LightintheWoods

Tonight I sat down with my friend and colleague, Paul Bazin. Recently I have been pushing Paul to embrace the web 2.0 world and since September he has taken some great strides. Already he manages a blog, We have set sail to learn, within his classroom. We have chatted about bringing our classes together through blogging and perhaps online blog mentorship in some capacity.

As Paul helped me learn how to use my MacBook more efficiently, I helped him become more familiar with his blog, introduced him to twitter, del.icio.us, a variety of links and Google Reader. It was such a good learning experience for me to take some time to walk a colleague through these tools. It helped that Paul was keen to learn and had started his own web 2.0 exploration prior to our visit. This is how change happens, impact one teacher at a time if you have to. Slowly more will come to see the benefits that result from technology implementation.

On a side note: I have only ever tackled photo editing once before. Today our discussion at the Digital Internship Seminar pushed me to try out picnik and phixr. My verdict, they do the same thing but picnik seems more friendly.

I posted this in the discussion forum of the Digital Internship Project

I was naive in thinking that all Grade 6’s would have email. Turns out only about 60% do. The division I am in has it in their policy that students in grade 4 and over should have email addresses but this is slow in it’s implementation. As a result, I have been contemplating how to get them all addresses and decided to send them all home with the assignment of emailing me if they could. Perhaps I should of created them all gmail accounts? I think that I will create accounts for different applications in the future.

(One mistake in the situation above is that I gave them my teacher gmail account rather than my division email. I am going to ensure that all further correspondence takes place through my school account.)

But I digress, a couple days later a mother has written a note in an agenda stating that “her daughter is too young to have email.” uhoh, road bump. I have this floating in my head all day trying to think about solutions, when another student asks if it’s ok to use his Dad’s email account. a-ha solution.

This is just a minor situation and I have only had brief contact with a couple parents. But tonight I am going to compose a note to go home introducing the blog. And hopefully once my students start blogging we’ll have the parents in for a show and tell. I will talk briefly about blogging and rationale, but I also want to ensure parents of their child’s safety.

I am looking for suggestions and stories of experience from each of you reading this. What would put in a letter to go home? What would show or say to parents? Of course everyone’s situation is a bit different, but this is a major issue to be addressed.

School started on August 30th. First couple days were very introductory with my Gr. 5/6 split, we got to know each other and the procedures of the class. Then by Monday, our class had been switched to a straight Grade 6 and our class population only decreased by one. Now there are only 18 little darlings under my guidance. I am excited because I don’t have any experience with the grade 6 curriculum so this gives me a chance to expand upon my K-5 elementary University program. If anybody has any tips on middle years activities or resources lead me to them please.

I have been a little nervous about where and how I was going to implement tech tools. But slowly it is happening. I set up the class blog and have used it to link the students to math games and endangered species information throughout the week but hadn’t really explained what it was or how we are going to use it. On Friday, I finally got our schools sole projector set up in the computer lab and introduced the class to Thinking Exploring Learning. They were the best behaved they had been all week, they ate it up. They, not I, can wait to get started. It was my intent to familiarize them with the blog through commenting and eventually take some time for them to create their own blog. This is all fine and dandy, until I realized that half of them don’t have email addresses yet and they are required for commenting on this blog. Little bump in the road. Their homework for the weekend was to try to set up an account, so far only two students have emailed me their address.  I think we will have to take some time to do set up email this week.

On the positive, my co-operating teacher really thinks that this blogging idea is great. This is a relief for me because it would be difficult for me to implement this tool if I didn’t have her in my corner. We both saw a difference with the class in the computer lab, they were so into it.  I am convinced that the use of this tool will reinforce the key learnings that we have over the semester.  They want to be on the computers, they recognize the computer as a valuable tool.