The Use and Abuse of Technology in the Classroom

This article was also posted on the kinderchat blog.

More and more primary teachers now have access to technology in their classroom. Whether it is an iPad or an iPod touch, a desktop or a laptop, a growing number of teachers are either being given access to this technology by their school boards or bringing their own devices to class to help students to learn. Because of the multitude of choices and opportunities that technology enables, this is a positive development.

I have been concerned, though, by some of the ways that I see technology being used. Technology should not just allow us to do things in a more engaging way; it should allow us to do new things that we thought were not possible. It is those new things that are the real value technology provides. It is not enough to USE technology. You must use it well.

Having access to books does not mean that the students in my classroom will learn to read. I need to make careful pedagogical choices and use those books in a way that will gently and purposefully help those children to become independent readers. Very few children can make this leap themselves. Most need a thoughtful teacher to guide them.

In the same way, having technology in my classroom does not mean that my students will discover how to use it as a learning tool. I have to carefully select and structure what it is used for so that it becomes truly educational. As with reading books, should not our goal be to develop independent learners? Here are my personal abuse and use lists for the handling of devices in the classroom.

Technology Abuses

Technology should not be used as simply a digital worksheet. There are many apps and Internet sites available that are simply a technological version of a paper task, forcing students to practice over and over a skill that they may already have mastered. Don’t get me wrong. Skills do need to be practiced. I just happen to think that students should spend most of their time using technology for more creative purposes.

Technology should not be used as a way to keep students occupied. A small number of computers or devices in a classroom can be an inviting center, whether it is an assigned or a self-chosen one. If you use technology in this way, choose wisely when you decide what the students will do with the technology. There are many, many creative options available. It should not be just to keep students busy while you work with small groups of children. (They’re working on mouse skills? Really?)

Technology should not be used to do what can be done without it. Drawing a picture on an app or a computer program and labeling it is a worthwhile activity, but why bother if that activity is an end in itself? It may as well have been done on paper. Technology should allow you to do something new with that picture, such as sharing/publishing it in some way.

The good news is that there are other, better options for using technology. My heart does a happy dance when I see these.

Technology Uses

Technology should be for accessing what was inaccessible. In the past, my teaching materials were limited to what was in my classroom and in the school’s library. Now there are a plethora of materials available online to fill any teaching need I have, limited only by my online search skills. From classroom-ready videos such as those of Mercer Mayer and Dr. Jean to sharing and learning with other teachers on Pinterest or Twitter to accessing the creative commons photos of thousands of photographers—well, let’s just say there is no longer an excuse for not having appropriate resources.

Technology should be for doing good things in better ways. For example, hearing books being read aloud is an important part of primary literacy. Long ago, listening to books on a cassette tape became listening to books on a CD. Now, there are online books and apps that do a much better job of this, highlighting the words as they are read aloud.

Technology should be for sharing with the world. The environment that our students are growing up in is wired for sharing. The hardware and the software that is available make it easier every day for children to share what they are learning with the world. Even young children can share their learning using drawings, images, blogs, video and digital portfolios. By sharing their artifacts digitally, students invite the involvement and support of their parents, grandparents and anyone who sees their work.

Technology should be for connecting. Before the advent of the Internet, classrooms were forced to be isolated learning hives. Now, those hives can all be interconnected as classrooms can easily link with other classrooms and experts to ask questions, compare experiences and learn together. Tools such as Skype, Twitter and blogs make connecting and collaborating with classrooms from anywhere a possibility.

Technology should give choices. We are blessed to have a lot of technology in my classroom and my favourite part of that is the choice it gives my students in both their learning style and in sharing what they have learned. When allowed to choose, some students prefer to read on iPads or computers. Others choose paper books. I think choice is important as we accommodate the variety of needs our learners have.

Technology should not just allow us to do traditional in a different way; it should allow us to do things that we thought were not possible.

Commenting With Pre and Emerging Writers

“For me? There’s a comment for me?” asked an eager five-year-old in my classroom, eyes aglow. I assured him that the comment was indeed for him and read it aloud to he and his classmates, pointing to each word on the Smartboard as I did so. He beamed as I read aloud, marveling at the fact that what he had posted on his blog was valuable enough to provoke a response from someone he had never met.

Ensuring All Students Receive Comments

When my students begin blogging each September, I ensure that they ALL begin getting comments as soon as possible. I hold a parent night and show the parents how to comment. I enlist the help of students who were in my classroom in previous years. Sometimes I have put out a plea on Twitter using the hashtag #comments4kids. I know how encouraging those comments can be, and I want all of my students to have that experience as soon as possible—to feel that rush of acknowledgement a first comment elicits.

Learning to Comment Ourselves

Soon after, I begin teaching my students how to leave comments themselves. With pre-readers and writers, this is a lengthy process! Sometimes we begin by going to the blog of someone who has just left a comment for us. Sometimes we begin by going to the blog of another classroom that is linked from our classroom blog. Wherever and whenever we begin, we always comment together as a group. (With pre readers and writers, this is not just good pedagodgy, it is a necessity!)

We start by talking about the comments we have received, how they made us feel and what was good about them. We want to be able to mimic the best of other people’s comments to us. Almost always, the students want to start by saying “I like your blog”. To help the students to stay on track, and to encourage them to think beyond this over-used phrase, we make an anchor chart to help us remember our discussion. (I first heard the term “anchor chart” from the Two Sisters. It refers to a chart that records a process or strategy and is created WITH the students in their own words. It is then posted in the classroom for the students to use as a reference.)

Commenting Together

To be honest, although this chart is made up by and with my grade one students each year, it does not change a lot from school year to school year. A good comment is still a good comment. Linda Yollis’ students have done some great work explaining how third graders comment, but for my pre and emerging writers, these steps seem to work best. Besides teaching them to comment, they reinforce other concepts my students are just learning.

Say something nice. What specifically did you like about the post? What made you smile?
Make a connection. What did it remind you of? Does it make you think of something you know or have done? Something you saw in a book or on a video? Understanding and making connections is a skill five and six year olds are just beginning to learn.
Ask a question. What do you wonder? What did the writer not include that you wish had been in the article? Understanding the difference between something you tell and something you ask is difficult for most six-year-olds. Including a question helps them to learn what a question is and how to think about someone’s ideas beyond their own.
Re-read your comment. This is a vital skill for commenters of any age. As the students realized how often they needed to change something we had written to make it better, we added this step at the end of our chart.

We follow this pattern pretty closely together for months as they learn the literacy skills necessary to comment on their own. The first independent student comments are often written from home. This year, the first student to comment on the blogs of his peers decided to be “fair” and left a comment for every other child in the class! I make a big deal about these comments, and as with every other comment we receive, we read them aloud together. After one or two students have written comments, the others start to want to do it as well!

Commenting Independently

It is usually near the end of our grade one year when I will actually officially ask all of the students to try making a comment on the blog of their choice. At first, I ask them to show me the comment before they click “submit”, but when they have shown me that they can do this independently, I let them comment on any of the blogs that are linked from our classroom blog, knowing that if there was ever anything inappropriate (to my knowledge there never has been), the teachers we are linked with would contact me. For students whose spelling skills are still developing, I stay close by and if necessary will write an editor’s note in brackets after their comment, in the same way I do with their blog postings.

Do they all follow the pattern that we have practiced together? No. It is a long journey. Learning to comment when you are an emerging writer does take a long time, but learning to read and to write also takes a long time. To me the result—a student who is beginning to understand how to interact with others in a social media situation—is worth the long journey.

Students Posting Online: How Do You Do That?

I get that question a lot. When people see my students’ blogs, the online artifacts they produce, their videos, and the digital footprint the children are beginning to create, the question I am most often asked is “how do you get permission from the parents to do that?”

The parents of our students have spent their whole lives protecting their children. Even before the child was born, they loved and sheltered that little being. They nurtured the child through the preschool years and then trustingly put the child into the school’s care. While this was happening, the media bombarded them with messages about how unsafe the internet is for children. When we broach the subject of posting their child’s work online, is it any wonder they have questions? Frankly, I would be more concerned if they didn’t.

This is What We Do

Blogging is not an option for the six year olds in my classroom. It is what we do. My students’ blogs are their online learning portfolios. From the first week of school to the last, my students write (even before their writing is “readable”) and produce digital artifacts that showcase what they have been learning. That portfolio is available any time of the day or night for parents to view or comment on. It is also available for grandma and grandpa in Calgary or for their older sibling who is away at university. The fact that people who have never met my students read their blogs and sometimes leave comments is a bonus.

I am fortunate that my school division recognizes that posting online is valuable. On the first day of school, a form explaining possible online uses of student images/work is sent home for parents to sign. (Click on school services and then on Student Media/Privacy Form.)

In the second week of school, I always hold a parent information night. On that night, along with talking about how to help their child learn to read, and pleading for them to not send birthday party invitations to school (it leads to tears from those not invited), I show our classroom blog to the parents. I show them my blog, with the pictures and videos of students from last year. I show them a student blog from last year including the way that student’s learning was documented through writing, images and video. We look at the way that student’s writing ability improved through the year and listen to podcasts of the child’s reading fluency. I show them the way our blogs record the number of page reads and a sample of comments the students received. I usually show them our Clustr map, with dots from all over the world showing where people live who have visited our classroom virtually.

Keeping Them Safe

Most important of all, I talk about how I safeguard their child. There are two policies that I have that are the keystones of the way I protect my students online.

I post images of students, and I post the first names of students but I never match the two. I know of many teachers who do identify their students, but that is not my personal policy.
Nothing gets posted unless I see it first. No student articles. No comments. Nothing.

The first class that I blogged with are now in grade eight. In all that time, I have never had a parent who, after seeing what we do on our blogs, has refused to have their child participate. The first year that I posted pictures of the children on my blog, I had one parent who asked for her child’s picture to not be posted online. By Christmas she had changed her mind.

If a parent DID have concerns, I would offer options.

Not including that child in any pictures that would be posted online.
Having their child blog under an alias.

Making it Happen

I realize that many teachers do not yet have a blog to show parents. In that case, I have encouraged teachers to show the parents a blog they would like to emulate. There are lots of great blogs, and this is a case in which a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Parents want to know that we are not putting their child at risk. Their questions come from their overwhelming desire to ensure their child’s safety. I want my students to have an audience and to make connections with people they would otherwise never connect with. I think we can do both.

Starting Out Right

I’ve done several sessions to introduce teachers to blogging in the past, and have usually walked away wondering how many were going to keep it up. Beyond the technical aspects (which are huge issues if you’re not yet sure how to do basic things such as copy and paste) there is always the worry that teachers will not see the potential, but will just see it as “one more thing” to be added to their already busy day. At a fairly recent session that I did, I guessed that only about one third of the participants would actually follow up on the work we did together.

Yesterday I did a daylong session about using blogging to meet your curriculum with about fifty K–2 teachers. This session was the brainchild of Donna Desroche and JoAnne Kasper, and involved teachers from almost all of the schools in their division. It was one of the most enjoyable sessions I have ever done. I loved it because I went away feeling like all of the participants there would actually use what they had learned. I think it worked well for several reasons:

Preparation – All of the teachers came with a Classblogmeister blog already set up. We didn’t need to take time to go over basics, but could instead focus on making it work in the classroom.

Time – The teachers had a whole day of release time to learn about, talk about and feel comfortable with their blogs.

Ownership – We spent some time talking about how to customize their blog and then let them have time to add widgets, change templates and make their blog their own. I don’t see this as peripheral. I think this is an important step in ownership for teachers as well as students.

Curriculum Connection – As you can see from the wiki that I used, we also spent some time talking about specific ways they could use their blog to connect their students with our Saskatchewan curriculum. When I showed them how to embed a video, and some examples of curriculum-related videos that they could use, I could see their eyes light up.

Ongoing Support – At the end of the day, Donna asked them to talk in groups about ways that they felt they could use the blog in their classroom, and then asked them to email both herself and JoAnne to let her know their thoughts about the day and what further support they needed to help implement their goal for their blog. Some of them took the opportunity to find other classes to connect with and begin a blogging buddy exchange.

Well done, JoAnne and Donna. You’ve created a great model that’s worth following. I can’t wait to see the great stuff the teachers and their students will do.

Blogging With Our Big Buddies

For the third year, my class is being mentored by a class of pre-service teachers at the University of Regina. From January to April, while the university is holding classes, these second year students will be commenting on the blog entries of my six-year old students. This program has been so successful, that Patrick Lewis, the university professor whose class is participating in this, and I shared about this experience as part of the K12 Online Conference.

Once again, my students are over the moon to have these big “kids” as part of their learning network. They got to meet their buddies face to face digitally last week via Skype, and were eager to ask important questions such as “Do you have a phone number book?”, “Do you like Pokemon” and “I wonder if you’re having a good day?” Patrick took pictures of the “big buddies” and emailed them to me. I printed them off and gave them to the children to keep in their desks. As in past years, these precious pictures come out to be looked at many times each day. I even saw one of the pictures getting a kiss!

My favourite response, though, was by one of my students when I first explained what we would be doing with our blogging buddies and how they would be helping us to get to be better writers. He said, “Maybe we could find out if they have blogs and we could comment to help them out, too”. Out of the mouths of babes… Apparently none of them are blogging–yet. Well, ELNG 325? We’re waiting.

Starting Right

Sheryl Forsman has just started blogging with her first grade students. Before she started blogging, she spent a lot of time thinking about why she would blog and what she would do if she had a blog. How do I know? Just look at this list that was one of the first entries on her blog.

20 Uses for Our Classroom Blog

Why did we create a classroom blog and how will we use it?
1. document our growth across the year
2. inform families of what we are doing
3. expand our audience
4. collaborate with other first grade bloggers
5. use another form of writing
6. learn about writing for an audience
7. learn about digital literacy
8. document favorite events of this year
9. integrate writing with other subjects
10. write book reviews
11. write journal entries
12. respond to class assignments
13. free choice writing
14. develop keyboard skills
15. communicate with each other
16. collaborate with reading buddies from other classrooms
17. collaborate with teachers from the university as blogging buddies
18.post pictures of our work
19. learn about visual literacy through the design of our pages
20. to have fun!

What a great list. What a great way to start.

Busted!

I’m not as good as Clarence Fisher, who can get kids expelled in another country, but I did feel a bit like Dick Tracy.

A few days ago, one of the students in my classroom received a comment that was not very nice. It made fun of her writing ability. In case you are not a regular reader of my six year old students’ blogs, I don’t edit their writing, but instead let it be an online portfolio of their developing ability to write. The particular child who received the comment has not yet made the connection between sounds and letters in her writing.

Because I use Classblogmeister to host my classroom blog, the comment came to me for approval before it was posted, so I was able to delete it and she was never the wiser. Her self-esteem is still firmly intact.

If it had been one of my students who had written the comment, I would want to know about it. The student did not have a name that was familiar to me, but I went to the Sitemeter I have posted on my blog. One of the options is “referrals”. It gives the URL from which the person linked to my blog. Since I knew what time the comment arrived in my email, it was easy to check and see where the referral had come from near that time. I followed the link to another Classblogmeister blog, with the offending student’s name and the teacher’s email address clearly there. The teacher wrote me back thanking me for the information, saying that she would be “definitely dealing with it”.

I am currently blogging with my fifth class of students, and this is the first time I can recall getting a comment from someone outside our classroom that was inappropriate. A pretty good record, but it is good to know that if I do get something unsuitable for publishing, I can do something about it.

Proving It

Last spring I blogged about a research project that Etty Rosen, a researcher from Israel, was doing about my classroom blog. She sent questionnaires to each of the parents in my class, asking them to rate a wide range of items including Internet access, visits to our blog and involvement with their child. She recently finished compiling the data, and was kind enough to send me a copy of her spreadsheet. Some of the results are below. It is interesting to note that three years ago, less than one third of the children in my classroom had Internet access at home. That has changed dramatically.

The results are overall very positive. Obviously, I wouldn’t keep blogging with my students unless I felt it was valuable, but it is nice to have some research to back up what I think is happening.

I Love Classblogmeister

I really do.My new class of six year olds (actually some are still five) has begun their blogging adventure, and I have been reminded about how exciting blogging with this great tool can be.

Last week I held my Grade One Parent Night, and I used the blog of one of the students from the year before to demonstrate the dramatic change in children’s writing in the first grade.The parents were riveted by the fact that their child would have a similar online portfolio.During the presentation, I mused aloud “if you have some free time tomorrow at 1:00, come and give us a hand getting started with our blogs”.Four adults showed up (actually, I did too so that makes five).What a difference it made to have so much help.There is a feature in Classblogmeister that allows students to choose the colours in their backgrounds instead of the provided templates.It is a bit complicated for young students, so I don’t usually mention this feature until after Christmas.With so much help, the students were able to all choose their background colours, select a title, tell an adult a couple of things about themselves to be included in the “about me” section AND write their first blog entry. They were enthralled with what they had created.

By the next morning, someone’s parent had commented on her blog, so we all had to have a look.That led to us to checking everyone’s blog to see how many “reads” each one had had.Thanks to a workshop of teachers from Grand Forks who had talked to my class via the Yackpack on our class blog during the morning and had promised to check out what we did in the afternoon, almost everyone had at least 15 page reads, and one child had 35.Huge grins all around.The child who told me, “I don’t know how to write” and “I don’t know what to say” visibly sat up straighter in his chair when he saw that he had eighteen reads.He is now beginning to think of himself as a writer.The addition of the “page reads” feature was a brilliant stroke by David Warlick when he created Classblogmeister.

This year, David added a new feature that allows the blogs of my “orphaned” students from last year to be picked up by their new teacher.This means that they can continue to blog and show their growth in the same online space—a two-year portfolio.The only thing better would be if their grade three teacher would allow them to blog as well.

I love that nothing is posted online unless I see it first.I love that there is a Classblogmeister Yahoo email group where users can ask and answer questions.I love how responsive David Warlick is to questions and suggestions that users have.But most of all I love the fact that my students have an audience can begin to see their place in a global community.

Captivation and Connection

I’m sitting at home working on my computer on a Friday night. (Boring life, I know, but I have to do something between folding loads of laundry.) I hear the little ping that lets me know I have an email. Thinking it is an email I just sent to a new recipient being returned, I check it. Instead, it is a blog article from Hailey, one of the six year old students in my class. She writes “Hi Ncol gess what we got to take with our bogging butty in aschaiea it was fun.”

Two things are noteworthy about this. First of all it is the weekend, and she is writing on her blog, definitely a school–type activity. It must be something that she enjoys.

Secondly, she is writing to Nicole, who was her blogging mentor at the University of Regina this past semester. Although she did get to meet Nicole once, all other interaction with her has been through the blog and somehow she has formed a definite attachment. (She is referring to a Skype chat she had a couple of evenings before with another blogging buddy her own age in Australia.)

These are two things that I love about blogging with my class. The way it captivates the kids’ interest and the connections that they make. (Never mind the fact that she demonstrated the use of a capital letter at the beginning and on Nicole’s name and that she ended with a period—two things I’m looking for on her writing rubric next month.)