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! 

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

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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.

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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.

--> Click Here for A Google Presentation on setting up Blogger! <--

Awesome resource for the writing process created by Ruth Ayres! #OETC14

2nd graders into Google Docs, Importing Images and QR coding with classroom youtube videos

2nd Graders at Roosevelt have been very busy lately on their computers! The kiddos in Mrs. Manderfield's class crafted stories about their sought after superpower in Google Docs, shared their doc with their teacher for feedback and even imported a hand drawn illustration to their doc.

Their next step is to create a video presentation of their work. Students will be recording themselves reading their work on the classroom You Tube channel. Students will then be creating QR codes linked to their You Tube videos and import the QR code into their Google Doc. The final step will be to print out their final piece to display at conference. Parents will be able to use a QR code scanner to scan their child's work and watch their student present the work hanging on the wall!

Update: This project was a huge hit at conference last night!

Off to a Great Start

Today I had the great pleasure to spend time at Lakewood High School and Roosevelt Elementary School. The announcement of the Digital Literacy Teachers' mission was well received and it sounds like teachers are eager to get to work with instilling a sense of digital literacy within each one of our students. I am in the process of working on a Digital Citizenship Haiku Deck for teachers to use within their classes questions or potential project ideas! (I am also available to discuss this in collaboration with classroom teachers). Please contact me with any questions or project ideas!

Let's kick '13-'14 off right!

-A.W.
@AWollenberg
abigail.wollenberg@lakewoodcityschools.org