Making Conncections Across the Grades

This post is a catch up post reflecting on three recent meetings and some of the work that has developed from them.
Last week I met with fifth grade to discuss how to intentionally put into the curriculum cyber safety and citizenship. Originally, I wanted to have the fourth and fifth graders create public service announcements (PSA’s) for the sixth and seventh grade to review and discuss. Middle school students would be given a form to structure feedback. Questions for the student to consider would include:

1. What is the message?
2. Have you ever seen or experienced this before?
3. How have you dealt with this?

As you can see, the goal is more to ignite a conversation. The plan was for the movies to be reviewed throughout the year and feedback given to the fourth and fifth graders. The PSA’s were to add continuous fuel to the conversation. However, there was some feeling that younger students creating for older students could be too much pressure to impress. Also inhibiting the process was the possibility of the older students teasing the younger students. It was suggested that the older students create the movies and have the younger students review the work. I have discussed this some with Roseanne Sessa, who has been working this summer from the middle school perspective. We are looking for the best place to meld this into the middle school curriculum. As I reflected on this, a further concern occurred to me. Younger students creating movies for middle school students, for the most part, will not cross lines of age inappropriateness. However, do we ask the middle school students, if this is in fact the direction we move in, to be aware of the age of their audience? Does this help or hinder the conversation? Also, how will the student feedback form work to spark conversation? Will it work at all? This is an area that I would love any and all feedback, please. If you have an idea, a thought or a suggestion, please post it below so we can all benefit.
We also discussed the most natural fit for cyber safety and citizenship. This needs to be an ongoing conversation so both wellness and social studies were identified as areas this discussion could fit in. Speaking of social studies, we talked about what technology would further student learning. Jane and Anne plan to do government first, so we will be looking intently at campaign advertisements in print and on the screen. This is a perfect place to weave in media literacy. Since the elections will be happening at the same time students are studying government we will be able to gather real time information about the process and how this affects the students.
Anne and Jane are also exploring the use of a blog for student writing. As earlier posts have indicated, this is becoming more of a common tool throughout AFS. For instance sixth grade social studies is planning on using a social network to gather information for the students on what they are learning. Embedded in this network will be blogs. One of the purposes of the blog is for students to have a place to go for big ideas that have been developed. Students will take turns as the class scribe, responsible for collecting and posting notes. Another use is for the students to work in discussion groups, with one person responsible for summarizing the group’s posts.
If fifth grade incorporates the blog as well, we are adding another scaffold to the process. But what is really great about this whole process is that second grade wants the students to have more of a voice in their classroom blogs. With this in mind the teachers are going to write blog posts with the students, beginning as a whole class activity. Students actively participate in their blog while learning how to write for a larger audience. This is exciting because we are beginning to see this writing form develop across the curriculum and the grades. Creating blogs as a class is a perfect modeling of the skill while having a chance to actively participate. Since the three classes mentioned are using the blogs for different purposes, students coming up the grades will be able to see the tool from different perspectives.
Second grade is also planning on doing a Community unit with a Jenkintown focus. This dovetails nicely with the government unit fifth grade wants to do, also within Jenkintown. Second grade would still prefer not to use Twitter however, would like to follow another second grade class blog. I have developed connections in New Zealand and British Columbia and will be able to help establish that connection.
A new unit for second grade is the History of Communication. Sandy, Jeanne and Betsy plan to explore with the students how communication has changed throughout the years and the effects of the changing communication. This is a developing unit that has a lot of potential for teaching media literacy.
I had the opportunity to work again with Andrea about the third grade and the work that has happened thus far this summer. As I stated in an earlier post, the six areas of technology that are happening in the school, was a larger part of our discussion.
We also talked about third grade specifically. Cyber citizenship and safety are an important part of the curriculum in third grade for me. This is a time when students will transition into becoming much more independent school netizens
At a previous meeting with both Andrea and Felix we also discussed creating a PowerPoint for their animal research projects, and using iMovie again for Family History.
This summer is quickly winding down. Connections and opportunities are beginning to show. I am starting to have a better understanding of where we have the opportunity to create transformative moments using technology. We aren’t there yet, but it is on the horizon.

Sixth Grade Social Studies

Two days ago I met with our Sixth Grade Social Studies Teacher, Mark. Mark’s themes of the class are Bias and Perspective and his essential Questions are:
1. What is bias?
2. How do bias and perspective affect history?
There are two major units in the class, one on the Romans and another on Medieval Times. Additionally, Mark covers smaller units on the Mongols and the Vikings. Skills Mark emphasizes in class include note taking and how to conduct research. Mark has two areas that he wants to work on this year:
• A more intentional integration of current events that he can parallel with the units he studies.
• An online space the students can use to keep gathered information and changing ideas as they grow throughout the year.
There were two resources that seemed to fit into the need to emphasize current events as well as begin to give students a more global perspective. This is exciting for me because it is authentic use for the technology as well as emphasizing a skill we are hearing is more of a necessity everyday – global perspective. Also, I love the idea of paralleling some of the events happening around the world today with what the students are studying in history. Global Voices is a blog space developed by Ethan Zuckerman. He explained his reasoning for creating this blog on TED. There is also a journal from England that was recommended, Understanding Global Issues. I have read in other online communities that this journal is written in accessible and easy to understand language and is unbiased. There is a free copy that can be reviewed on line and it seems inexpensive.
We reviewed WackWall, a social networking environment that doesn’t (yet) have an age limit listed in the terms of service. This is a ning like environment that is still in beta. Like most freeware in beta the user should expect some glitches, but normally when testing a beta tool there is also a high degree of technical support-at least that has been my experience.
The actual use of the online environment is still being worked out. Since Mark doesn’t use a textbook, he does want the space to be a place students can reference notes. His vision is to have a student responsible for recapping important points discussed in class. It could also be a place to post resources for the students. We also discussed using the space to have students converse about central topics in the class including perspective and bias. Since this is going to be an exceptionally busy year for Mark professionally, he needs to have a way to keep up with the conversations without having the discourse become overwhelming. Online group work could help him manage the student posts more easily. Essentially the way this works is to break the students in to small groups and have them form smaller online communities. One student is responsible for monitoring the conversation and posting a summary reflection of the points discussed. This would have to be modeled in class and may take a while for students to get down the process. The skills the students develop in this process, reading for understanding, picking out main points and synthesizing information as well as communicating the information to a larger audience are valuable. Grouping also relieves students of the burden of having to follow all of the online discussion.
Mark’s responsibility becomes one of mostly reading, picking out points that he wants to either emphasize or clarify in class face to face. As long as Mark brings back topics discussed on line in the class, the students will be aware that he is reading the discussion and considers it to be valuable.
Assessment was the piece touched on in the meeting. How does Mark evaluate the online discussions? How does he grade the process of the work done by the students? I’m not sure what other modes of assessment are employed in this class; so that is something I need to ascertain. For students I think a short punch list will help them structure their work and may change dependent on the nature of the work. However it may include something like this:

• Did I fully answer the question?
• Did I support my answer with examples from the class or text?
• Did I spell check my work?
• Does my work make sense?

Another punch list would need to be developed for responses and could include the following:

• Did I explain my agreement or disagreement?
• Did I support my reasoning?
• Did I spell check my work?

For these lists short and direct works best. As I reflect on the above post/response model I am thinking about a recent post by Alfie Kohn. He writes about transitioning our teaching practice from having students take an “adversarial” position on a topic and transform that to one of evolving thinking and understanding. It is something to think about.
Mark’s assessment can take several tacks and will depend on what he is actually evaluating. If he wants to make sure all salient points from class are understood he can evaluate the weekly scribe from that perspective and can create a rubric to support this process. He can also have group grades based on the summary posts of the group. The person summarizing group response would change every week. It will be harder for him to determine how students understand the impact of perspective and bias from summary posts of information, however if he lurks on the blog he will glean some of this information. The digital recording of the information will give him a place to go to check student understanding. A component of posting in a timely manner would also be reflected in the grade. Online learning environments work through different topics throughout the year. This necessitates having a starting and ending date for discussions where students are not expected to revisit conversations once they have come to an end. This frees students from having to keep up on too many conversations at one time.