Fotobabble

Another successful app to use with young children.  A great way to record student voice - giving children the opportunity to publish their writing or to express their opinion about something they have learnt. It is easy for them to take a photo and to record, then listen and rerecord if they wish. Then this can be shared - via email to their parents or the link is copied and uploaded to their Padlet page (I am doing this for them at this point in time.)

 
Samantha explaining her garden plan; Scarlett talking about how a food pyramid keeps us healthy; Cooper counting in 5s.
Here are examples of how fotobabble can be used to record student learning - it also gives children the opportunity to talk to or about a topic without having to read a script - which is an important skill in itself!

Blogger - Our Class Blog

So simple! Using the iPad Blogger app has made it easy for the children to write a new post each day on our class blog. I was determined that by the end of Term One they would take responsibility for choosing the learning of the day that they wanted to share and be able to publish the post themselves. 
To achieve this I had to:

• set aside time each day to show 2 children how to take/choose a photo, write a title, write the caption, write their names as the labels
• suggest the photo/learning to share
• suggest an appropriate title, they could usually think of a sentence to write on the topic
• be available to edit their writing before publishing
• make sure that the task was shared around ans that everyone had a turn
• make sure that there were 4 children that were shown 

Padlet - Term 1 2014

This has turned out to be the most successful app for the beginning of the year for my Year 2 class. It is so versatile and has enthused and motivated the children into taking photos, videos and writing and then sharing their learning with their parents.

As an introduction to Padlet we had class pages where we all wrote on the same page.
Now:

everyone in the class has their own Padlet page 

each page is uploaded to the class blog -  http://www.chelseabachelors.blogspot.co.nz/

it is then able to be accessed from home as well - several children have taken off with this and have added photos and captions of themselves at home

writing on their Padlet page has become part of the Daily 5 reading rotation 

writing on their Padlet page has become part of the writing rotation

children choose what they want to write about - choose or take their own photo, write their own title and write their own sentence/caption

2014 - Using The Blogger iPad App

Student voice and all that - the children will be rostered on to take a daily photo of classroom learning and be responsible for writing the caption. Hopefully this will take the blog into more homes and will mean more parents will use the blog and maybe leave comments and feed back for the children - an authentic audience for their writing. The Blogger app for the iPad has made posting photos and captions so easy that all I need to do is check and edit the writing before publishing.

Blogger - Our Class Blog

http://www.chelseabachelors.blogspot.co.nz/

I still see a need for a class blog and Blogger still seems to be the best platform to share with the parent community what the class or Syndicate is doing. 2013 saw The Bachelors' Blog become a Syndicate blog where I was in control of what was posted. Usually weekly I would post a least one photo with a caption to show what the learning for the week was. I would always update the Star of The Week photo too. A weekly commitment but that's what a blog is all about - regular communication with the parent community.

Kidblog - sharing an individual child's work online

http://kidblog.org/Space10sBlog/

Half way through the year I was having doubts about our class Wikispace pages. I was always fixing errors with the children's posts. They found it hard to remember to write posts chronologically and I would find their writing in all sorts of mixed up places on their page. Uploading photos and leaving comments was messy too. I feel wikispaces is probably suited to children older than my 6-7 year olds. Kidblog seems to be a cross between Blogger and Wikispaces, allowing a teacher to set up individual pages for each child in a class while still having control over each page. (Using Blogger meant having individual email accounts which seemed too big a step for Year 2s.) Writing posts was more organised and leaving comments was a lot easier.

Embedding Slideshows

Then early this year I became really clever and taught myself how to embed a slide show into my blog - so easy really. I then discovered how to change the size of embedded fotobabbles and Storybirds - more by good luck than good management!



 Click this link to watch a video slide show of the Trip to the Zoo in March 2012 and sing along to the zoo song
or
Zoo Trip March 2012 - watch a slide show of photos

 

Click this link to watch a video slide show of the Trip to the Zoo in March 2012 and sing along to the zoo song or

Zoo Trip March 2012 - watch a slide show of photos

A Blog Begins - 2010

After attending the workshop on blogging in the classroom in January 2010 I knew that I could do this! So a trial blog began and many hours of fiddling and trial and error!

My first class blog - Feb 2010

The first wallwisher created after a class visit to Ambury Farm
 

However my first trial blog with my class at the beginning of 2010 was not well received by Senior Management or the B.O.T. It was obviously too early for this type of innovation at Chelsea School – security involving photos and information were the questionable aspects apparently. I continued with my slideshows for the rest of that year and trialled Wallwisher with the children and found it was well received by the parents.






This made me determined to continue with my class blog and in 2011 to bypass the security issues I advertised the URL for the blog only through syndicate newsletters that were sent home each term and made sure the URL was kept off the school website.

This link takes you to one of the very first posts on the new Bachelors' Blog in Feb 2011