Learning As I Go

(I’ve already put this out there, but I’ll say it again: This is my first official year teaching and I’m fairly new to all of the 2.0 stuff. Just wanted to set that straight! )

I had a really great, really valuable learning experience today with my 4th graders as I tried to get them started with the blog we’re going to be participating in - Global Bloggers.  This is a blog project I started with Amber Coggin, Anne Mirtschin, and Shavon Davis-Louis as a way to get elementary students communicating with students from throughout the world in a REALLY easy way…….check out our Blogging 101 page for how we set it up.  Now, I know there are a gazillion other projects like this and maybe even a better way of doing it (if so, please share!) but I wanted to jump in to a collaboration project and this is where we landed.  My main concern was having a place to do this where I wouldn’t have to set up usernames and passwords for my students - I teach in 10 elementary schools over the course of the year, with at least 2 - 4th grade classes in each school, and at least 25 students in each class…………..quick low estimate gives me 500 students…..no WAY am I going to set that many edublogs users up and worry about passwords, etc!

Okay, back to the learning experience.  I’m a fairly impulsive teacher - if I think something seems fun on any given day and it fits in with the overall plan, I do it. I don’t believe that it’s necessarily always better to plan each activity down to the second, since anything dealing with technology and/or kids in general tends to lead to plans A, B, and C anyway.  So, with plans all the way up to Z in mind, I decided that even though I hadn’t planned on starting Global Bloggers today, we’d jump in.  I was excited because Shavon’s class had already commented on my post and Amber’s page and I wanted for us to play too! 

Shavon had the splendid idea of doing a webquest on blogging before using the blog with her class, and I can’t wait to find out more about that from her.  I, however, have extremely limited time with my kids (25, 30-minute sessions) and I’m supposed to be teaching the full keyboard and touch typing in that time period.  Honestly, I could spend all day, every day just blogging with my classes!  But, not an option.  So, I have them partner up and we dive in. 

How’d it go?  Well, the kids had a blast, got a taste for how cool this can be, learned a lot about Australia, and are looking forward to coming back to it sometime next week. 

What did I learn?  Well (and seasoned vets, just giggle away, and possibly share tips!)…………..

1. And I KNEW this one - 10 minutes is NOT enough time for even a pair of 4th graders to write a comment.  I am used to blogging with 6th graders and forgot to adjust for the slower thinking/typing speed
2. I might have them write their comments in Word next time so we can save them and finish them if time runs out - the kids who weren’t done either didn’t get to submit a comment or I didn’t approve it because it wasn’t finished, and there’s no way of going back in and finishing it, short of having them come one-by-one up to my computer under my account to edit the comments.  If we did the comments in Word, we could just copy and paste it in when they finally finish.  It would be a good copy/paste activity as well.
3. We might do group comments sometimes, that way we’d be able to actually do more comments in less time - maybe have the kids take turns coming up to type while everyone else is working in the keyboarding program
4. I need to steal the computer from the kid who’s hooked up to the projector - I try teaching without it and just can’t handle it.  Not a big deal to move that group to a different machine.

So, it was valuable, it was fun, but if anyone were watching, it probably looked chaotic.  You know what?  That’s ok.  If we teach kids every tiny step of every thing when using these tools, are they really learning skills or just remembering steps?  My goal is for the kids to be able to come across another blog someday and be able to comment because they learned how to figure it out in my class.  If that means they were talking kind of loud, so be it.  If that means some of them never got a comment written because they were busy reading Amber’s profile, that’s okay.  And as one very memorable child said, “Wow, Mrs. Olson, if a lot of kids start writing here, you’ll have to hire like 5 people just to approve all the comments!”  Well, I can’t hire anyone, but that would be SO cool if I felt like it was big enough that I had to…………

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