Connect 2.0

Ms. Bellone’s amazing grade 4 class would like to share their fabulous stories with you!

With the help of our 21st Century Literacy Specialist, Ms. Cofino, this class has brought their stories to life by taking their written pieces from their Writer’s Workshop unit and turning them into digital stories using Garage Band and iMovie. Now that their movies are digital, Ms. Bellone was able to publish them on the video sharing website, YouTube, on a channel just for her class called Team Bellone (no personally identifying information has been shared).

Now you can watch all of their excellent digital stories online and even leave a comment or two! Here’s one just to get you started:

Being able to share their work with a global audience is one of the most motivating and engaging ways to help students get excited about writing. Most of these stories have already been viewed over 50 times! How many of your writing pieces have been viewed by 50 people around the world? And that’s only the beginning!

This digital storytelling project also introduced these wonderful grade 4 students to two new technology tools: Garage Band (used for recording your voice) and iMovie (used to combine audio and visual elements). Both of these tools are standard on all Apple computers and are just right for elementary school students to learn more about audio and video editing.

Being able to hear (and see the audio input of) their own voices telling their story helped the students understand how important emphasis, emotion and tone are in their speaking and presenting voices. Having the opportunity to practice this type of animated speaking is great preparation for both face-to-face presentations as well as further technology-based work.

Learning how to combine audio and video input into one smooth, exciting digital story, is a great way to tap into students’ creativity and higher order thinking skills. They had to figure out just how long every picture should be so that each one perfectly matched to their previously recorded audio. Many students even had the time to add a title and credits to make their story more like a movie.

Becoming active producers of creative content in a digital format is a critical aspect of 21st century literacy and an essential experience for all students at ISB. This project is part of the foundation that students need to understand the potential, impact, and appropriate use of technology tools for communication and creativity.

It’s hard to believe this was their very first experience with digital storytelling! We’re already waiting for more amazing stories from Team Bellone!

Our fabulous elementary teachers and students are participating in a wide range of exciting projects that help them connect to the world around them using web 2.0 tools. If you’re curious about web 2.0 or the different ways that your children will be using technology at school, please come to our monthly Parent Technology Coffee Mornings in the ES Learning Hub (the first Wednesday of every month at 7:30, as listed in the school calendar).

For now, you can get started by checking out our first projects for the school year:

Grade 5: Students Teaching Students

The wonderful Chrissy Hellyer and her fellow new ISB teacher, Aly McAloon, will be kicking off the school with a classroom blogging project that will eventually include a regular podcast focused on the Lucy Caulkins Readers Workshop. Our students will start by reading and commenting on each class’ blog, while learning about online safety and appropriate behavior, and will eventually become contributing authors to this blog. We will connect with another grade 5 class at Shanghai American School and the American School of Madrid to help engage and motivate our learners to share their learning with their classmates around the world!

Grade 4: BlogPals

Our fabulous returning teacher, Sonja Merrell, who participated in the 1001 Flat World Tales last year, is back for more 21st century learning this year! She has decided to start the school year off with a class blog, which she will use as a communication portal for her students and their parents. We’re going to start off the year using this blog as a discussion tool, to build a strong school-home connection and to get her students thinking about their learning in a more interactive way. Over time we will have each student as a contributing author to the blog, in order to record their learning and development over the course of the school year.

Grade 2: A Window to Our World

Another amazing returning colleague, Susan Souza, is connecting her class to a partner class via a tool called Ning. She conducted a similar project last year and was amazed to see how quickly her students took to this new learning environment – posting questions and answers, commenting on individual student pages, and sharing their learning as a class – all in second grade! This year the project will focus on building intercultural understanding, learning about diversity, and getting to know our collaborative partners in this private network.

Grade 1: ESL Learners Speak English

Our enthusiastic grade 1 ESL teacher, Erin DeYoung, started using VoiceThread in her classroom last year as a way for her beginning ESL students to practice their English in an authentic environment. We had a great time connecting to grade 1 ESL students at the American School of Madrid, and we’re planning to re-connect again this year. Our students will start practicing their English with an short introduction to each student so that our partner class can really get to know each person as an individual. Over time the students share a bit about their lives in Thailand, the school, and other grade 1 favorites.

Kindergarten: Kids Draw!

Our amazing Kindergarten team teachers, Sandy Chin and Akiko Nagamine, are jumping in to a new model of technology learning with their fantastic class. We have started out the year with a short unit on drawing, where the students were asked to draw a picture of themselves on paper (for a unit entitled “All About Me”) and then draw the same picture on the computer (using KidPix). We discussed what was the same and what was different about drawing on paper and drawing on the computer. Interestingly, although almost all of them though drawing on the computer was more difficult (we still need to work on those fine motor skills), most of them liked drawing on the computer better. After this short unit, Sandy, Akiko and I realized we have lots of room to grow with drawing and technology. We’d like to revisit the concept of drawing on the computer over the course of the year and build in some thoughtful reflection, ideally with VoiceThread, where students can talk about the context of the picture, and the skills they learned while drawing.

All of these projects are being facilitated by our 21st Century Literacy Specialist, Ms. Cofino, in partnership with the classroom teacher. You can keep up with all of the new and exciting developments in 21st century literacy here on the Connect 2.0 blog!

Two of our fantastic elementary classes have recently participated in two different, but equally exciting, writing projects. Both projects involve students from around the world and both projects result in the publishing of a book authored by our students!

Grade 5

Mrs. R’s class used the group instant messaging tool, Twitter, to write a globally collaborative story as part of the @manyvoices project. Twelve upper elementary and lower middle school classes all worked together to create a fantastical fiction story 140 characters at a time, following the protocols of Twitter. Mrs. R’s class wrote chapter 10 (of 12) using their best descriptive language, in just one afternoon. As each student wrote their sentence in the story, they were able to build off the work of the previous author. What a great way to build excitement and enthusiasm about reading and writing! And what makes it even better, is that the finished story is now published as an actual book you can either buy or download!

Grade 4

Mrs. M’s class used a wiki to participate in the globally collaborative writing project, 1001 Flat World Tales, elementary group. Our students used this simple web 2.0 tool to become peer-editors for students in Australia and the United States, while developing their persuasive writing skills. We enjoyed the project so much, that we collaborated just a little bit more to create an interconnected frame story that links all of the individual student stories together.

This ongoing writing workshop involves students and classes from grade 2 all the way up to grade 12 and will continue until the end of the school year (each school division participating on a separate wiki). Once all of the participating schools are finished writing, the top stories will be selected by the students for final publishing in a book! After reading the fantastic stories from our grade 4 students, I’m sure at least one will be chosen for the final publication!

These projects are a fantastic way to engage students in their writing and to promote a lifelong love of writing, reading and learning!

Mrs. L and Ms. B’s fourth grade classes have just started an exciting new project! They are going to be creating multimedia book reviews on VoiceThread (check out a sample here) and then sharing them with partner schools around the world so that their single book review can become a dynamic conversation around books.

Our goal is to promote a love of reading for all students. We can share our VoiceThreads with other classes here at ISB, as well as partner classes in other international and public schools around the world. We will post all of our completed multimedia reviews on our wiki: Books Go Global!  (thanks to Lucy Gray for inspiring our wiki layout with her fabulous Cities of the World wiki – another amazing global collaboration to join!)

VoiceThread is an easy to use, free, online digital storytelling tool that allows students to share their ideas using images and their voice. One exciting feature of a Voice Thread is that it allows us to collaborate with other students around the world. Once a Voice Thread is created, other students can add their own images and narration to the initial Thread. This means that students around the world can begin to discuss and share their thoughts about their favorite books.

Now, I have to admit, I think VoiceThread is pretty cool. When I show our grade 4s a sample VoiceThread I thought they would just be blown away by the tool. And, to some extent they were impressed. But, when they really got excited, and I mean literally shaking with excitement in their seats, was when I mentioned that these book reviews would be shared with other students all around the world.

I find these global connections exhilarating myself and I’m so impressed at how quickly and easily fourth graders were able to grasp the power of these tools. One student asked if she could create her book review in English and her native language, so that friends and family from her own country (who might not speak English) can still enjoy her work. Which then started a discussion about the possibility of a book review being started in Korean, but making it’s way around the world, being translated as it travels. We talked about having partner schools on every continent and ending up with one book being reviewed in as many languages as possible – just like “real” books are published in different languages. What a powerful thought for a group of nine-year-olds!

It’s clear that this project is going to be amazing!

Last week Mr. Lamont’s Grade 4 class culminated their active reading workshop with an new 21st century twist.

Active Reading is a reading strategy used to help break down an understand different types of texts. It is made up of four components (Marking-Up the Text, Visualize, Predict and Question) and is taught in grade 4 to help students work with fiction and non-fiction.

This year during the workshop Mr Lamont’s students were asked to model the active reading process using the Smartboard. Each students was given a scanned page from their text and they were asked to go through each of the four active reading steps and show and capture their thinking on the board.

This work was then saved as images and imported into a program called Garageband. This pod-casting program allowed students to record their own voices while answering the question “How does active reading help you read? Students reflected on the active reading process while watching the images of their own work to go a little deeper into what makes this strategy work for them. There was some great thinking and deep questioning going on!

Finally these video pod-casts were posted on a site called Teacher Tube where they were shared with other Grade 4 students and teachers from around the world. The hope was that by sharing their knowledge perhaps others could learn and become better active readers as well. The response has been fantastic as already each of their student videos has been watched over 20 times!

Watch the learning happen! Like many of the projects involving technology in the Elementary School, the focus is always on the curriculum learning outcomes and the technology is used as an engaging and relevant tool that allows teaching and learning to happen in new and exciting ways.

Great job Mr. Lamont’s Class!