What: Students post predictions about water use and images of the water cycle to reinforce their learning and practice blogging netiquette specific to an academic setting.
Materials:
Time: 2-3 weeks
Challenges:
- If more than one teacher shares the students, the new KidBlog rules only allow 1 teacher login per classroom. Other teachers can be listed as "Parents" to be given more access. This is a change starting 2015. Previous, more teachers could be listed as "moderators" with ability to approve comments, etc.
Tips:
- Post the KidBlog login specific to the teacher on a site that all can access easily.
- Students may need support to practice writing various comment types. We introduced the following and isolated ones specific to each post:
*compliments
*questions
*advice: Careful to help craft these so as not to offend reluctant writers or sensitive students
- Allow students to create avatars during the first blog lesson. We used PhotoBooth and allowed the students to use the filters, etc. But limited the amount of time to edit. However, we prefaced this activity with a video about digital footprint from Common Sense Media. We also let them know that KdiBlogs is a private space for only people at our school and their families.
- The students posted images of the water cycle. We introduced the image posting with a discussion about Creative Commons and Google Image Search > More Tools > Usage Rights. We also discussed how we need to be careful so that we know we can trust images online, which can sometimes be dishonest. We also need to give credit to the photographers and artists who created the images.
- Introduce the students to citation. We did not go into full citation, but did show the students how to copy and paste the link of the website where they found their image into the blog post where they posted the image from the internet.
- We ran out of time in the image lesson to:
1) Caption the image.
2) Create a hyperlink to the website where we found the image.
- Show students how to tag posts so they can be sorted later. We tagged ours with "water cycle."
- Teachers decide if they would like to allow all comments without approval or to exert more control by approving all comments. When you opt to approve, it slows the process of seeing each others' comments which may frustrate some students and remove some of the motivations for commenting. With a robust discussion about commenting, approval may not be necessary--especially since teachers still have the ability to remove offensive comments.
Narrative:
Mrs. Witte and I discussed the possibility of teaching blogging skills connected to the water cycle unit. She also wanted students to learn basic skills like opening more than one tab in a browser and netiquette for social media in the classroom. She and I collaborated to generate a question for the first blog post: "How much water do you think a 3rd grader uses in one day?" and also what images they would post in a subsequent lesson.
We let the students know that the first time you do something is always tricky, but that if you pay attention to detail, we would be giving them tips to make things easier. Mrs. Witte helped to troubleshoot glitches during the lesson which was helpful to keep the lesson moving.
We encountered some bugs with laptop login issues and charging issues. But we problem solved and forged ahead. We were happy to hear that some students went on the KidBlogs from home to comment on each others' posts.
Session 1: Login and publish first blog post. Discuss commenting conventions.
Session 2: Create and post avatar.
Session 3: Search for and post online image from search. Cite image with website URL.
What: Connect with classrooms around the world by preparing questions that the students video for the "mystery" classroom to answer. The questions the students write are intended to generate answers that will provide clues about where the "mystery" classroom is located.
Materials:
- MysterySkype website (optional) I connected with former international school colleagues to take this activity international. Time Zones were an issue so we decided to create a video and send it to them to answer in their own time zone, rather than try to coordinate 13 hour time differences.
- Google Doc with table for student questions and cells for responses to record when students receive the video answers.
- PhotoBooth or digital cameras
- iMovie or video editing device for splicing all of the questions together into a video to send the mystery classroom.
Time: 2-3 weeks
Challenges:
- Time Zone differences: coordinate with receiving teacher
- The students were interested in meeting people from a "second" or "third" world country, but weren't exactly sure what this meant. We would be connecting with students who attended international schools who may not be representative of the local population.
Tips:
- Students should ask questions that will reveal information about the country like "What is the name of the money used in your country?," rather than questions about preferences like, "Do you like Pokeman?"
- Students should be sure that they are not wearing clothing that would reveal their location: local sports team shirts, local landmark attractions, etc.
- Upload video to a secure server or unlisted YouTube that doesn't give a clue about your location. May want to create a "mystery skype" specific google username and invite the mystery teacher to upload to this space as well. To ensure more safety, create a SafeShare URL.
- If you send the google document with the questions, send it directly to the teacher and ask them to make a copy of it and save it on their server and distribute it that way. This way, you can avoid having students viewing the name of the school in the URL of the school google drive.
- Create a welcome and salutation portion of the video if you are not actually skyping.
Narrative:
The fifth grade teachers and I wanted to follow up on the World Cultures unit with an actual connection to students living in other parts of the world. After having just returned from a stint as an international teacher, I had contacts with teachers from various countries who I could tap to see if they would be interested in answering students' questions about their country. Due to the time zone consideration, we decided to create a video, rather than have a live connection (especially with the Asian countries).
On the day we planned to video the students' questions, writing their questions took longer than expected since many of their questions were more "get to know you personally" questions rather than location or geographic questions. However, this generated a lively discussion about how to ask about poverty and skin color.
Here is a link to the questions the students generated.
Mr. B
Mr. H
5B Video questions
5B Video answers
5B Video guess
5H Video questions
5H Video answers
5H Video guess
