Blogger Badges

 I am so blessed to work in a Manaiakalani school, where we often hold cluster-wide Toolkits (Professional Development opportunities) that allow us to learn about various tools and resources that others have found beneficial when teaching with our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Since our cluster has started supporting "outreach" clusters over the years, we now have Online Toolkits available throughout the school year. 

Since we are all teaching from home right now (Auckland is at Level 3), our team leader suggested that we all sign up for a different Toolkit this week to share the learnings with our team. The Toolkit I signed up for is Creating Digital Badges for Blogger. I have wanted to do this for some time now, and this toolkit was the push I needed to start creating badges for my students.

I recently noticed that I have a student in my home class who has exceeded 200 blog posts this year alone (nearly 100 more than the majority of her peers). As a way to continue to push her further, and get other students to rise to the challenge for the remainder of the school year, I created a 250 Blog Posts badge.

The process was very simple once I got going, and I am happy to share what I have learnt if you are interested! Just comment below and I will happily get in contact with you.

DFI: Blog Analysis

As part of the DFI Session 4 (Dealing with Data), we spent the day exploring ways that we could better collect, collate and display data. At the end of the day, we talked a bit about how our students in Manaiakalani (and across the Outreach Clusters) make accelerated growth in their learning when they blog post a minimum of three times a week and continue their growth over the holiday periods if they continue blogging on their own.

We looked into a statistical investigation that Robyn Anderson (Panmure Bridge School) did with her Year 7/8 students looking into the regularity of their own blog posting.  We were then tasked to use the tools we explored during the day today to look deeper into some student blogs from around Maniakalani and analyse them. After doing so, I spent some time looking at my own professional blog and this is a DLO for what I came up with.

This is a task that I would love to do with my students in the near future to see how they think they measure up with the 3 posts a week average goal, and what goals they would set for themselves moving into term 3.

Blogging for Reading Mileage

My small group of students have started to finish their first blog posts about their chapter books.

Oalii was very excited to write about what she read in Chapter 1.  She made me laugh when she eagerly asked if she was allowed to write, "To be continued..." at the end of her post.

As taken from Oalii's Blog...

It was a school day Emma was not at school. She was at spy school at that school she was learning to be a spy. Today was Emma last test once she is done with this test she'll be a real spy. The test was if she'll is a real spy she'd have to take her last test. So she went to put her jumping gear and climbed in the helicopter. They sat in their seats and when they went hay up to the sky she got butterfly in her poko. but she jumped anyways when she jumped she didn't have anymore butterfly she throght it was very fun and also when she jumped she was a real spy.


                                                                 TO BE Continued


So far, the students are still pumped to be reading 'special' books and the those who have begun to write their first blog post are nearly finished.  The biggest obstacle we are having right now is time.  Chromebooks are still very new to my group of learners and everything learning task takes longer than expected as they learn to navigate their machines, Google Apps and typing on a keyboard.  I am confident that the reading is happening.  However, the children are still struggling to complete their blog posts in a timely manner.

Making Reading Mileage Fun

This past week, I was gifted a reading library of age appropriate novels for my students.  Instead of simply adding them to my classroom library shelves, I decided to try something a little different with my students reading above National Standard.  

After labeling the books with shiny gold stickers, I brought the designated students up to my teaching table and spread the books out in front of them.  I explained that these were brand new books just for them to read as long as they agreed to write a blog post at the end of each chapter.  Immediately, their eyes lit up.

Everyday after lunch, the 60 students in my ILS come in and read silently a book of choice for 10-15 minutes.  The students in my 'red bin' reading group (simply named after the bin that the books are stored in) came racing in ready to read.

Surprisingly, this morning three girls came in (all at different times) before school and asked to complete their Chapter 1 blog post.  I was shocked that during their before school free time these students were choosing to blog instead of play with their friends.

Now, I just have to make sure the excitement remains!  I'm hoping to find some more books to add to my special collection.  Also, I am curious to see if reading and commenting on the blogs of the others in the group will spark dialogic conversations among the students and increase interest for reading other books in the collection as the year goes on.