72 Hours, and Counting...

No. I haven't fallen off the face of the earth.
It's just that we move to SINGAPORE on Monday.
If you saw our home, you would not guess that it needs to be empty by Monday morning. Thankfully, our family and friends have turned out in force this week to help us. We truly could not do it without them. Thanks to them, we may even get to sleep a bit Saturday and Sunday nights - the last times I moved I pulled a few 48 hour days.

Things are happening.  In the past two weeks we have acquired...

• new water heater
• new roof
• new driveway (which can't be driven on until after we leave)
• new flooring on first floor
• new furnace
• central air

After 5 years of renters, there are so many little things that need doing.  Most of the renters were really good renters, but a 19 year old house is ready for upkeep.  Now that the house looks so great, is anyone looking to rent a 3 bedroom, 3 bath house in White Bear Township?  Call Metro Home Maintenance and ask about renting in White Bear Township.

It has been such a mad rush (and still is) that we will have some reckoning to pay later in terms of catching us up mentally with where we will be physically.  Thank you for reading.  I hope you'll continue to visit this blog after it is being authored in Singapore.

Blogged with Flock

Here and There Japan

I am greatly enjoying a blog written for children. It is titled Here and There Japan. The author is Annie Donwerth Chickamatsu. She is writing from Tokyo.

Each post focuses on one aspect of daily life. Reading it is almost a meditative experience because it forces me to slow down and focus on a basic detail of life. Recent topics have included a view from a train platform, summer is here, department store carts. Each post includes at least one well-crafted photograph. It is a wonderfully accessible look at a different culture. I hope many people find her blog and read it regularly. She would especially like to reach children, so please pass on this news.

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Reading About Reading and Writing

My new school is in the midst of professional development focus on reading instruction.  As a result, I've been more aware of articles on this topic.  I'm reading more of them, and finding edublogger who are writing about that.

Konrad Glogowski publishes one of my favorite edublogs, Zone of Proximal Development.  I consistenly enjoy it  because he pushes my thinking, helps me see the bigger picture and shows me how to move forward. He often references the researchers who are my gurus, and he shows me how he is implementing their ideas.

His recent post, Progressive Discourse, brilliantly lays out the metamorphic change that blogging brought to his classroom this year.  This is one post that I know I'll be rereading.  I'm eagerly waiting for him to write more.

 

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Flock Extensions

Interesting to me that so many of my favorite edubloggers switched to the Flock web browser at the same time that I did.  I'm glad to see such an innovative brower being so well received. 

I made Flock default browser a week or two ago, but still found myself returning to Firefox to refer to the Forecast Fox extension. (I live in Minnesota and we have lots of weather here, and it can change hourly some days.)  Imagine my delight to find an extensions menu in Flock.  It lead me to a link for more extensions, and there I found all sorts of useful extensions, including a Flocked version of Forecast Fox.

So if you were considering using Flock but didn't want to give up your Firefox extensions, you may not have to do so. There is even an extension that converts Firefox extensions for use with Flock.

Blogged with Flock

Have You Ever Fallen in Love with a Place?

I did. I fell in love with Malaysia when I had the good fortune to live there. Most of my time was spent in Kuala Lumpur, but there are other places around the country that I also hold dear.

When I knew I would be leaving, I went into a sort of mourning. To ease my sadness, I conceived of the idea of making my own photo alphabet book of Malaysia. I began a list of personal icons of Malaysia. While waiting in lines or riding in taxis, I'd take it out and work on it, pondering important questions such as, "Should M be Mont'Kiara, Merdeka Square, mosque or macaque?"

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to actually create my book. Now that I was back in the USA, I figured it would never come together. Then one day the team at Wetpaint invited me to be one of their Early Adopters to try out their new wiki platform. (I first mentioned Wetpaint here.) I readily accepted, but had no idea of what type of wiki to create. Then I realized it was the perfect opportunity to finally make my alphabet book. Now, not only will I create my keepsake of my time in KL, but others will have a place to do the same for cities or countries that they hold dear.

Wetpaint will soon have it's public launching. I've been scrambling to add content so that there is something to show in time for the launch. I invite you to come play around at my wiki. I've titled it wikiPlaces: The Essence of Your Favorite Places. I'd be delighted if you added a few photos of places that you hold dear. No expectation that you illustrate all 26 letters, just try your hand at it and let us experience a bit of a place through your eyes. I'd appreciate it.

Learnerblogs Are Good Things

Our summer blog is underway! As I mentioned before, we are using Learnerblogs.org. Thus far, I am liking the multi-user Wordpress blogs that James Farmer makes available for students for free. I had never used that platform before, but I am finding it easy to use and powerful.

Even this early on, I am impressed with how well it fits educational purposes. For example, although students need an email address to register, I was able to create all the student accounts using my own email address; many sites won't let you do that. I appreciate being able to choose whether or not people need to give an email address to be allowed to leave comments -- many children don't have email accounts and this would have prevented them from leaving comments. I love that I can choose to moderate comments before they are posted. And of course, I am able to set up my students as contributors which means their posts go through me before they are visible on the internet. One wish is a way to leave editorial comments for the blogger prior to approving the article for posting. Thus far, I've just typed a note in itallics at the top of the draft, but the student may not realize I've left them a comment; they may just think I haven't gotten around to approving it yet.

I like that the posts from all our users appear together on the main page, but that by clicking on the students' names in the category list on the side of the blog, you pull up a page of just that student's posts. This combination gives the students the feel of having their own blog, while still giving them the increased visibility that comes with a multi-user blog.

That brings up my biggest worry; since we are no longer in Blogmeister where other students are likely to find us, and since Learnerblogs doesn't have an index that makes it easy for others to find us, I worry that no one will visit our blog.

If you are interested, please visit our new blog and leave a few comments. The writing will be rougher than our previous blogs because I'm no longer editing with them, but the enthusiasm is high. If you still have students, please feel free to have them visit our blog as well. Please let us know where you are writing from if you leave a comment.
http://ssedro.learnerblogs.org

How Much Support?

I listened to one of the EdTech Talk podcasts today while I jogged. As you would expect with good interviewers and someone as well-spoken and wise as Will, it was an interesting interview. There were many points I wanted to think about, but promptly forgot as new ideas over-wrote them. However, near the end they were discussing support for teachers using Web 2.0 technologies. Will asked how much support teachers were receiving-- I immediately thought, forget support; how much direct hinderance were they ?

It made me realize that by and large, many teachers have done great things with very little support. As long as they were not being actively opposed, they found ways to make good things happen for kids. It is now that districts are filtering out more and more of these collaborative technologies, and tech budgets are being cut deeper and deeper, that true barriers are placed in the way of teachers, as opposed to just not supporting them.

It is ironic that just as blogging has moved past its early, giddy childhood, and moving into a place of wider acceptance, these technologies are being actively blocked and filtered.

New Life for the eMates!

I feel that most things I did this year were approximations. That is always true to some degree, but this year, my constant mantra was, "Next year, I'll know to do x instead." Our eMate experience was no exception.

I feel our pilot was a success. Students loved using them right from the start. There was a very low learning curve, and all the time we spent on keyboarding in the fall paid off as soon as we started using the eMates. Unlike so many word processing machines that find their way into schools, the eMates have a large enough screen that you can see a paragraph or more of text. This leads to much more coherent writing that when you can only read one line at a time. Add to it the spell check, the ease of editing, and the novelty of having a laptop computer in school, and it is no wonder that the children wrote up a storm on them. The changes were the most dramatic with reluctant writers. Even children who would not write when sitting at a desktop computer were able to overcome writers block with an eMate on their lap. Maybe it was because they could sit under tables or sprawl on the floor with these nifty devices.

If I had them to use next year, we'd still start the year with keyboarding, but move as quickly as we could into working on the eMates. I'd set them up for different users with a login for security. More importantly, I'd have a better organized writing curriculum so that we would be using them more-- we didn't use them a lot until we were working on DARE essays and blogs this spring. However, they were a success and I was sad to think of them languishing unused next year.

Therefore I am more thrilled than I can tell you that our eMates will live on next year. Due to budget constraints, my school is reconfiguring by adding split classes for part of the day. One of the teachers will teach all of the writing for the fourth/fifth grade team. She is interested in using the eMates. Not only that, but my highly supportive and resourceful principal has found the money to fix the hinges and replace all the battery packs. She has also located the original cart which can be used for storage and charging. To sweeten the deal further, the wonderful person we are hiring to fix the eMates will donate a few printers.

Last Friday, most of the fifth grade and part of the fourth grade was gone at Valleyfair. I used that opportunity to introduce the remaining fourth graders to the eMates. They worked through the built-in eMate Tour and Works Practice. The children loved them. One child didn't want to quit to go to lunch! They all came back to work on them again in the afternoon. I doubt they will remember it all next fall, but it will let them be more expert than the other children in the fall. And their enthusiasm will excite the other children. Nice to start the year with the children eager to start writing.

An Even Better Idea... Learnerblogs

I love how much I get done when I should be working on report cards. If only I were this driven all the time

I have changed my mind since the previous posts. I have decided to set up a class blog at Learnerblogs.org. I found great directions for how to do so at MHetherintong.net. This will solve all sorts of problems. All the students will be posting to the same place, so at least they will be reading each other's blogs. I can still monitor the experience, and learn HOW to manage it all as a hobby before I need to use it on my new job. Finally, it does permit me to moderate, which gives a bit more control as these children continue to blog.

It may be that none of them continue to blog; I know all about good intensions coming to naught when we finally switch to summer mode. However, this seems like a good option, and I can open it up to other children on the team, since it will be moderated.

Possibly best of all, it gives me a legitimate reason to play around with a new blog when I should be working on reports.

Once Again, What should we do with our Blogs?

Monday starts the last week of school. My students are asking questions about their journals and their blogs. I'm not certain what to do. The blogs are easiest to think about. I see a multi-tiered approach. I think I will send home a parent letter with the following options.

1. Do nothing, or tick the "Remove Blog" option. - I will remove the blog at the end of the year. This is the easy option. I will remove it rather than just leave it there to free up server space and to keep visitors from writing comments that are never read by the blogger.
   
2. Let Blogmeister blog remain in place, with parent agreeing to oversee content. I will continue to monitor comments and delete the inappropriate ones, but I will not continue to monitor quality before an article is published. That becomes the parent's job. This option has the advantage of letting the children continue to use a platform they are familiar with, and keeps me in touch with them.
   
3. Move blog to a new platform, or start a new blog on a new platform. I am thinking of offering to help the children set up a blog at either Blogger or Learner Blogs. Blogger has the advantage of being easy to use, of having spell check, and of me knowing how to use it well. It has the problem of being out there on its own so no one may find their blog, and it has that darned button at the top that randomly takes them to another blog which may or may not be appropriate. I can take that button out, but if they change templates, it will be back again. Learner Blogs are more powerful, and may link them with other student bloggers, but none of us have used Wordpress, so there will be a learning curve for teacher and student just at a time when we are not going to be seeing each other. I personally plan to start an Edublogs blog so I can learn Wordpress. I may want to use it with teachers in Singapore, so I want to get up to speed.

In terms of the journals, I am at more of a loss. They can remain in Moodle, but since I can't get Moodle to notify me when something new is posted, I'll need to keep checking it manually. That seems like a set up for failure. I checked Nicenet, but it won't notify me either. I wish they just had email accounts; they would meet our needs beautifully. I could offer to give the students Gmail accounts, but it requires that families already have an email address, and my most avid journal writers don't have that. We can get around it using my .Mac aliases, but it all seems iffy. They just may have to write me letters! One final option may be Think.com. I need to check it out to see if it will work for us. The registration period may take too long.

Collaborative Diagrams

Recently, Clarence was writing about using a simple matrix from the Medici Effect to thing about educational change. He then created a wiki to allow us all to join in the discussion. I love the entire project. My only frustration was that in a wiki, the information was no longer in a matrix, making it visually more difficult to process.

I wish the information was in some form on online, collaborative concept map instead. However, I have been unable to find a tool that allows us to create them. I had been looking just a few weeks ago. I even sent a note to the Zoho team suggesting they create one, since it is clearly missing.

Today I heard about Gliffy. It is an online, collaborative app for creating diagrams such as flow charts, concept maps, and room maps. I thought it might be just the tool for projects like this. I registered for a free account and gave it a try.

I liked how easy it was to use, and the well-organized sets of icons. My disappointment was that what I really want is a tool for easily generating concept maps, a sort of Inspiration online. What I found was that I can most certainly draw concept maps, but I must create the text with a text tool, find the icon, resize it to fit, combine the text and graphics, draw connecting lines, etc.

It IS a great tool and it allows you get the diagrams onto your wikis and blogs quite easily. I suspect I will use it, but not when I am trying to brainstorm. I'll use it when I want to create diagrams to be posted online.

[P.S. I couldn't add text at all when I was using Flock as my browser, but it worked fine with Safari and Firefox.]

[Addition: Clint, the Co-Founder of Gliffy left me this comment: "...In Gliffy, you can automatically add text to an object just by starting to type while the object is selected or by double clicking the object. Hope this might solve some of you're frustration. Also, we might be adding more concept/mind mapping capabilities in the near future."]

Library Books Due Before Auction

That title goes with the article that was posted here. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant for this blog. It was meant for my school blog. This is the second time this week that a blog post has gone to the wrong blog. The first one was because I posted from Flock and I neglected to use the drop down menu to select where to send the post.

This post I actually wrote within Blogger and looked at it and failed to notice that I was posting to the wrong blog. And here I thought I was coping pretty well with our move and the end of the school year. Maybe I'm a bit more overwhelmed than I realized.

Combining Blogging and Comprehension Toolkit

I've been using Heinneman's "Comprehension Toolkit" created by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. It is really good stuff for really helping kids comprehend real texts. Then today I was reading Nancy McKeand's post of her reflections on blogging with students this year. She blogged with her middle school reading students about what they were reading. Made me realize how rich this could have been combining blogging with the Comprehension Toolkit. The toolkit does a good job of scaffolding gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the students. This could be the step after the lessons. I love having kids comment on sticky notes, but I can never get around and conference with them enough to help them grow more. If they were blogging from their sticky notes, I could do that outside of class, saving the face-to-face follow ups for where they were really needed.

Yeah, I know, this isn't truly unique thinking on my part. But it is thoughts of how to build on the good and make it better, which is progress.

Now, I must get back to preparing for our shippers. They arrive Wednesday and we are far from ready.

Lessons Learned from our Wikis

Journal Wiki
I'm learning a great deal from the two student wikis we have in use. The first one is the journal wiki that I've written about before except its lack of change notification. I received a good suggestion from Diane P; she is making great use of Nicenet and suggested that it might meet my needs. I'll check it out if I can remember my old Nicenet user name and password.

Important Poems Wiki
Since my wonderful communications class has mastered every bit of technology that I've thrown at them, I decided to give wikis a try as well so that they would have the exposure and I could get a handle on how they worked so I could plan for their use next year.

Unlike our journal wikis which are private, our entire class can edit the poem wiki. At this point, that has proved to be more of a weakness than a strength...

We spent a few brief periods in the lab working on it last week. The index page of the wiki was to be a list of their names. Their names would be links to their pages where the poems would be. I had thought of creating the list of names myself, but I wanted them to have some experience with the CamelCase necessary to create links in the Moodle wiki (or at least, necessary when you are running such an old OS that you don't get the toolbar in edit mode).

The first problem arose on the second day when kids would click the edit button on the index page and make their changes. When they tried to save the changes, they were told the page was in use because other children were editing it at the same time. As I realized what was happening, I told them to all leave and I'd type the list. After I typed in all the names, I realized that one child had NOT logged out and so I hunted him down and had to type all the names again. Finally, all was working well.

This afternoon we were in the lab. Some children were commenting on each other's Important Poems in our Poem Wiki in Moodle. Other students were still trying to get their poems into the wiki. Unfortunately, this became impossible for a brief period. It all centered around one student. This poor kid had his computer crash last week when he was drafting the poems. As a result of the crash, his own computer didn't have the poems, but even after a restart all other computers claimed the couldn't access the file because it was in use. Fortunately, we used the Apple OS trick of opening a recent document and that pulled it up.

Today when we were back in the lab he was eager to get the poems onto the wiki where they would be safer. Unfortunately, he's not real big on reading or listening to directions and he managed to delete the index page of our wiki by pasting his poem over it. I tried using the wiki's revert to previous draft feature, but I couldn't get it working. I'll need to read up on it.

In any case, I asked everyone to once again get out of the index page. I retyped all the names. To my relief, the new list of names was linked to the children's poem pages. If that hadn't worked, I didn't know how to relink them.

A few minutes after all the links were restored, the poor kid's friend helped him to do the exact same thing AGAIN. His friend pasted the poem over the index page. It was a teachable moment as I showed them how to tell what page they were editing, and then I typed all the names again. Actually, a few of the names survived this second assault so I only had to retype half of them.

So, up to this point, the highly editible nature of wikis has been a hindrance to progress. However, I think that as we move ahead, they will master wikis and be able to respond to each other's writing even from the old computer lab where the forum module won't work correctly. In the future, I'd use one of the online wiki platforms that allow comments and provide a real-world audience. Until then, I'll probably get really quick at retyping.

Stupid Grade Book Tricks using Easy Grade Pro

I started the year using Makin the Grade as my grading program. Our district has a site license so I invested in the OS X platform version and began using it. In the past, I have always created my own grade books using Excel. I'd merge these into our report cards which were in MS Word. This worked better than what teachers had been doing before, but the spreadsheets always became complex enough that they had trouble merging correctly. We figured out tedious work arounds, and it was still quicker than working by hand, but it wasn't ideal.

My district uses an online report card system. Merging grades into it from Excel or any other program isn't an option, so I decided to use Makin the Grade. I tried it for a term, but it didn't fit me well and my middle-age eyes found it difficult to track across the screen.

A friend and colleague was also questioning whether it was the best program for him to use, so he did some research and settled on Easy Grade Pro. It has suited my work style and been much easier for me to read and to locate information.

All worked fine until yesterday when I printed out Almost End of the Term grade slips to help my students track their progress. Normally I print a summary of each category at the top and then include an itemized list of all missing assignments at the bottom. This time, the summary at the top would list X number of missing assignments, but then there would be nothing listed in the itemized section. I hadn't noticed this discrepancy, but a few of my astute students did.

It took me a while to track down the problem. In the assignment set up window, one of the settings had somehow been changed so that the assignments were supposed to be included in the scoring but excluded from reports. I have no memory of toggling on that setting, but once on, all new assignments carry that attribute until you choose a new one. Normally this is a useful feature-- as long as you are awake enough to notice what you are doing. Fortunately, my furniture ships to Singapore on the 31st. Hopefully after that I'll be a bit more aware of what I'm doing on the job.

There. That's probably far more than you wanted to know, but hopefully of use to someone.

Do You Have a Favorite Children's Book?

What's your favorite children's book (besides Harry Potter)? If you have a few minutes, please go to my new Vaestro channel and tell us about it.

Vaestro is a new, free, online service that lets anyone set up a channel where people can have an asynchronous voice discussion. You don't need to sign in or subscribe; to leave a comment, just go there and take part. All you need is a microphone. I just used the tiny pin hole microphone on my iBook and it worked quite well.

To add your comment, click on the reply button, then click the record button and start talking. Don't worry; you get to listen to your recording before it is posted. It is up to you to delete or approve it.

If you experience technical difficulties, anything from the site being blocked by your school's filters to the URL not working, please post me a comment here. I'm asking all of your to be my guinea pigs before I release the link to my students. Thanks for you assistance.

Arianna's Nutrition Expedition

I'm working on a nutrition unit with my fifth graders. My pre-testing showed that with a few exceptions, my students do not already know the information I plan to teach. The students who did score 15/20 points on the pretest had been playing around on my SchoolNotes page over the weekend and had already tried out many of the resources. I found it encouraging that students are voluntarily using the resources on my site even before I introduce them.

I started the unit by setting up a journal in Moodle in which students told me what they knew and wanted to know about nutrition. Next, they took a pre-test in Moodle. I adapted it from the pre-test provided in Arianna's Nutrition Expedition, a nutrition unit available online from the National Dairy Council. In the past, I've shied away from teaching materials from groups with a vested interest, but these resources are excellent, not merely an advertising venue for the council.

As they finished the pretest, they played the Blast Off! game I mentioned here to expose them to the ideas and information they will be learning. Next, we began using the lessons in Arianna's Nutrition Expedition. I found the lessons very age-appropriate. They held my students' interest and engaged them in thinking about the topics being taught. For example, after an adventure story that taught about the different food groups in the food pyramid, the students completed a worksheet in which they had to identify which foods were placed in the wrong groups. I heard students having good discussions with each other as they tried to figure out which foods were misplaced. After that, they responded to journal questions.

The final activity was to go to the lab and play the first of four online computer games that are part of the unit. We played Quintricious! First students had to use colored eye droppers to label each food to indicate the food group to which it belonged. Each pair of students were stumped by a few foods. Peanut butter was the trickiest overall-- many pairs of students had to try it in all of the wrong groups before figuring out it went in the meat group. This gave us a natural lead-in to helping them rename the group to the Meats, Beans and Nuts group. This will become clearer after we start discussing the nutrient basis for assigning foods to groups.

When the foods were all assigned to the correct group, the game took the students through three levels of a Tetris-style game where they matched up foods from the same food group. This part of the game was well-scaffolded. In level one, all the foods retained the color coding the students had given them. By level three, there were no clues as to what food group each food belongs.

I hope the worksheets and games continue to cause spontaneous, focused discussions occur. I tend to shy away from science worksheets in general because they tend to require such low level thinking, but these are doing just what they should. If you teach fourth or fifth grade and have a nutrition unit at your grade level, I hope you find these resources useful.

Different Flavors of Journals in Moodle

I last wrote that we were trying to use the assignment module as a tool for the ongoing journaling between each student and myself. I liked the privacy and that the text fields didn't become increasing narrow as the replies nested. Unfortunately, even when I selected the options for my comments to be in-line, it didn't work. My comments would not intersperse between their comments and the children found the whole venture very confusing.

Thankfully, pdzone left me a comment to my earlier post, suggesting I try the wiki module for my journals. I set it up with each student having their own wiki. The wikis are private; only the student and I can see or edit the wiki.

The students were glad we were abandoning the assignment-style journals and they loved the term wiki-wiki, so they were game to give it a try. Thus far, the wiki seem to be working. Students were a bit confused at first about how to add to the journal- the edit button wasn't an obvious choice, since in their minds, they weren't editing.

Students were also confused by what they saw after hitting the edit button. The cause of the problem is that to make the journals easier to read, I make my replies italic and blue-- the students are using an older web browser that doesn't give them formatting options. Since my text is formatted, when students click the edit button, my posts are encased in html coding. However, I showed them how to just click at the top of the edit box, add a few blank rows, and type their response, and they quickly adapted.

Our only real difficulty came last weekend when I went to make my first replies. I was using Firefox version 1.5.0.3. It appears that this new version doesn't play well with the Moodle wiki. I could start new wikis using it, but if I tried to edit an existing wiki, my additions disappeared when I hit the save button. After a frustrating ten minutes, I thought to switch to Netscape. This solved the problem.

I am excited that the wiki option is working because it is quicker; I spend less time waiting for Moodle pages to load. It seems to meet all our needs and since the pages don't fill as quickly, I won't need to keep switching us to a fresh set up. This is important since my students want to continue journaling after the school year is over. I love the idea, but don't want to spend a lot of time on upkeep. Now the challenge is to see if edit notification is available via email or RSS.

A Surprising Lack of Sophistication

Friday found my science classes in the good computer lab to take the pretest for our nutrition unit. With the remaining time, I had them play the My Pyramid BlastOff! game as a lead in to learning about the new food pyramid. It is one of the many resources available at the Mypyramid.gov website.

The game challenges students to fuel a rocket ship by planning a day's worth of balanced nutrition and physical activity. I expected that my video game savvy fifth graders would see right through it and easily blast off to the planet. I was wrong! They were fueling the rocket with the cookies, sugary cereals and soda that they normally drink, and they were all losing the game. That made me like the game all the more.

One strength is that the initial screen gives them a few quick guidelines. It wasn't much reading, but a number of students blew right past it anyway. Next, like any good video game, it doesn't tell you everything. For example, the food pyramid that dominates the screen has a fuel gauge on each of the food groups. The directions don't mention that you have a balanced diet when all the fuel gauges are at full. After a few losses, my students started figuring that out.

When your rocket ship goes up in a cloud of smoke, you get a screen that shows which parts of your diet were balanced and which weren't. After losing the game, I noticed students actually stopping to pour over that page.

What I liked the most was that I couldn't get students to quit playing to go to lunch, and a number of them asked if I would give them credit for beating the game if they finished it at home and printed out the certificate. The one student who did successfully complete the game admitted that she had been on my SchoolNotes page earlier in the week. She'd seen the link and had played the game at home a few times. Gotta love that!

In any case, I think it was a good anticipatory set and with the carrot of getting to play the game at the end of the unit, I think their studies will seem more purposeful and be more focused. Not a bad payoff for 20 minutes at a website.

How Do They Do That?

Okay, maybe someone out there can explain this to me. It seems that almost any time I mention an online app or service in this blog, I receive a helpful comment from someone associated with the company. I love their responsiveness. I've often learned timely, helpful information from these commenters. My only question is, how do they know I wrote about them?

I know there are things like Trackback, but I thought the poster had to do something to invoke it. Are they Googling their name? Is Technorati that quick to pick up hits? To test that, I went to Technorati and typed in eMates, since that was something I posted on recently. However, it didn't pull up my post. I tried it with a few other terms and still no luck, so that isn't how it works.

If anyone does know how this works, let me know. I'm intrigued.

[Upate: I think I figured it out. I went to Google's blog search and entered the same terms and they pulled my blog up in the first few hits. Not surprising since my blog is at Blogger which is owned by Google. Smart strategy on the part of start-ups!]

An Update

Arranging for my move to Singapore and keeping afloat at work are consuming every waking moment, which is why I've been posting so rarely. Here's an update.

For the past two weeks, when we weren't taking state tests, our time in the computer lab was spent writing DARE essays. For my communications class, I once again used Moodle to give students feedback. As before, it seemed to be an effective conferencing tool for my students and keep my from lugging piles of essays back and forth each night.

Starting next week, the NCLB testing will monopolize our computer lab completely, so this week we put a burst of energy into our blogs. On Monday I was out sick. I lifted my blogging lesson for the reserve teacher directly from Clarence Fisher's blog post on Supporting Discourse. As usual, a few kids were completely untouched and are showing no change in their commenting. However, a number of them are trying out the comment starters that Clarence found on Anne Davis' blog. For most of them, it still sounds a bit awkward. However, I am a firm believer in honoring approximations as students develop new skills. Hopefully they will soon own these new tools.

I've been streaking with the software side of things. The Superglu page I set up to make a one-stop link to our blogs is finally behaving. I quit making changes, so I assume it was technical difficulties with their servers. Now I'm struggling with Blogmeister. Some of the time, I receive email letters with comments to approve. When I click on the link to approve them, instead of a window popping open in my web browser that announces, "Comment Approved!", I get the message that no record exists. I'm getting a fairly high number of these. They never have a name with them, so I can't tell if it is one of our own students or one of our visitors. Luckily, the comment is visible in the email, so I show that to my students.

Final challenge at the moment is to find a painless way to track student blog posts through the writing process. In the past, I taught a number of courses at Hamline University. Participation in online forums via Blackboard was a mandatory part of the course. Since I found myself tracking those from home, school, and on campus, I set up a database in my PDA. Each student was a record. Each assignment was a field. The system worked well.

Since then, the software I used has gone out of business. I thought of using an Excel spreadsheet so I could mail merge it with a report card, but my Quickoffice never installed correctly and the company refused to help. I thought of using one of the nifty, free online web app creation tools, such as ZohoCreator. I still might go that route, especially if I can download the data in some friendly format. Or, I might use the free Mobile DB program on my PDA, even though it won't play nicely with anything on my desktop. One thing is for sure. I won't be toting a piece of paper as a checklist. With my impending move, there are already far too many of those little papers in my life.

The Kindness of Strangers

One of the things I most appreciate about edubloggers as a whole is their kindness. This kindness translates into a willingness to share of their knowledge and time.

This was demonstrated to me again this week as our student blogs took off. I posted a short notice in the ClassBlogmeister discussion group announcing our blogs and asking for teachers and classes to stop by -- especially those who could model good commenting, since some of my students are STILL stuck in the chat room genre of commenting.

Within minutes of my post, two teachers had already gone in and left a few comments. Soon other teachers contacted me. One is going to have her middle school students visit. A fourth grade teacher added our blogs to their list of blogs to visit.

As always, these first comments had an electrical effect on my bloggers. They knew all along that their work would be on the Internet. As a result, many of them have spent more time than usual on revising and editing. However, it wasn't until they were reading comments from people in California and Italy that it really clicked for them. This is not just some assignment. This is real. Real people are reading and responding to what they have written.

Here's where I could get all sappy about the power of the pen, the importance of real world applications, the empowering effect of the red/write web. I'll spare you that, even though it all has me beaming. I'll just say that you for the kindness of edubloggers.

KWL via Moodle

I often use KWL charts at the start of a new unit to assess both what the students already know and what they want to learn. As I prepare our next health unit, I decided to use the journal module in Moodle rather than have them write their KWL on paper.

To my surprise, I seemed to get longer responses from them than I usually get on paper. This is especially surprising because the students who are not in my communications class have not spent much time keyboarding this year so their typing is a bit laborious. For most students, the spelling was highly inaccurate and a number of words were left out completely-- a sure sign that they aren't rereading what they write. I know that is typical of children, but I wish I had ideas on how to get them to reread-- ideas that do not involve lower grades or some other punishment. Ultimately, I don't want them to edit their work to get a good grade; I want them to edit their work because poor mechanics make it more difficult for their readers to understand the writer's message.

Using the journal module worked well because it is private- students can only see their own entry, no one else's, and because I can read all of the responses from one page rather than needing to click on each message as I must do in a forum or assignment module. I wonder what module I should have used so that they could add their "What I learned" section after the unit; journals only allow one entry from the student.

Big Changes-- Singapore Ahead!

I'll keep this brief, but I am excited to announce that next year I will again be in S.E. Asia. Kent and I have accepted jobs at Singapore American School. He will teach grade 4 and I will be the IT Coordinator for the intermediate school.

This is a bittersweet announcement. I have finally figured out how to do my job here in Minnesota. I work for a gifted administrator. I work with a talented and dedicated staff. I have greatly enjoyed teaching this bunch of students who have been so willing to try whatever new bit of technology I placed before them. My school district welcomed me back after my previous leave, and now I am looking to leave again. Most difficult of all is the thought of once again leaving behind family and friends.

On the flip side is this opportunity to work at such a well-regarded school in a part of the world we enjoy. I'll once again be able to focus on technology integration, working with both students and staff. (Sometimes I need to pinch myself to believe that someone is willing to pay me to do work I enjoy so much.) I'll be teaching in a place with a strong, well-supported IT infrastructure.

We'll be living in a country that the UN human development index lists as one of the top ten countries in the world based on income, life expectancy and education. It is a tiny country located on an island that is approximately 26 x 14 miles in size. It has high population density, but then half of the land is set aside for parks, so maybe that balances out the crowding. It has excellent mass transit. I could go on and on, but I won't.

I wonder how this new job will change this blog? On one hand, technology integration will be much easier to implement there, but with strong programs already in place, there may be less room for exploring such as I've done with the eMates and Blogmeister and Moodle this year. However, I'm not worried; this is a fabulous opportunity for us.

In the mean time, we need to finish up this school year, rent the house and pack out. Anyone out there have any words of advice for two Minnesotans moving to Singapore?

The Moodle/Blogging Connection

Our student blogging project has taken a serendipitous turn. Students were writing their first blog entries in Blogmeister and submitting them for my approval. I was writing them carefully thought out responses, and then the responses were disappearing. Not all of them, but most of them. Not just once, but twice. Each time it took me well over an hour to comment, and now those comments are gone. Not Good.

I contacted the ClassBlogmeister discussion group but no one was able to offer any suggestions. What to do? These were the first student blogs in the school, maybe in the district. Oversight was definitely called for, but how to proceed?

I figured our most likely solution would involve our Moodle. I decided to create a blog post forum. Students could post their draft to the forum and then not only I but the rest of the class could conference with them on the piece by leaving replies. In addition to helping the children learn to conference on their writing, this could be the tool I was searching for to move them away from the inane, "Look at me!" type of responses they were currently leaving, to more thoughtful, helpful responses.

When I introduced it to the class, I tried to help them see that this was not the place to actually respond to the writing-- we'd do that in the comments section of the blog when the piece was published. Here in the forum, we are to respond to the following questions.

1. Does the lead grab your attention and make you want to read more?
   
2. What other parts of the blog post really held your attention? Why?
3. What questions do you have after reading their post? Ask questions that will help them improve the article.
   
4. Help them edit the mechanics if you notice mistakes.

After a week, I'm pleased to say that this solution has been a success in a number of ways. Most of the children are leaving thoughtful, honest comments. Most of the comments are constructive and many are the ones I would have made to help the writers craft their articles. Many of the children are revising their writing based on the comments they received. Many of the children are reading the comments I left for other children and that has expanded the types of comments they are writing. Finally, the children are enjoying it, asking to go in and leave comments in their free time. They don't need to twist my arm on that one!

A new challenge with this solution is that the children are not able to revise their post in the forum. They could make the revisions in Appleworks and then add the revised piece to the forum as a new discussion item, but that separates the piece from the earlier comments. Another challenge is that it became difficult for me to track what I had read and what changes had been made by the writers. We needed to tweak this solution to solve these problems.

I have been playing around with wikis in another context so I decided to use the wiki module in Moodle. If the children created a new wiki page for each of their articles, the rest of the class could comment at the bottom of the page. The writer could continue to revise the article and the class could continue to comment until the piece was ready for publication. I thought tracking what needed to be read could be tricky, but this process would expose my students to a wiki, which is a goal I've had for a while.

Unfortunately, after I set up the wiki I realized that the Moodle wiki doesn't allow comments. I know that the Moodle folks are preparing to roll out a different wiki module. It was in beta testing the last time I checked.

Since the wiki wasn't solving our problem, I set up an assignment module. Now, students draft their blogs in Appleworks so that they can make use of the spell check. They post the drafts in the blog forum. They revise their drafts based on the feedback from peers and the submit the blog article in an assignment module.

Only the teacher and the writer can view the post in the assignment module, but the teacher can leave comments and the writer can make revisions right in the module. When the piece is ready for publication, they post it in Blogmeister and I publish it. It sounds ridiculously complex, but it has grown organically, so the children have been there each step of the way.

Most importantly, the children are writing and writing and writing. When they can't be in the computer lab, they are voluntarily using the eMates to draft their blogs. [They love to use the eMates.] Some children have written more in the past three weeks than they wrote for me all last term! And this doesn't take into account all the writing they are doing when they leave replies for other students. Along with this, our Moodle forum and assignment modules are allowing me to conference with each child, and for other voices to join in. It is creating a rich conversation. I'm eager to see where it goes.

Slacker's Reward

I've had a wonderfully productive weekend.

First off, I explored a visually appealing beta wiki platform called Wet Paint. Not realizing they were still in beta, I created my first real wiki right in the middle of their feedback site (oops.) Realizing my error, I cut and paste each page from Wet Paint into Wikispaces. I had poked around at Wikispaces, but not really dug in to create something. I am starting to find my way. Today I discovered that I need to use double brackets to insert html code into the wiki. That should make it easier for me to get the pictures where I want them and make other adjustments.

The wiki I created at Wikispaces, is designed to assist teachers who decide to teach overseas. From what I see, there are many resources to help teachers secure an overseas job. However, once you land the job and need to back up your old live and get settled in a new country, there are fewer resources online. My wiki is an attempt to document what needs to be done to make that move a successful one. If you have something to contribute on that topic, please help edit the wiki. In an attempt to thwart at least a few of the spambots, I've set it up so that you must be a member of Wikispaces to edit the wiki. However, membership is free, so I hope that won't deter you from taking part.

In the course of creating the wiki, I finally downloaded my first picture from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. Flickr is set up to upload photos into your blog, complete with correct attribution to the photographer. I first attempted to move it from the blog to the wiki, but that was a failure, so I downloaded the photo and uploaded it to the wiki. I didn't know how to tweak the html of a wiki page, so my first attempt is inelegant, but better than the page was without the photo.

This weekend I researched what I'd need to do to replace the fading batteries in the eMates. I was able to take part in a small way in the barn raising at the EdTechTalk Wiki. I finally caught up on the feeds in my NetNewsWire Lite. Sent overdue emails. Talked with friends overseas. Ran a bunch of errands and so on.

Unfortunately, little of what I did was what needed to be done for a successful school week. This morning I should have been facing the grim prospect of not being fully planned for the week. Instead, I awoke to the sound of ice hitting the windows and the telephone ringing to tell us it was a snow day!! Now the trees branches are outlined with seven inches of snow and I'm in my easy chair. Life is Good.

A Few Tools to Help You See Your Audience

I mentioned coComment! a few days ago. I've been playing with two other free blogging tools worth mentioning.

The first is Amazing Counters. The service has a wide variety of counters to choose from. Once you've installed the counter, the site gives you a variety site statistics, and allows you to monitor all hits or just unique hits. Another useful feature is being able to teach the counter to not count your own visits. On the down side, the counter comes with an advertisement link. Fortunately, you are able to make it very small (see the link at the very bottom of this blog).

The other tool is great fun. gVisit.com allows you to track visitors to your blog using a Google Map. To use it, register at the site and tell it your blog's URL. They give you a piece of javascript code to insert into the html code of your blog. For those of you using Blogger, this is easily accomplished even if you don't know anything about html. From your settings controls, click on the Template tab and paste the code into the page. It doesn't seem to matter where on the page it is, and it doesn't show on the blog.

After that, visit the link they gave you to view a world map showing the location of your visitors. You can also display the data on your blog. The free service allows you to track your 20 most recent visitors. If you donate any amount of money to them, they will expand your features, including allowing you to track the 100 most recent visitors.

After I set up a SuprGlu page to aggregate our student blogs, I'll add both a counter and a Google Map. As Mr. Kuropatwa says,

The real "blog juice" is the global audience. When kids finally realize that what they write is being read and talked about by people across the globe they are inspired to do better work; they want to make a good impression. ... This is the main reason all my class blogs have Visitor Maps. They were installed, but invisible, for the first two weeks of the semester. When the map links went live the students were able to "see" their audience immediately.

What an exciting time we are living in, when these powerful tools are free and easy to use.

Creating GIFT quizzes for Moodle

Moodle continues to be part of our classroom life.
One of the many ways we use it is for quizzes. The students tell me they prefer to take their quizzes and tests in Moodle because they get instant feedback. I prefer it because for low-level things like spelling tests, they take half the time and are scored correctly by someone besides me.

Actually, they have taken much longer, but the time has been coming out of my prep time instead of my class time. Creating the quizzes in Moodle is a fairly tedious process. It is easy and works well, but it is putzy.

I knew that the Moodle quiz module would import GIFT files, but I wasn't having much luck getting that to work. I incorrectly assumed that if I exported the files in GIFT format and opened them with TextEdit, then I could do a quick "Save As" command and voila! I'd have a template that I could quickly update and then upload each week.

It was a good idea, but it wasn't working. Actually, it worked once, but the next week the file wouldn't upload. And once a quiz has been taken by the students, I could no longer export the questions. In frustration, I've continued creating the quizzess in Moodle.

Today I finally took the time to play around with different options. Here's what I discovered.

• Don't start with exported question. Open a new document in your text editor.
• Make sure the text editor is set to use plain text, not any flavor of rich text.
• Leave a blank line between each question, otherwise all the questions import as one big question.
• Make sure the file has the suffix .txt
  

Following those guidelines, my short answer quizzess are importing cleanly and saving me time. What's frustrating now is that I waited so long to figure this out. Moodle has an excellent built-in help system and by following enough links within it, I found clear directions that got me started on the aforementioned discoveries. Nothing like reading the directions to get me on my way.

eMates Save the Day!

Used by permission (Sonny Hung)

The more I play with them, the more impressed I am with the old eMates a colleague rescued for us. Their main application suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a drawing program, all of which are intuitive and responsive. The eMates came loaded with an interactive tour and a training program to get you up to speed with the applications. Within 15 minutes my students were enthralled. Within 30 minutes, not only were they feeling comfortable with the machines, they were using them to write their next blog posts.

Their rugged clamshell design includes a sturdy handle so carrying them around the classroom was easy. The screens even have a backlight button which meant the pairs of students could lay on the ground under their desks-- for some reason this was a popular seating choice during this activity. I suspect it felt a bit like being in a cave or a tent with a flashlight on.

Despite charging, about half of the eMates needed to be plugged in to work. The others are still capable of retaining a battery charge. That amazes me. My classroom only has 3 outlets since 1.5 of the walls are movable. We have to charge the eMates in shifts. Fortunately, they have charging indicator lights on the top that change from orange to green when they are charged. That makes it easy for a child to monitor them and swap the plug to a different machine to get them all charged.

We tried out the eMates last fall and then haven't touched them again because of the fatal hinge problem that causes dried out old hinges to uncoil and poke through the thin cable the carries the video signal and the digitizing signals inside the computer. (The eMates have touch screens, hence the digitizing signal.) When we tested them last fall, only one showed signs of this type of damage, so I was hoping to hire my father to fix all the hinges. This is an involved process so it is slow going. I finally decided that we just needed to start using them. Our compromise is that now that we have opened them, we are not shutting them again. We figure if we don't move the hinge, no further damage will occur before we can get them fixed.

My jobs this weekend include...

1. Buying strip outlets that accommodate the eMates' large power plugs-- a conventional 6 outlet strip can only accommodate two eMate plugs.
2. Figuring out how to dock them with one of the Macs in my classroom.
3. Finding a serial to USB cable that will allow us to print to the Epson printer that was donated to our class.
4. Rewrite my lesson plans for the week to make use of these great machines.
   

The kindness of online techies continues to fill me with gratitude. A member of the local user group gave me the original eMate manual which is proving very useful. He is part of an amazingly supportive online community of Newton users who have been answering my newbie questions. There is an online Netwon archive and WikiWikiNet to keep me from bothering the listserv too often.

coComment!

One of my frustrations with blog comments is that when I leave them, I forget to go back and follow the conversation. That has made me hesitant to ask questions in the comments sections of blogs. Fortunately, that is all changing thanks to coComment!

Here's how it works...

1. Go to their website.
   
2. Set up a free account.
   
3. Install their button on your favorites toolbar.
   
4. Add your coComment feed to your RSS aggregator.
5. Go leave comments in other people's blogs.

Now when I comment in people's blogs, I click the coComment button in my browser before I publish the comment and voilá! I can now easily track the comments to the blog posts to which I have commented.

I was so inspired by the potential of coComment that I did a bunch of blog commenting over the weekend, asking questions to my heart's content. It felt good to be conversing again.

Sharing the Things They Care About

I am just starting individual blogs with this year's group of fifth graders. I have been wondering how to set up my curriculum so that my students are reading and responding to blogs outside of our community. I may have hit upon a bit of a plan. As I introduced the blogs, I told them that part of the power of having their own blog was that it could help them share the things they care about, and it could connect them with other people with the same interests.

They got it. As they began their first posts, words poured from their fingers. Students who seemed to struggle with writer's block in other situations were writing amazingly well crafted first drafts on topics such as video games and golden retrievers. Maybe my next step is to help them set up Bloglines accounts, as Clarence has done, and help them learn to find those other blogs of interest.

My fear is that they will find and aggregate inappropriate feeds. I agree that fear-based decision-making isn't a place I like to go, but I also don't want to sabotage this first blogging venture in my school, possibly my district, by taking on too much too soon. For now, I'll just take the first step; I'll check in the blogging permission forms, and start pushing my administrator publish button in our Classblogmeister account.

The Evolution of an Essay

Essays and fifth graders are not a natural combination. Unlike most of the forms of writing in the fifth grade curriculum, children have no experience with essays. No one sits their preschooler on their knee and reads them essays. No one is making picture books or children's movies of essays. In short, I'm asking them to write something for which they have no internal schema.

Earlier this year we made a few quick jabs at essays. In truth, they were more opinion pieces rather than essays. They were written in response to questions from the local newspaper, such as "What do you fear?" and "Who has it harder in life, children or adults?" A few of the more advanced writers understood what I mean by introduction, body and conclusion and made good beginner's efforts at including them. Most kids just wrote a few sentences.

After our environmental trip, I assigned them to write a real essay. I took them through all sorts of prewriting to generate ideas of what they learned on the trip. We did mapping exercises to discover ways to organize their ideas. We practiced writing introductions.

After all of that, we went to the lab and they wrote. What they wrote bore no resemblance to an essay. The first ones "done" wrote one informal paragraph with no apparent organization. The ones who took longer to finish wrote lovely travelogues that began when we boarded the bus and went straight through until they got off the bus back as school four days later.

I wasn't surprised to see that we had no essays. In the past I would have tried to conference with my students. However, as I've mentioned before, that hasn't worked well for me. The conferences rarely lead to real change, and the students who aren't in the conference at that moment are difficult to keep on task.

This time, I had them upload their essays into an assignment module in Moodle. I added a copy of the assignment rubric as a resource. As the projects came in, I was able to score them against the rubric, and then leave the children comments.

Before the class logged in to Moodle the next day, I discussed the difference between a travelogue and an essay. I assured them that we would keep their travelogues. They were worthwhile and a good way to remember the trip. The advantage of word processing was that we could save a copy of their travelogue and turn that into an essay without having to start again from scratch. We also revisited the rubric which to make more sense to them now that they had their writing in front of them. Students gamely logged in, read their comments and went about revising their work.

When I logged in that evening, I was amazed. The students were truly transforming their pieces into essays. They had introductions that introduced the topic and their main ideas. Each main idea had it's own paragraph with supporting details. Some students had even written a semblance of a conclusion. These are recapping conclusions, rather than "draw it all together and then make a further point" conclusions. But at this stage in the game, I'll take any conclusion I can get.

Of course not every student was at this point, but the majority of them were. This is much better success than I've ever had with face to face conferences. I'm not sure why this has been so successful. Is it that they can reread the comments? Maybe, but I'll wager that it is the combination of comments with an easy way to revise their writing without having to write it all by hand, again.

None of this is rocket science. I've seen for years that word processing generally makes fifth graders more willing to revise. But this Moodle conferencing has taken it all to a new level.

I'm excited for our next assignment; I'll set it up as a workshop instead of an assignment. Students will receive two other students' assignments to score and an attempt to score their own assignment. I'm hoping that evaluating other people's writing will be educational for them. This entire process is proving highly educational for me.

Moodle Evangelizing

I was writing a letter to a dear friend and former colleague. I was blathering on about...

• what I've been doing with the Moodle
• how it is helping me get a handle on my overwhelming paperwork
  
• how the children are appreciating the immediate feedback on quizzes
• how my students who hate to read and write don't seem to realize they are doing both when they take part in the chats and the forums
• how kids are logging in from home to journal with me
• how the journals are helping me forge connections with children who now seem to see me as an ally instead of just another person getting in their way
• how the ability for me to leave comments on their assignments is leading many children to improve their writing through revision
• how I look forward to logging into the Moodle-- a feeling I don't get when staring at a pile of worksheets

After I sent the letter, I had second thoughts. I thought, "Oh no. Too much Moodle in that letter."

Imagine my delight when she wrote back very excited about Moodle and appreciative that I'd gone into so much detail because now she is getting ideas on how to implement it at her school -- I feel like a grandparent who just discovered someone who actually enjoys looking at pictures of my grandchildren.

Workshops or Assignments

I've been exploring Moodle's workshop module. For now, I learned it is too complicated for me to use with my current essay assignments. I really love the idea that students would be scoring and commenting on their own and two other students' essays based on the rubric I gave them. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting it working and in the interest of time, I switched it to an assignment. Now I see that for this point in our Moodle experience, that was wise. It is the next step up in terms of complexity. I think after students understand how to upload files and better understand scoring writing projects with a rubric, then we will be ready for a real online workshop.

Even just doing this as an assignment, I'm loving the interactions that Moodle allows. When I try to conference personally with 26 kids, it doesn't work. The other students are not focused enough to be gainfully employed while I conference, and the face to face conference isn't giving me all the impact that I want. Students generally enjoy the feedback, but it doesn't often lead to improvements in their writing.

With the assignment module, I am able to leave students replies, either inline or separately. I am also able to give them a score that I can change later. This is good for students since they can refer to the comments as much as needed, and the comments don't get lost. It is good for me since I can write the replies outside of class, freeing me for lots of mini-classes during class time.

Moodle Grades

I've been a slow learner this week. Although I know about our browser woes, I started new discussions with students in their private forums that we are using as journals. I ended up with sad children who thought I hadn't written back to them because they couldn't see the second message since Internet Explorer mashes all of the links together. I finally figured out what was going on and happiness reigns once more.

I did my first grading in Moodle. Since I will be coordinating the environmental ed trip next year, I set up two forums. One is for students to tell me what was great about this year's trip; these are the things I shouldn't change. The second forum is for discussing ways to make the trip better.

My initial standards are quite low. If they successfully posted in both forums, and their post was at least remotely on topic, they earned full points. The grading itself was easy. In the forum set up, I designated how many points were possible and that I was the only one who could give grades. Now when I read a response, there is a drop down menu to let me select the score. The students don't see that option.

If I had allowed them to give grades as well, there are all sorts of interesting options. They could grade each other's comments in regards to relevance or with points. The Moodle can even do some fancy score balancing if numerous scores are given for one response.

For now we kept it simple. I scored the responses that were submitted. The next day, I showed the children how to access their grades primarily so they had an easy was to see if they had posted in both forums. They seemed to like checking their grades, especially since they were getting such good ones.

I don't keep my main gradebook online yet, but this lets me see the power in doing that. I think there is some sort of plug in that would allow me to post my Easy Grade Pro records online with parent passwords. I may look into that for next year, even though that really ups the pressure on me.

In any case, I once again had children pouring over each other's responses, and when their computers allowed them to do so, they left replies. This still enchants me since the children reading through all these responses are so often the ones who refuse to read during our silent reading time, and refuse to write on writing assignments. I hope they never figure out that these ARE reading and writing assignments.

Browser Blues

One step forward, two steps back...

Our step forward was that our wonderful technician put Netscape on the old computers in lab B while we were gone at camp last week. Those that are running Mac OS 9.2 are now working well in Moodle using Netscape.

The steps backward come on the oldest computers. Those running Mac OS 8.0 or 8.1 still aren't working well. If students try to post anything, they run into trouble in Netscape because the post button is missing. In Internet Explorer, the posting works fine, but they can't read anyone else's posts because all the post links are smack on top of each other, making it impossible to reach more than the first one or two posts.

Amazingly, the students are making it work. Despite the computers being really slow and them needing to toggle between browsers, they are managing to post and respond. They like Moodling enough to hang in there, ploughing through the difficulties.

I like that they are getting so comfortable with computers, with online environments, with troubleshooting. More importantly, I like that we are now hearing from everyone. When I post a forum question, everyone responds instead of just a few kids. On top of that, lots of the kids receive responses to their ideas. This is in great contrast to a typical fifth grade discussion in which a majority of the kids are so busy thinking about what they want to say next that they aren't listening to what anyone else is saying.

So maybe I need to revise what I said. Maybe it isn't one step forward and two back. Maybe with all this shuffling, side stepping and spinning around, we are getting somewhere. It's a strange dance, but it seems to suit us.

Which Wiki? or The Trouble Without Email

My friend and colleague John approached me for suggestions regarding an upcoming web project he plans to undertake with his class of fourth and fifth students. He was planning on having them create posters to share information about alternative energy at the end of their energy unit. He then wanted them to be able to easily share that information on the web so that families could see and possibly even respond to it. He was going to create web pages, as he has in the past, but wondered if blogs would better fit the task since families would be able to leave comments.

I pondered it and told him the answer was none of the above. He should use a wiki. I quickly showed him PBWiki and Wikispaces. He looked unconvinced; he's a busy guy and didn't really want to take the time to learn this new tool since he was wishing he'd started the projects LAST week.

I argued that since he was going to set up the entire web site as a template, the kids weren't gaining much in the way of skills. If they used a wiki instead, they would be part of the read/write web because they could do the work themselves and other people could leave them comments. As Clarence has found, they would probably go home and start creating wikis of their own.

To better convince him and to get up to speed for my own upcoming student projects, I decided to set up a How to Wiki wiki for him. I poked around with the various wiki hosting options to see which would best meet our needs. John and I have identified three key criteria for our wikis.

1. They need to be readable by families and other schools.
2. They need to be protected to some degree from spam, but still allow outsiders to leave comments.
   
3. They need to track who makes what changes, so we can track malicious editing back to the person who did it.
   

Here's what I've learned so far.
There is a wiki in Moodle, but from what I can tell, it is safely locked up inside the Moodle, so it fails to meet the first criteria.

PB Wiki meets the first two criteria. Wikis can be viewed by anyone, but we can restrict editing privileges to only those people who have our passcode. This would keep out spam bots, but would fail criteria #3.

Wikispaces meets all three criteria, but at a price. Each child receives a separate invite. Accepting the invitation makes them a member of Wikispaces and of our wiki. Since each child is a separate member, the wiki can track which user makes which changes.

It sounds perfect, but it is at this point, that I once again run up against the thorn that keeps jabbing me this year; we don't have student email addresses.

I could use a service such a Gaggle.net, but this will involve getting parent permission. Since we don't plan to use the addresses for correspondence, this sounds like a lot of hassle.

I could create them on my BlueHost account. I think my subscription allows me to create 2500 email accounts. This could be almost as safe as Gaggle.net accounts, since I could set them up in such a way that all messages must stay on the server. However, it will be tedious work to do this for 50 users.

I know that with my mail application on my computer, I can tell the program whether to leave messages on the server or to download them to my computer. I wonder if that can be over-ridden by settings on the actual mail server. If it can, then even if the students tried to use their email addresses, I could monitor them. This is important both because I don't want to give the world unlimited contact with my fifth graders. I also don't want to give my students unsupervised access to each other. Some of them are still at the nasty note writing stage. I don't want to give them another tool to use for that, since the tool isn't going to be in use for positive activities as well.

How does everyone else deal with this need for student email accounts when setting up Moodles, blogs, wikis and other shared online spaces? Please share with me how you have overcome this problem.

Motivation to Moodle

Lately I've been doing a bit of soul-searching about why I am battling to bring blogs, wikis, Moodle, and online calendars to my students. I can tell that some of the people I am annoying in my district think I'm inserting technology where none is needed.

Then I read this quote from Bud's blog...

One of the most frustrating parts of teaching and assigning writing is that I can't read, digest, and respond to everything that I ask my students to do in as timely a manner as I would like. By the time I get to some papers, students have moved on to other thoughts, ideas, and assignments, and the opportunity that might have existed to push a particular student's thinking in a new direction has moved on.

That sums up one of the reasons I want to do this. Not only can I respond much more quickly when I can do it online, but the Moodle and the blog make it possible for others besides me to give them feedback. To that end, we posted our essays into Moodle and students have begun commenting on each other's work.

I am pleased with their comments. Most students responded to the content of the piece. A few even commented on the writing itself. Thus far, the comments seem more focused and useful than the student-led peer conferencing we have done. Those tend to leave the writing far behind as their conversation wanders off to football, video games, and who likes who.

Failing the Moodle Quiz

All right, between getting ready for our upcoming environmental ed trip, and working such long hours to get the Moodle running while still teach all my courses, I've been only averaging a few hours of sleep per night all week. That is my only defense...

On Thursday we went into the creaky old lab to try taking the weekly spelling tests in Moodle. On one hand, using Moodle for spelling tests seem like a true waste of bandwidth. On the other hand, it takes me 30-40 minutes to give the spelling tests since there is more than one group and I must spell all the words aloud as we correct. Then I must recorrect them since quite a few of the children either don't really care, or, they care enough to be dishonest. In light of all of that, taking the weekly spelling test in Moodle seemed like a way to free up more of my time for more worthwhile things.

To that end, I used the quiz module to set up a spelling test for each group. I used the short answer portion of the module. I still have to dictate the words and they enter them in. However, when they finished the test, they could instantly see their results, which according to brain research, is key for making the test a learning experience.

Of course, there are not enough working computers in the old lab for all the children to take the quiz at the same time, so I had one group go first. At first the children had a bit of trouble with the interface until one discovered they could tab to the next field rather than try to scroll using the slowly responsive arrow keys. Kids kept getting lost and we'd go back to to catch them up. At long last, that group finished and submitted their answers only to find that they had all received a score of 0/20 and they couldn't see their itemized results. Scrambling to salvage the situation, I told them to print, but of course, after the third child, the old printer ran out of toner. Admitting temporary defeat, I had the second group take their turns at the computers, and they all had the same scores as the previous group. I told them all not to worry. It was a problem of my creating and they would not be penalized for it.

That night I went into Moodle to figure out why it hadn't worked since it was working so perfectly the night before when I tested it. It was at that point I sheepishly discovered that the Moodle quiz had worked just fine. All the problems were my fault. For the first group I had entered the wrong words. For the second group, I had the correct words but I had them in the wrong order. I couldn't figure out why they couldn't see their itemized results-- it was working fine now. I made the appropriate changes and the next day we retested.

The newer lab was available and all went smoothly except that half the children received an error from the Moodle server saying it was too busy to let them in. This is strange since I've had them all in before, but no matter. We once again tested in two groups and all went smoothly except for the child in the second group who was still logged in as the first group. Oops.

Listening to the children talk, they seemed to like taking the test on the computer, even though a few made typos -- I find they make typos even when writing by hand (c: I'll use the informal survey module at some point to see how they feel about online spelling tests after they've had more experience.

Mucking Around with Moodle Settings

Instead of being a dutiful teacher and getting caught up in my correcting last night. I added the rest of our students to the Moodle. I had some trouble getting the csv file to upload, but it worked eventually.

Next I spent time playing around with the themes. My thought was to see which themes made it easiest for the students to locate information on the page. Some were definitely more legible than others. I finally settled on a different theme for each course so that the students and I could more easily keep track of them. And then I clicked something that reset all of them to the same theme. Such is life.

Finally, I experimented further with the quiz module. I found I could export a quiz that I made into a text format. Then I could easily make changes to it and upload it again as a new quiz. Much less tedious than entering them each question individually.

We'll try out the new quizzes tomorrow when we take our weekly spelling tests. I truly hate spelling tests; even using the developmental programs, I don't feel that we get enough out of them to warrant the time they take. If Moodle can shorten the time we spend administering and scoring the tests, then it will be yet another Good Thing.

First Lessons Learned in Moodle

Day one of Moodling was a success. I assigned my students the following tasks:

• Log in
• Go into the Journal course so you can write back to me in your journal
• Go into the Science course and take the quiz
• Go into the forum and tell us what you are looking forward to doing on our environmental ed trip next week.
• If you have time, go into the chat room and chat with your classmates
  

Here's what I learned...

• You can moodle in Mac OS 8.x. However, the screens don't render correctly. This isn't insurmountable once you know where to look for things, but it is a bother. The biggest rendering problem we've encountered thus far is that in the journaling forum, the header above the topics is completely jumbled and covering the link to the topics themselves so you have to wave the mouse around until the cursor turns into a hand, otherwise you can't find the link.
  
  
• In OS 8.1 the chat feature works. In OS 8.0, the browser keeps trying to take us to the plug in download page, but not finding what it wants. I suspect it needs Flash which isn't compatible with 8.0.
  
  
• I didn't give clear enough directions regarding the journaling, so some students started new topics rather than replying to the message I had written to them.
  
  
• In the quiz module, I watched some students take the quiz, but nothing was recorded for them in the grade book. Possibly they aren't submitting their answers.
  
  
• In the forum, if they reply to someone else's response rather than hitting the reply link on the original topic, they are not given credit for responding in the grade book.
  
  
• As the teacher, you can read ALL the comments made in the chat room, even after the event. Although I had laid down guidelines about the chatroom's use, a few students went over to the dark side. They will be surprised when they discover that even though I was busy helping students while they chatted, I still know what they said.
  
  
• All of the students really seemed to enjoy the journaling. Most of them do not spend time online at home and don't have their own email, so this is a novel experience for them.
  
  
• The students greatly enjoyed chatting. One of my struggling readers who rarely reads voluntarily, read the chat messages as they appeared for twenty minutes. He only managed a few comments; I suspect the chat was streaming by too quickly for him to keep up. However, anything that gets this child to want to read has great merit in my book.
  

My next goals are to get the rest of the students in the grade level into the Moodle and the correct courses. Then I can really put it to work. However, it's mid-terms time and then we are off to camp for a week, so my progress may be slow.

Moodling Around

My Moodle is finally ready to use. I decided to get my feet wet by having student journals in Moodle. In years gone by, one way I would get to know my students while also getting them to write was to journal with them. They each had a notebook and we'd write back and forth. It worked really well except that I had to lug around a class set of journals each night and then write in them by hand. Being able to type my responses motivated me enough to get going on this project.

I'd installed the Moodle software a few months ago on my web space. It had been quite easy since my web provider has Fantastico which did most of the work for me. After installing it, I'd gotten bogged down at the thought of creating an email account for each of my students. Our district does not provide them. I have the ability to create thousands of addresses as part of account with BlueHost.com, but I REALLY didn't want to go through all that work since we weren't going to use the address-- the program just insisted that they have addresses.

Fortunately, I decided to see how smart the software was. I gave all the students my Gmail address and it worked. The program now realizes that more than one user has the same address and it has grumbled at bit about that, but the user accounts are working just fine.


To set up my journaling Moodle, I first needed to import my student data. I already have an Excel spreadsheet containing class data. I was able to duplicate and revise it to fit my needs. Once I saved it as a comma-separated text file with the extension .cvs it imported cleanly. The biggest problem I had with this step was that I couldn't figure out where I needed to be to import the data. I finally figured out that I needed to not be logged into any particular course. There is an administration link in the first window that allowed me to upload the data.

I wanted these journals to be private, meaning that no child can read any other child's journal. To set up that level of privacy, I gave each child a unique password and username, and then I made each child there own separate group. Then I created a forum and started creating one discussion per child. Luckily I decided to test if this was working correcting. It wasn't. The children could see and read all of the messages. After lots of muttering and referring to the manual, I tried forcing the groups which is a command in the settings pane. That did the trick. This is an extreme setting, since part of the power of Moodle is collaboration. However, I have plenty of plans for other courses that will have them collaborate.

One unknown at this point is browser and OS compatibility. In our old computer lab at school, some of the machines are still running Mac OS 8.0 which means they can't run Flash. No where on the Moodle web site could I find any minimum browser requirements, so here's hoping it works. There's a chance it won't even work in the newer lab which is running 9.2. We can't view the parent blog there because Blogger doesn't play well with Internet Explorer 5. It makes the words display as one letter per line -- that makes for a really long web page.

Little Bits of Blogging

Our student blog is underway! Pairs of students are taking turns writing a summary of our day and posting it on our class blogmeister blog.

We began last Thursday. We went into the computer lab and first we visited the Super Students Blog. It is an excellent 5th grade blog written by Ms. Sanborn's class at Willowdale Elementary. I wanted them to have good blogging role models. I don't know that in one visit my students absorbed those writers' effective strategies, but they were envious that Ms. Sanborn's class was working on a robotics unit.

Next I introduced Blogmeister. The class voted on which Blogmeister template they wanted for our blog. They chose the rainbow colored pattern with a peace sign logo. Next they helped me write the first entry. It was a bit tortuous writing it as a group, but they did help me revise it as we read back through it.

I explained to the class that we were writing for two different audiences. One audience was their classmates. If someone was absent, they could visit the blog to see what they had missed. The other audience was their parents. As I explained it to them...

None of you would ever do this, but SOME children go home and when asked by their parents what they did at school that day, they reply, "Nothing."

They clearly related to THAT experience.

Next we went back to the room and formed blogging teams. To my surprise, a number of students chose to be on a team of one, which means they will write alone on their day. To my delight, most of the children wanted to be the first to write to our blog.

Reading the first pairs' draft, I could clearly see that our first area of writing instruction needed to focus on fleshing out writing topics. Even Strunk and White would have to admit this writing was too lean. I had another student work with them to add more details.

The next day, students were approaching me on their own to ask permission to be the blog writer of the day. I hope that level of enthusiam continues.

Before our next session, I created a brainstorming template in Kidspiration, and another one in Appleworks. The children prefer the Kidspiration template, but I'm thinking it may be the most effective for the bloggers to receive a paper template that they carry with them the day they are in charge of writing the blog. They can add to it throughout the day. I'm envisioning a special blogger clipboard they could carry from class to class so that all their teachers would know they had permission to be taking notes.

It was a crazy time of year to tackle something new. We have class through Friday and the children are already giddy with Christmas excitement. However, it is proving a worthy distraction. And it was a gift to me to be blogging with children again.

My ID...

When I first created this blog, I wasn't sure if I could include personal information that would identify my school because I wasn't sure how the student blogs would interact with it. To protect their personal information, I didn't share mine. I was also a bit leery of giving away personal information in the blogosphere; I hadn't any real feel for the potential consequences, so I erred on the side of caution.

Eventually it became clear that the student blogs would not be linked to this blog, so I turned on my profile, because bloggers I respected kept writing about how important it was to not be anonymous.

Then about a month ago I started another Blogger blog. It is an online newsletter for the parents of our students. It represents our entire grade level, not just me, so I didn't want my profile on the page-- that made it look like it was just mine. Unfortunately, the Blogger settings seemed to be an all-or-nothing type of thing in regards to profiles.

Finally, I poked around enough inside the blog template to remark the profile out of the parent blog. I tried this before and ran into trouble. However, it seems to be working for the moment, so I'm glad to no longer be anonymous on this blog. Thank you to Doug Johnson over at at The Blue Skunk Blog for nudging me into it.