Getting Heard

School closed!

With Hurricane Rita threatening to worsen a diesel fuel shortfall, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue asked schools last Friday to close Monday and Tuesday. While some parents praised the governor's move, others complained they did not have enough time to arrange child care.

I was to meet with this group today but we will have to regroup. More later.....

Give me 5 and other important things

It was great watching all of you working so hard on your writing. Ms. Baros was teaching away!

A quick review for you:
Points covered:

• prewriting
• first draft
• editing/revision
• publish - final draft

Ms. Baros continued by explaining that you as the writer will check your assignment first, then a peer editor checks, then she is the final checker!

Questions to ask yourself after writing:

1. Does my writing make sense?
2. Does my writing  flow?
3. Have I checked capitalization, punctuation, spelling, complete sentences?

"Give me five" - this is how she explained this.

1. who
2. what
3. capitalization
4. punctuation
5. does it make sense?

Pretty clear, right?

She had you edit with different colors of ink so you could tell just what you had checked.

Time was spent talking about listening skills and a reviewing how to mark edits so that you all would be consistent.

You completed your papers. Then I showed you this class weblog, Getting Heard. You used the side links to go quickly to your blogs. Wow! All of you who created one last week had at least two or more comments. Some were from Japan, New Zealand, Ohio and other places. The comments were most interesting and you got right to work answering them. I was impressed with your responses. Hey, editing even came into play there. The one really good thing about editing is the more you practice the quicker it starts coming to you.

I can't believe how the time zipped by! Next week we'll get right down to posting. Have a great week!

Our first day

Naming weblog projects is always a struggle. I'll spend way too much time thinking about the name but eventually a "light-bulb" moment pops up and I can get going!  "Getting Heard" is the name I picked for this weblog project. I think it really fits for this particular group. We need to work  at getting student voices heard but we need to work even harder to hear those student voices that do not often  get heard. I think that's the case with this group. This is a very small group of students (currently all boys) who are in an English class in a local public high school. I just met the class today. It didn't take long to realize that they had something to say! I'm beginning a journey with these guys, their teacher and the instructional technology teacher in their school. These students are good thinkers.  They don't like writing  much. They're not into peer editing. Their experiences with learning have not always been the best. That aside, they found the concept of weblogs very intriguing. They asked questions that made me dig a little deeper to answer well. They were polite and willing to listen. In addition, they are very eager to be part of a project exploring the use of weblogs to see if this type of writing just might be right up their alley!  The fact that others would read  their weblog and might even comment did not escape them. They liked the thought of hearing what others might comment. I explained how we would be opening the doors of our classroom. I told them that I had even heard from a teacher in Colorado who was interested in making connections with us. Their ears perked up! I was peppered with questions.

We spent most of the session talking about weblogs. Examples were shown. I used parts of the very same slide show that I showed teachers at the High Schools That Work conference this summer. I think the visuals helped.  Then explaining the  mechanics of creating a weblog, how to navigate around the different areas of the software and exploring the different features took a good part of the class.  Finally, user names, logins, URLs and other blog lingo was mastered to enable most of them to enter their very own weblog and complete one post.

The teacher was excited about school reform and improvement being a "hot" topic for class. Across the board every student felt that high schools should change. We will be tackling that topic next session.

Check out the weblogs on the sidebar and welcome these guys to the world of blogging! I can tell this is going to be a group where a "whole lotta learnings goin' on"! Can't wait till next week.