Open Blog Night

We are getting ready for Open Blog Night, which is like an open house where we get to show off our blogs. The last couple of days have been spent editing, adding the Blogamundo (our class website) link, and making sure everything on our blogs looks presentable.

I expect to have about 50-75 people show up. We'll order pizza for a few more than that, just to be sure. That is quite a crowd for this location.

The editing is going extremely well and I am so proud of all the progress the students have made. It's amazing to see how their writing has changed since their first posts. It is especially noticeable with the students who have been here and have been blogging for a few weeks now. I am so impressed. They are having to do less and less editing after the fact because they just aren't making the mistakes anymore. They are making good writing a habit and that is what I like to see!

UPDATE: The Open Blog Night was a great success! About 50 people came (including staff) and I was able to connect with a lot of parents and show off some great blogs the students have done.

Beyond Blogging

Here is some of the other stuff we do in our class. We spend at least 20 minutes a day reading, at least 20 minutes on Read 180 on the computers, and we also have group work where we learn reading and writing skills.

These students are very ready to learn and are trying to build their own skills in reading so that they can move on to their G.E.D. or to finishing their high school diploma.

Although attendance is usually the main obstacle between students and success, there are also other missing pieces that have to be filled in. Sometimes it is the speed of their reading, phonics, vocabulary, or some other missing link. We try to fill in the missing parts and usually their reading skills shoot up pretty quickly once we figure out exactly what they need.

What great students, though! They come to school, they work hard, and they make great progress. It's not every day that you get to work with students who are so dedicated to their own education.

Adding Pics from a Camera

We got our new cameras last week, so I let the students take them out around the block and take pictures to upload to their blog. Most of them where just snapping pictures of anything that looked interesting and then they edited by only uploading the pics they wanted to keep. I think the SD cards are 1 gig so it shouldn't matter if there are a bunch of pics on there for the time being. The only problem I can see with that is that as they take more pics and then go to upload them, they will have to scroll down through all the old photos on the card to get to theirs at the bottom. It really probably doesn't matter very much, but I may have to erase the cards every so often to keep it from bogging them down. Here are some pics that I took when we were out photographing today:

I really like this one. I just snapped it on the fly, but it turned out really neat.

A view of one of the unique bike racks from up on top of the parkade.

Fall Colors!



Two brave students who agreed to pose for a pic. :)

Budding photographers in the back alley.

Adding Pictures to the Blogs

As you can see, I did a little practice adding maps to my blog. Actually, I had my blog up on the projector and I went through the steps with the student's as they learned to add a picture from Google Images to their blogs.

We added maps of Colombia, the country we have been reading about in our class literature recently. Then I had the students write a little about Colombia and what they had learned about the situation there.

The picture adding went surprisingly smoothly. I had them save the picture to My Pictures on their laptops and then browse for the picture on their computer. I chose that option because I did not want to add the picture from the web and then have it move or be removed later.

Info on the Country of Colombia

After reading the book Out of War, I realized I had learned a lot about the country of Colombia. They have been having a war there for almost fifty years now. The people of Colombia have to deal with violence, kidnappings, massacres, and mass poverty on a daily basis. The country is very unstable, but even with all of these problems many children and young people in Colombia are working for peace for their country.

What I Know About Colombia

Colombia is a country in South America that has been at war for almost fifty years. There is a lot of violence. They have many kidnappings, massacres, and gang fights happening all across the country. There are also many people living in poverty. Many of the problems in Columbia started because of problems with the drug traffic from their country.

Information about Colombia

Before I read the book, Out of War, I didn't know a lot about the situation in Colombia. Colombia is a very complicated place. They have been having a civil war for almost fifty years now. I learned a lot about the fighting, the violence that they live with every day, and the instability of the whole country.

Peer Editing Blog Entries

Yesterday, I did a tutorial with the students on peer editing, which can be found here. It was a little bit elementary for them, but I explained that it was already online so we would just overlook the middle school style format. It was actually fine, but I didn't want them to feel like it was talking down to them. I skipped parts of it to make it more streamlined. If I was going to do one myself, I would pare it down a bit. Partly that's because I do mini-lessons that need to be pretty quick and partly because they don't usually stay with the lesson for more than 20 minutes. I had them take notes on the peer editing format and enter it in a blog post so that they can go back and review it whenever we do peer editing.

Today, I had them go into other students blogs and do some peer editing. They left the editing comments in the comments section of the other person's blog post. They seemed to do a pretty good job although some of them probably have a little trouble actually figuring out what is wrong with another post. The good thing is that most of them are able to find someone either on their level or below their level of writing so that they can actually see the mistakes. Those who are at a higher writing level are quite a bit harder for some of the students to edit because their mistakes are less obvious and sometimes they don't really have mistakes, although they might be able to edit for content or add to it to make it better.

I was impressed with their ability to be kind and remember not to make others feel bad. I was afraid they might forget that in their effort to find corrections. Sometimes it is easier to focus on the mistakes than on the good things in someone's writing, but they did an excellent job of balancing both sides.

Technology

I think I have decided to teach the students a new technology tool every Monday. It is important that they learn how to use the technology, not only so they have the information for later in life, but so that we can do what we need to do to keep the blogging fun and interesting.

I'm hoping that we get our cameras soon. We are just waiting for the money to be accessible. We had some trouble getting it into the appropriate account and now we are just waiting to see how hard and long the process is going to be when we need to request the money. I do hope that we can get them soon and get some pics uploaded before the Open Blog Night.

Ah yes, Open Blog Night, an open house for family and friends of the students is happening on October 30th, which is two weeks from today. We'll see how much we can get done before that happens.

Getting Things Under Control

I finally feel like I'm getting this project under control. We are getting less of the locked blogs and it seems like things are settling into a pattern.

I think we are getting less locked blogs because we are only starting up blogs with new students as they come in so there aren't as many being created from the same IP address on the same day. Because we have a wireless lab, the IP address was showing up the same for all the laptops and that made Blogger suspicious. Apparently, only spammers can create that many blogs, that quickly, all from the same address. Until us, that is. :)

Also, I have written up instructions for getting started and although they need to be modified and made more explicit, it really helps when I can just hand it to a student and let them follow the instructions. It seems to work really well. I still have to check in to make sure that they are putting in the correct username and password, but overall it works pretty well.

I chose to have them all use a specific formula for their username and password. It is based on their names, initials and birthdates and is information that they should know off the top of their head, but that everyone else would have to really look to find out about them. It is a good thing that I did because I can't tell you how often they forget this information!

Blogs, blogs, blogs

I feel a little overloaded today, with trying to keep up with the new blogs, adding them to our Google Site and trying to figure out how to keep the blogs from getting locked by Blogger. Apparently, we seem like spammers and they just keep locking people's blogs. I hope that it doesn't keep doing it to the same students. So far I think that each student has only been locked once, but I haven't been keeping close tabs. I've just been having them request blog unlocks as soon as I notice it so that their blogs don't get deleted. I sent off an e-mail to Megan who is going to forward it to her friends from the Google Teacher Academy she attended. Perhaps one of them will have an answer for me. In the meantime, I just keep trying to make sure the blogs aren't lost for good.

The Second Week

I started today with sentence combining work. I gave the students three simple sentences and asked them to combine them in as many ways as possible. They did a pretty good job. As usual, there are some students who work more quickly than others, so I was able to differentiate quite a bit by just asking them to use different forms of the verbs (ie: wearing instead of wore) and then told them they could add extra information in order to add descriptions that would help me see the picture they imagined.

They are picking up the technology part of this project very quickly. I think I only had to help one student log in today and they are able to navigate their way around Blogger pretty well now without explicit directions from me.

One problem I still have is that it takes a long time for the initial setup and it is a bit tricky to incorporate that into the 20 minutes I have alotted for this writing every day. I only have 90 minutes to work with, so if I go longer, they lose time with reading skills time. I have to work on this and see what I can figure out. I have my assistant working with them to get started right now and I think I'll wait to see if it speeds up as she learns the process better or if it just takes that long no matter what. That will help me see what else I can do to fit it in better. Unfortunately, new students is a recurring theme in an alternative setting like this.

Getting Up and Running

I think things are pretty much up and running at this point. Most of the students have one or two blog posts and I got on this afternoon and left a comment on everyone who had at least one post up. I only left a comment on one post, but I think it will help give them the feeling that this is interactive. My next step is to try to get them linked up together so they can read and comment on other students work.

One problem I am having is adding links to a sidebar. I have never had a problem with this in my own blogs in the past, but it looks like Google is changing the process for adding things and it is much less user friendly as far as I am concerned. You have to be more knowledgeable about HTML and that is something that I am not. I can sorta figure it out a little bit, but it takes quite a bit of time and energy and I can't imagine trying to get my less tech saavy students to do it.

I need to look into this a bit before I do that assignment and in the meantime I'm not sure if I should just use the Reader tool on the dashboard or wait until I have it figured out.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

The First Day of the Project
Well, we started our blogs today. Most of the students seemed to be really excited about starting their own blogs. One student said he felt like he was in college! Although most of them had heard of blogs or at least knew about them from Myspace, none of them actually had a blog, so it was new territory. They did an excellent job creating their gmail and blogger accounts. The part that took the longest was figuring out what to name their blog. I asked them to use their name or something specific to them in the name of their blog so that I could tell them apart. It was difficult for them to come up with ideas that they were happy with, but eventually they did and actually they all came up with really good names. I also asked that they keep their URL the same as their blog name. That didn't always work because some of the names were already in use, so we just added an 08 to the end of their blog title in the URL and that seemed to work.The other main problem we had was that we were creating multiple blogs from the same IP address since we are on wireless computers and blogger tried to keep us from doing it thinking we were spammers. I can see that this might continue to be a problem. I see that now blogger has blocked most of our blogs thinking they are spam blogs and we have to request a review to get them to unblock the blog. I hope that it goes smoothly and we don't have a bunch of blogs deleted.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Blogamundo Project
The Blogamundo Project is a blog writing project being funded by a Salem Keizer Education Foundation grant at Roberts High School, Downtown Learning Center. It is focused on multi-media literacy. Our goal is to teach reading, writing, and technology by having students blog their writing assignments. Writing assignments will use photographs, short videos, and Web 2.0 technology to enhance the writing experience. Students will be able to keep track of their own writing on their blog as well as reading and commenting on the blog work of other students in the class and across the school. Part of the project focuses on community building within the school as well as with other students in the internet community. We also hope to ease the transition of students from program to program by keeping the blogs going as they transition to writing in other program areas.