Connect 2.0

This morning we hosted our final Parent Coffee Morning of the year. We shared a brief overview of the 21st century tools that we’ve been using here in the ES all year, along with an introduction to some of these exciting tools.

The first tool we discussed is blogging:

We love blogging as a tool to extend classroom conversations beyond school time, to engage students in authentic writing for a real audience, to develop communication skills, and to document reading and writing development. There are quite a large number of class, student and administrator blogs here in the ES – check out all the links on the sidebar at right to read them!

Next we talked about wikis:

We love wikis for collaborative knowledge building and working together on a focused task with partners around the world. We talked about the benefits of being able to view the entire history (every edit of every wiki page) of all wikis to track student growth, the ease of using the discussion feature to communicate with others beyond our classroom about our learning, and the many different ways to track changes on a wiki through e-mail updates or RSS.

Then we covered RSS:

We love RSS for bringing all the information we want directly to us! We talked about using RSS to track any work your children do with web 2.0 tools at school by setting up a Google Reader account, you can actually follow along with any blog posts, wiki pages, or podcasts that your children create, as soon as they create them. This is a great way to change the typical after school conversation starter from “What did you do at school today?” to “I saw that you added a new blog post at school today, why did you choose to post about that topic?” The possibilities for staying connected with their learning are endless!

Finally, we discussed podcasting:

We love podcasting for the ability to build oral language skills, increase depth of understanding about oral communication, and the ease with which you can take podcasts with you wherever you go. Podcasting has made a huge impact on the language development of our ESL learners here at ISB and is an easy way to have students reflect on their learning in a format that is exciting, engaging and comfortable to them.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on at the ES! You can keep track of all these exciting learning experiences here on the Connect 2.0 blog.

Get ready for more Parent Coffee Mornings on the first Wednesday of (almost) every month next school year! These events will be formally noted in the official school calendar to make it easier for you to plan ahead. We hope you come back from your summer holidays rested, refreshed and ready to learn even more about 21st century literacy here at ISB!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 1:18 pm and is filed under 21st Century Literacy, The Parent Connection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.