New Brighton Story Walk 2011

This past Saturday, March 5, 2001, the New Brighton Elementary School had it’s annual story walk.  The story walk has been going on for about five or six years.  I have taken my daughter the last two years, she thoroughly enjoys the day.  The staff from several of our schools, and in some cases their families and former staff, come in school and create a family reading, craft, and fun day for several hours.  Laura Fryer, our Elementary Librarian organizes the event and works on getting the funding through various grants.

The story walk itself consists of a number of areas where students are read stories and get to create crafts related to those stories.  There are several other stations where they can make a healthy snack, play in the gymnasium, or listen to music.  Every child in attendance gets to choose a free book to take home and keep forever.  It seemed like many of the children remember this fact, because the books were rushed right off the bat.  For awhile we were unsure if we would have enough books, but the demand evened out and we did have a number to keep for next year’s event.  This year there were 5 or 6 stations with the event having on overall open theme.  Last year, the theme was a story from every continent.

This year over 260 children and their families attended the event, a marked increase over the past couple of years.  A number of parents gave unsolicited feedback about how they enjoy the event and their kids look forward to it every year.  It would be nice to think that the numbers will continue to improve, bringing the community together with the school and strengthening the overall relationship.

With budgets shrinking or being gutted, we are already brainstorming ways to fund the endeavor next year. The goal is to ensure that we can meet the growing demand and allow all the children to participate fully in the event.  We believe we can make it happen with some help from the community and others in our personal networks.  Hopefully next year’s post will talk about how the numbers continue to increase and have more success stories of collaboration between our schools and the community.

Better Late than Never: Student blogging ownership

Not being 1:1 in my classroom since October has really slowed down my plans for student projects this school year.  It may just be my own personal bias or train of thought that slowed things down, but things slowed down nonetheless. I felt it was too complex and cumbersome to require students to access and work regularly on projects without dedicated daily access to 1:1 technology.  The students still have completed group projects, but many of the mundane things I wanted them to do have fallen to the wayside.

At long last, my Freshmen are finally personalizing their individual blogs.  I made it an assignment for them to personalize their blogs’ theme, add widgets, pages, and other such things.  There are restrictions to the personalization process, everything must be appropriate for school and relevant in some way.  I want them to begin using the blogs outside of the classroom…I will still award points for bog posts, but I want them to start CREATING THEIR OWN IDEAS….and then publishing those ideas on the Internet.  My Freshmen are in my civics class and what is more civic than contributing positively to the social discourse.

I will still have final approval before posts go public, it is one safeguard I am not comfortable relinquishing at this time.  I do not know if many, or any students will blog on their own outside of class, but I hope they do.

Web 2.0: Putting All Together part II

Previously, I mentioned that I was trying to streamline my web presence and make my sites more effective for my classes.  This is another post in a series of how I am attempting to do that.  Earlier in February I attended the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference, PETE & C, in Hershey.  There were many great presentations, in fact, there were more presentations than could be attended in person, but through the power of the Internet, most of the sessions have information posted online.  One of the ideas that was discussed was using Netvibes.com to coordinate and post student blog feeds in a single area; I heard this in Joyce Valenza’s session on School Libraries and Web-based Practice: A Tour of Effective Practice.

Netvibes is a tool that allows you to collect feeds from various web sources and post them publicly or privately on your won web page.  I used the site for posting news feeds for my social studies classes since learning about it in 2009 at CAIU’s Web 2.0 Event.  It is a very effective tool for social studies, a one stop shop for current events and trending topics in the classroom.  It is not the only source of news but it provides a focused list as a starting point of information.

Anyway, I decided to add all of my classroom blog accounts to Netvibes; these include my professional blog and all student accounts.  My hope is to make the blog accessible from more Internet sites which will draw attention to them.  I have Netvibes linked to my class wiki, my professional homepage, and a complete listing of student blogs listed on my classroom blog.  My goal is to increase student usage of the blogs beyond assigned writings and to the improve the quality of their work.  I have previously found that student motivation increases when they see that people are viewing their work online.  My students’ blog feed page can be found here.

I will let you know later if my idea was successful…