staff to the emerging technologies and I  thoroughly endorse her remarks. The initial journey needs to be taken by a few who are willing to put in the research and committed work, and as time progresses, the powerful learning rewards that emerge, sow seeds amongst others. This allows a solid social network to develop where teachers can support each other in bringing powerful learning into our classrooms.

Our existing and potential uses for Blogging

• Online journals
• Digital portfolios - (I will be concentrating on this area with the students)
• Classroom exs (task set by teacher in a post or via wiki and student replies in post.)
• Reflection
• Educational resources and links
• Establishing e-connectedness with parents, community and the globe.
• Professional Development (See http://pixiepointers.blogspot.com/)

 We are so fortunate that ours is a small school where our student blogs should soon reflect so many subject areas and a great number of staff will also travel down this web2.0 path. Babies grow into children and mature into adults and so, the journey continues.

Last week, despite personal mental and physical exhaustion coping with first week back at school, one crashed computer lab and intermittent internet access, my students on Friday, set up their own blog space. We decided to enrol with global students, as our experience with edublogs did not work last year. (possibly our school’s tight security.) Following are the steps we took.

Pre-Learning activities

1. Viewed some online blog sites, including our own backyard site (where I would grab their writing and images and post them online myself) and discussed content and appearance.
2. One group was given the responsibility of commenting back on a youthradio blog that we will be involved with this year. I quickly checked content and spelling to ensure comments were suitable and discussed etiquette and the need for saying where they were from. (but no personal details!!)

Going online

1. Each student applied for a blog, checked their emails, activated the response, got their username and password) and then logged on.
2. Each student had to set a minimum of 5 goals for the year, three had to be school related and two could be personal. (a very interesting excersice and will summarize the results at some stage as it was a rather eye-opening one)
3. We kept the post simple except for some basic formatting and will look at presentation more fully next week (although the geeks were off and running and found that option early on.)
4. Students then created a cartoon to illustrate some portion of their blog. Most are still working on this and it does add interest to the post. They created the cartoon, made a screen dump and resized the image and saved it through MS Paint. Then uploaded it into their blog.
5. I am in the process of linking all their blogs to this blog and will ensure that I have administrative rights over their blogs.

As our students as a whole call themselves technokids, each year level has techno in front of it. Scroll down this blog and some year 9s and 10s (technoteens)  have completed their first post. (eg Tarzy, Dhugsy) Even our challenging group of ex-year 9 boys were focused on the task and enjoyed the challenge.

Evaluation

• All students, from the least to the most literate, completed 5 goals (only a few struggled to find 5)
• Would have liked a little more depth to some of their goals and had to push them to explain some of their sporting goals.
• They enjoyed making cartoons and enhancing the presentation
• The geeks were off and running - discovering all sorts of areas of wordpress that took me months to find
• The comments we made on youth radio ended up in Kevin’s spam box. They were quickly retrieved. Hint:  email your host informing them that comments have been made.

Post lesson acitivity: will endeavour to reply to student posts with comments plus try and get form teachers to do so as well.

……..creating a unique cyber identity
A recent comment on one of my blogs made mention of the many pseudonyms that I have. This made me reflect back on the reason for my many online user names. In Australia, few of us have any say in our names unless a female decides not to take on her husband’s name. Our parents decide our christian names. My surname is that of my husband  - Mirtschin. This is a name that is rarely spelt correctly due to the conglomeration of consonants. Even when spelt out letter by letter M-I-R-T-S-C-H-I-N, few people get it right. 
So when I commenced my blog, I decided to go murch, as each of my 4 children have been nicknamed.  Imagine my surprise when I decided to apply for murch as my username in wordpress, and the pop up message alerted me to the fact that someone already had that name. I tried murcho.
Unbelievably that too, was taken, so murcha become trhe name of my most commonly used blog. So, I now have murch, murcha, murcho and murch0 (a typo where the number o, was entered instead of the letter o) for my various web2.0 registrations OOoohhh!!! So now when I log in, I need to remember which user name is appropriate for which software.  Recently when registering for youtube, all of the above were taken, so now I am annemirtschin. Even though I had a choice initially on my cyber ID, I have now gone back to the name of ‘no choice’.
In InfoT ech classes, I teach my students to change their passwords regularly and frequently.  But due to my ageing memory, I keep the same password. (But please don’t tell the students or the hackers)!!  I have signed up for so many online software types (with ever  increasing frequency due, to the constant blocking of various sites on our school server and the large number of recommendations on Twitter and my other other social networks). I don’t even remember half  the sites I am registered for, until I go to register and it tells me that I already am on!!!
Great care and thought should be given to your cyber identity but hindsight is a wonderful teacher. If I was starting over, I would choose a user name and add numerals to it. This should ensure that it would be uniquely mine or else I would consider using my real name, realising that few people will ever find me as they cannot spell it.
 

Tips for classroom and personal use

1. To ensure safe practice, my students use their school code names consisting of the first three letters of their surname and a three digit number. Eg MIR0001
2. Change passwords regularly.
3. Younger students should keep a copy of usernames and passwords in their personal, protected folder so that they cannot forget. 
4. Identifiably needs  vs privacy issues needs to be taken into account.
5. Keep it as simple as possible, yet retaining a unique username that can be consistently used over a cyber lifetime.