Keeping up with Student Voice

One of the key goals of Manaiakalani has always been to hook our students into learning through a few identified avenues.  One of these is to use the engagement of an authentic audience to encourage them to develop their 'voice', particularly in writing.  By the end of 2012 across our nine schools we have more than 1000 active student blogs. It is a real pleasure to monitor what our kids are saying, but it is a lot of writing to keep up with.

I have posted before about some of the ways I have explored to keep up with this rich flow of student expression. I am very pleased I began using twitterfeed several years ago to feed the posts through to the @clusternz Twitter account.  It is a bit unwieldy and is quite slow to input new accounts, but once done it provides lots of options for ongoing monitoring of the blog posts.

Teacher Dashboard is by far the easiest way for an individual teacher to access the blog posts (and comments) appearing on the class blogs, but I am also looking for public solutions.

My most enjoyable way of viewing the feed of student blog posts is through Flipboard on my iPad, but it is limited to the most recent posts.

I was happy to discover RebelMouse over the Christmas break and have set up an account here and embedded it on this blog here.  It gives a user experience a little similar to Flipboard on my laptop.

I will continue searching for ways to best access and display all the writing our Manaiakalani students are publishing.  There are lots of possibilities.

Not as easily solved is the important need for this writing to be taken seriously by those assessing and researching improvement in these kids' writing.

Twitterific Tweachers

I have always believed that teachers should use the frameworks and tools they expect their student learners to use in their own professional learning. In January I contributed to the Red Beach School teacher only day and enjoyed seeing how Lesley and Sarah and their team used their students' "Powerful Learning" model as the framework for the staff professional development day. It prompted me to do more of it myself!

Conferences are a great place to try out new ideas (if the submissions committee is brave enough to select new ideas!!), so Lenva and I decided to present our Twitter workshop at Learning at School USING Twitter.

We set up a twitter account @nztweachers , and the entire presentation was a series of tweets and interactions with the tweets of others. Now the presentation is over, the twitter account remains as a stand-alone tutorial on using twitter for teaching and learning. If you scroll to the earliest tweets in the archives and work from bottom to top to have a resource you can use for yourself or recommend to others!

At one stage during the presentation students from Bucklands Beach Intermediate tweeted in their gems.

This is the blurb we gave to the conference committee:

Twitterific tweachers:

This workshop will be a lighthearted introduction to the use of twitter as a t(w)eaching and learning tool.

Twitter can be used to support the learning of teachers and students in every area of their lives.

It can be everything from an online supply of the latest pedagogical ideas and resources for the teacher, to a shopping extravaganza.

This workshop will be a twitterfest rather than a presentation and will certainly be different from any workshop you have attended before.

To get a headstart and connect with us before the workshop, join twitter.com and follow @dorothyjburt and @lenva and of course our workshop id @nztweachers

Managing all those Blog feeds

One of the key indicators we are researching through our Manaiakalani Cluster projects is the impact of authentic audience on student motivation and engagement, and ultimately on their learning oucomes. This means that they are increasingly publishing their work in online spaces such as blogs. As our students move more and more into working in online spaces the task of tracking their changes and just keeping up with it all can become daunting, particularly for those in school management roles (and secondary school teachers) who are overseeing more then one class of students. At the moment there are close to 100 blog feeds alone from our cluster students, from Year 1 - 13.

I have been working with principals and teachers to introduce them to RSS and try to find a method that suits their eLearning style to aggregate their RSS feeds. We have explored all the usuals; Netvibes, Google Reader, iGoogle, browser based, Apple Mail (would love to know if Outlook and Entourage have simple RSS like Mail does), etc and the most commonly used appears to be adding a feed gadget to the sidebar of their own class blog, as I have done on this blog. But this doesn't allow for the sheer volume of blogs they want to follow.

I have come to accept that the sort of person who is reading this blog has no problem with the concept of RSS, but not everyone is willing to either set up an aggregator OR go searching for the feeds. Most willingly accept responsibility for a feed from the work they monitor from their own students as part of the job, but the rest of it feels too hard or too geeky. So I am trying another solution.

I have tried adding individual feeds to our cluster website using Grazr, and that worked well while we only had 10 or 20 accounts feeding in. As the numbers grew it has become a 'hunt the needle in the haystack' to try and find them.

In the holidays I saw isaac_d send a tweet from Twitterfeed and I checked it out to see if it might be a one stop solution for Manaiakalani. I created a new Twitter account, clusternz , then signed up to Twitterfeed and added all the RSS feeds from the cluster blogs one by one - very tedious, as even on our KAREN connection it doesn't load fast! Now every time one of the cluster blogs publishes a new post clusternz automatically sends out a tweet.

However, I didn't actually create it to Twitter from myself, as I can't imagine many people wanting to follow an account that only tweets blog updates! I really wanted the RSS feed that Twitter generates on the side bar. http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/55514340.rss

So now I have another option for creating widgets schools can put on their web pages, like this one, or individuals can add to their blog side bars (an example in the sidebar of this blog), or the RSS feed works in Mail, iGoogle etc. I have had feed back from two people this week who say it already feels much better having all the kids' blogs consolidated into one feed and not swamping all the other feeds they follow.

The only problem with this is for teachers in schools who block twitter, but maybe if this is an effective system for the principals to use, they may unblock it ;)

And now, I am waiting to hear feedback from you all that there is a MUCH simpler solution that I haven't thought about yet.....

Twitter and Feedjit - let our powers combine!

There has been a bit of discussion online in the last 12 months about how to use Twitter in the classroom (presuming it is seen as a worthwhile education tool) and none of the suggestions I have read about have triggered any 'aha' response with me yet. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with what some people are doing, just that none of them have meshed with our situation. In the first week back at school for the 2009 year I had the opportunity to facilitate a powerful learning moment with some young students and their teacher. This teacher is starting out in her first ever teaching position with a class of 6 and 7 year olds in a school that has not embedded eLearning in a major way. So the kids in this class were real newbies in the Web 2 environment. The teacher set up a class blog and on their first day of school they co-created the first post and published it. It can be very mystifying to adults, let alone young students, as to 'why you would do this' and 'is there any possiblity it will even be read', amidst the millions of pages of exciting content available online. I had advised her to incorporate a Feedjit gadget into the sidebar of her blog as she was setting it up, to demonstrate to the students and parents that publishing in this way meant that their work had a chance of being read by people around the world. The authentic audience factor again! Of course this can back-fire miserably if you open your blog page with the kids and see that the only red dot on the map of the whole world is languishing in the bottom right hand corner on Auckland, New Zealand - and that visitor was probably your Mum! The next day I had a brainwave! I have often seen people on Twitter ask their network for a shout-out so they can demonstrate to their mates/their conference attendees/their boss how many people love them and follow their 140 character pearls of wisdom. This must make these adults feel great when they get the responses flooding in and presumably supports their objectives. I wondered if my Twitter network would respond in a similar way to support these kids and their fledgling blogging project. From this evolved the idea of combining the powers of Twitter and Feedjit. At 10 am the next morning, while the students were in class with their blog open to "FeedjitLive - Arrivals as they happen", I tweeted asking my network to simply click on the blog URL I supplied so the kids could see where in the world they came from. It was a bit of a challenge explaining the request on Twitter in 140 characters, and in class the students weren't told anything specific about Twitter. Well, the Twitter network came up trumps! The kids were simply wowed by watching the visual demonstration of 50+ people from around the world landing on their blog in the space of an hour. And some of those visitors (without having been asked) took an extra couple of minutes to leave a comment for the kids as they passed through. How cool is that for newbie bloggers? I'll paste a few of the comments the students wrote on their blog after this experience....

Dear visitors, Thank you for the lovely comments on our blog. Please keep on doing it because I like seeing the comments from different countries. From A

Dear Mum and Dad, Thank you for doing comments, you are now a commenter! Have you seen all the red dots there are on the map? It's so cool because people from overseas have seen our blog. I love being in Room 10.

Love from S.

Dear commenters, Thank you for commenting on our blog, thats very nice of you. I feel proud of me and the class. I like my blog. It is awesome. From X.

Thank you to all of you who responded to my tweet and provided a fun learning opportunity for some Year 3 kids and their beginning teacher. Their map went from only having visitors from Auckland to what you see on the left in an hour
Kia ora.

Download the pdf of the Feedjitlive screen after one hour