News @215

Deep Breath and Heavy Sigh! Elin and I have accomplished a great deal for newly arrived digital immigrants; In this week alone we have seen the new world from the deck of the ship, pulled along side the pier, and now we both feel that we have stepped foot in our new country. “See” sickness had abated with many widgets! We collaboratively created a 4th grade wiki (which includes our third teaching partner) called, The 4th Grade Bookshelf. http://fourthgradebookshelf.wikispaces.com/. It is linked from both of our class blogs, and is a place for all of our students to share all the great books they read this year. The greatest beauty of of this wiki is that, even though we each have a page, all three are accessible to all of our kids. After each book is finished the kids will work on their responses, find the cover of their book, upload it to the wiki page, find pictures they want to go along with their voice thread, and create a voice thread book review. They will be able to use images from the web, take digital photographs to begin. We have no doubt that eventually, our kids will take off with this and it will become a living entity without us. We chose to use a wiki, because we did not want to force the conversational piece yet, and knew that if conversation was a piece of it, some kids would be very sad never being commented to. In addition, I have begun to change my blog from “my Blog” to a class blog where news is shared with parents that my students will write as the year goes on. The class blog that Bob shared by Maria, http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=51141, re-sparked my original vision of a class site. I was swayed by the idea that a blog needs to be conversational to be worthwhile. If I start it, they will blog.