Wednesday, September 24, 2014

So Many Ideas...So Little Time

Wow! The past week and half flew by! So many great things happening in our Lincoln Learning Community! We have so many great things going on including teacher blogs with Kathy Sisson (@SissonSmarties) and Sean McGuan (@LKWDMcGuan) where teachers and students are learning how to share the amazing things happening in their classroom with the community!

We have Google Classroom up in running in 3rd-5th grade and teacher and students alike are loving the simplified format for creating, collaborating, providing feedback and sharing work! It is awesome for working with The Columbia Writing Project- Writer's Workshop and such great exposure for our students!

Literature Circle Commercials were a great success in 5th Grade, where students worked to prompt the use of literature circles in the classroom to share with younger grades! How could younger student not want to participate in Literature Circles when after seeing a video like this?



I cannot wait for all of the other amazing thing right around the corner with our Lincoln Learners! 


Thursday, September 11, 2014

Okay...This year I will Blog! First Up, Blogger with Lit Cirles


I am making it one of my major goals this year to not only support the teachers I work with, but also share the great work we do with the world!

First up, Using Blogger with Literacy Circles. This year, one of the first things I began working on with a teacher is Literacy Circles on Blogger. The steps can be found below and the kids and teacher are loving their ability to pose questions, offer feedback and share their work quickly with their group to facilitate rich conversation, along with video and pictures. Now we just began, so I will post later on to share some of their great work with you.




Setting up Groups Literacy Circles on Bloggers

1. Students should be in the Google Apps for Edu Domain for your district
2. Students go to the Chrome Web Store and Install Blogger for their Browser
3. Students can then bookmark the Blogger Website
4. They will create a "Basic Blogger Profile" (unless your district has Google+ enabled for your students)
5. One student will start a blog
6. That student will then go into the blog settings and add their follow classmates e-mail account (linked to Google Apps for Edu) AND their teacher(s) as authors
7. The other group members will then go into their student e-mail and then accept the blogger invitation
8. The student who created the Blog will then set all authors as "admin"
9. Now, all students, and the teacher(s) have access to participate on the blog

Notes: This particular teacher is using Google Classroom and Drive to work though drafting writing, and then Blogger to Post Final work for discussion.