February 2008

Rookie mistakes - live and learn. That’s the story of my day! I started out with my wiki project this morning and quickly encountered a MAJOR problem that I should have been aware of. No excuses, I should have researched this more fully before embarking on the project. I had the entire class (in 9 groups) working on the project all at the same time, but wikispaces doesn’t allow simultaneous editing of a page. Major whoops - kids had a lot of work erased and got pretty frustrated. I had to quickly move all groups but one out of the wiki and have them keep their research sites open while we waited for 1 group at a time to add their links. This slowed us down considerably and the students grumbled a lot, which they surely had a right to do!

After class I created 10 group pages that I will now be using for individual group research. I’m actually glad that this happened because I realized that it will be great to have the group pages - now I can have each group draft their blog posts on the wiki rather than in Word. This will make it much easier if a group member is gone or if one group doesn’t finish before the 10 day rotation is over. A group in the next rotation could just pick up where the other group left off.

This situation is one of many that needs to be addressed before embarking on new technology projects, but what is interesting is that I couldn’t have actually tested this out on my own at home. You can only be logged into one wikispaces account at a time on any computer. What I should have done is send out a tweet to make sure that my idea would work. After class today, I even found a discussion on Classroom 2.0 about this very issue.

Lesson learned - I will make sure to do MUCH more research before trying another new tool in my classroom!

Just a note about the wikispaces handout I created for my 6th graders to use as they work through using and adding links to the 6th Grade Research wiki. The handout describes how to log in to a wikispaces wiki, navigate pages, edit a page, and add a hyperlink. You can view it here: 6th Grade Research wiki handout

Comments and suggestions for improvement more than welcome :-)

In my post last week about teacher training here in the U.S. and abroad, I quoted a TIME magazine article about practices in Singapore. One of my readers, John Larkin, made these excellent comments on the post:

“Hi Kate

I once taught part time at Singapore’s National Institute of Education after work at Nanyang Technological University. I also had the good fortune to consult on a number of IT projects with the Singapore Ministry of Education.

Singaporean teachers are easily among the hardest working teachers in the world. The pressure upon Singaporean teachers for their students to succeed is enormous. The pressure comes from the parents and the system. The teachers work incredibly hard, even conducting additional classes during the school holidays.

Singapore is a city-state. It does not possess natural resources and land like countries such as the USA and Australia. Singapore’s resource is its children. The pressure placed upon students is significant as well.

Cheers, John”

I replied

John -

Thank you so much for offering a different perspective on the teaching situation in Singapore. The article covered it in a very utopic view and I appreciate the information you provided. With the benefits come much more pressure, which must be considered. Many teachers in the US might not appreciate this……….

and John replied!

“Hi Kate,

Thank you for the reply. Singaporean teachers do work very hard. The trainees deserve the income and the teachers deserve their pay.

I conducted workshops in neighbourhood schools and the most influential schools. Teachers at both ends of the spectrum worked just as hard as the other.

I also had the good chance to meet teachers from across Asia while I was in Singapore. If you ever have the chance to work in an International School in a city such as Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or elsewhere then take the opportunity. While you are there make an effort to get to know the local teachers.

My wife and I buried ourselves in the Singaporean culture while we were there. I became involved with local environmentalists, bike-riders and teachers. I also conducted free IT workshops for parents and children on weekends from time to time with other Singaporean friends. That enriched the entire experience. Our photographs can be found here:

http://www.larkin.net.au/040_gallery.html

Working with Singaporean teachers was a real eye opener. Class sizes are much larger than here in Australia and students sit for a significant series of exams from the very earliest years through to matriculation year.

Interestingly enough Singaporean students picked up blogging much more quicker than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Singaporeans are tech savvy. Three of my favourite blogs are by Singaporeans:

Siva ~ lecturer, environmentalist, blogging for many, many years
http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/%7Esivasothi/blog/index.php

Kevin ~ social networking researcher and lifestreamer
http://theory.isthereason.com/

Marcus ~ biologist and nature photographer par excellence
http://budak.blogs.com/the_annotated_budak/

Cheers,
John

PS. I am off to Singapore to work with Singaporean teachers next week! ^_^”

John is currently in Singapore and has been blogging about his trip - he just posted some great photographs and information on Singapore’s Chinatown today. You can check out his blog here: TeachTech - Technology Tips for Teachers.

Exchanges like these are what make blogging such a valuable experience!

While working with my 6th grade students in keyboarding class, I’ve been struggling with how to introduce the how-to lessons for blogs and wikis. The students already know the mechanics of commenting on a blog, but we have a lot of work to do on writing posts and making sure work is fit for public consumption. I want to introduce the concept of blogs and wikis in my keyboarding class as a way to practice the keyboarding skills while learning new technologies, but also as part of a useful project rather than simply a how-to lesson.

The main issue I have is time - I have each group for 10 days, 1 hour each day. This led me to decide to create a project that can be built upon by each class, rather than starting over every 10 days. The students will build up to writing posts on Global Bloggers (an existing blog project) through brainstorming on our classroom blog, Keying In, and posting research on our new research wiki, 6th Grade Research. The researching and writing of posts will be done in groups of 2 or 3. I decided on group work because it’s been my experience in a lab setting that with a classes of almost 30 students, groups usually lead to more work actually getting done because students are able to help one another through the technical issues and questions about directions.

I will have the students work on the posts in Word before copying into Global Bloggers. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about blogging with my students, I think drafting the posts in a word processor allows greater flexibility. Also, due to the nature of Global Bloggers (a teacher-run elementary blog with student commentors), I am going to be having the 6th graders write their posts under my account (after I’ve logged in) rather than actually giving them access. Again, this is because of the short time I have with the students and the nature of the Global Bloggers blog. I have set up student blogs in the past and will post about that at another time.

At this point, the students have done the brainstorming of ideas by commenting on a post on Keying In and I have demonstrated to all of the groups how to log on to the wiki and add a link. Note: I set up 10 student accounts for the wiki that will be able to transfer to the next class when they start. I demonstrated to each group rather than the whole class because I don’t have access to a projector in my classroom. The rest of the class was working on keyboarding while I did the demonstrations.

While we are working on blogs and wikis, we are also spending part of the class reviewing keyboarding skills in DanceMat Typing and learning/reviewing some basic computer skills. We just finished going over Mac keyboard shortcuts - you can see the google docs version of my handout here: Mac keyboard shortcuts. We have also been reviewing how to right-click (CTRL-click on Mac) to open links in new tabs or windows to make web navigation easier.

Our next step in the project will be reviewing internet search strategies and compiling our research on the wiki. I hope to do this at the beginning of next week and get at least one post written for Global Bloggers before this group moves on. This project has been an eye-opener so far - I’ve learned that it’s way easier to actually blog and create/use wikis myself than to teach 30 middle school students how to do so! The logistics with logins and demonstrations on that scale were a bit more than I anticipated, but I think we’re getting to the fun part now :-)