Thursday, September 29, 2011

An afternoon away and other news...

It feels like it`s been a long time since my voice has been heard on our classroom blog... which is kind of awesome because that means that I`ve started to meet my blogging goals...
1. To post something every school day.
2. To `hand over` the responsibility for the blog to the children.
3. To help the children in my class see that the work they do is important, interesting and worth sharing with the world.
...I`d say so far so good. We`ve posted every day and blogging has become a natural part of our daily routine. Some days we blog together and everyone has a chance to contribute, and other days two or three students take on the responsibility. I have had a number of children ask if they could post on their own and very soon they will get that opportunity. The children are interested in looking at our flag counter to see which countries our visitors are from, and the LOVE getting comments! They`ve even helped Mrs. Caldwell with her blog. She was a bit nervous about sharing her thoughts and ideas with a global audience, but Taylor assured her that she would be okay, there was nothing to be nervous about, and that `it`s just like sharing stuff with your friends`.
This week we got a present in the mail from one of our blog followers. (Which was very exciting for all of us!) Mrs. Dent Scarcello at Bird`s Hill School follows our blog and saw that we are doing the Daily 5 in our classroom. She sent Awesome Owl bookmarks to each of the students in our classroom! The children knew that we needed to thank her so we Skyped her this morning. It was our first Skype call of the year and we had a couple of technical difficulties at first, but we got to talk with Mrs. Dent Scarcello for about 5 minutes. She asked the children about the Daily 5 and answered a few of their questions. We talked about the criteria for Skype and the jobs that we will have during longer Skype learning calls. This short call allowed us to test out all of our equipment and of course to thank Mrs. Dent Scarcello!
You might have noticed that I`ve made a few changes to our blog tonight. That`s because I`m getting it ready to share at a professional development conference for teachers this weekend in Winnipeg. I`m facilitating a session called A Window to the World - Blogging in the Classroom at the Fab Five conference for new teachers. I`m also conducting a couple of different technology sessions at the SAGE conference later in the month... so our visitor counters are going to sky-rocket!
I almost forgot... the reason that I`m posting without the children today is because I was away this afternoon at an ICT coordinator meeting (I am the coordinator for Dr. Hamilton this year). Our blog requires a password in order to create a post, so the kids can`t post without me... but they`ll be back tomorrow!
-Mrs. Malkoske

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Mrs. Malkoske for showing
us how to blog. Our Skype call was
fun. It was neat to see the
grade 5 class from Mrs DentScarcello.

Cameron

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Mrs. Malkoske for teaching our kids some really cool stuff to do on computers! I think that Kendall is doing a good job of helping me to learn how to blog too! What a fun year we are in for! Thanks! :)
(Mrs. Barnes)