Blogical Minds

Harley tops off a day in the snow!

Harley was the hit of the day! I wish you could have heard the exclamations of joy coming from the students when his picture appeared. Lani gave us a great tour of the snow Chardon, Ohio is having and it was the next best thing to actually being there. Thanks Lani for giving us a tour of the winter wonderland. Your questions made us think and it was a fun-filled day in Georgia for students who rarely have the chance to see snow. Be prepared - lots of questions are coming your way and the blogicians are most interested in knowing more about Harley! Warm wishes are being sent your way from the blogicians and their teachers!

Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

Today you are going to take a virtual trip via Lani! It is going to be so much fun and I can't wait to see your reactions. Travel with me to

A New Meaning to the Word Shovel

And these are?

He looked out and he cried!

Enjoying the snow!

Thank you Lani for this most excellent collaboration!

Emmy emails Governor Purdue!

Here is a copy of the letter Emmy created to email to Governor Perdue.

Hello Sonny Perdue

   I’m Emmy. You may not remember me but I had a picture taken with you at the Georgia State Legislator Leader Appreciation Night. You said I could interview you but over e-mail. So here I am e-mailing you. I want you to choose the question or questions you want to answer.
1. How do you use technology in your job as a legislator?
2. What is your favorite part of your job? Your least favorite?
3. Do you have a blog? We see it as a good way to communicate with people and learn. We share ideas and help each other with the comments.
4. Do you think a blog would be helpful in your job? Do you think it would help you communicate with the public and media?
5. Is recess in schools good or bad? Why don’t we have it anymore? Do you support funding for recess equipment? We have very little equipment.
6. What is the best way you have found to let people know what you are doing?
7. What are two issues that are of special interest to you concerning our      schools? How can we help?
8. What are your most important responsibilities as a legislator?
9. Would you blog in your free time?
10. What is your view on poverty and equal educational opportunities for disadvantaged students? Do you support special programs for less fortunate students?
11. Would you support incorporating blogs into schools?
12. How do you feel about keeping music, art, and PE in schools? What should students do to make sure music, art, and PE are kept in schools?
13. Do you support funds for improving technology equipment and staff in schools?
14. Will you comment to our blogs?
15. Do you support redistricting schools so that our student body is diverse?
16. Should fun activities be kept in schools (examples, Halloween parades, assemblies, parties, etc)
17. How can we keep the internet safe at school?
18. We have to drink milk with our school lunch, but we would like to have the option to drink water instead without an additional charge. Would you support this change in menu?
19. Free summer reading programs could be very beneficial to students. How should we fund and implement programs?
20. Students often times aren’t listened to by teachers and administrators. Do you value our opinions and concerns? How should we express ourselves in a meaningful manner that will be listened to by others?

If you could just answer one or a few questions that would be great but if you answered all of them that would be wonderful but that would take a while. So just a few of them would be nice. Since we’re doing this at school I don’t have an e-mail here so could you send your reply by e-mail to my bloging teacher “Mrs.C”. She is the lady who took a picture of you and me. Here is her address: xxxxxxxxxx  I will share your answers with all of my fifth grade class.

Thank you for all you do for Georgia and for letting me interview you. This has been a great honor and I thank you for the interview.

Emmy

P.S. I would like to invite you to my honor chorus performance at XXXXX High School Feb. 3 2:10 we have been practicing on this for a long time so please try and come this might be our honor chorus break through it’s only for fifth graders that’s why it’s called honor chorus.

This answer came back for Governor Perdue's office.

Governor Perdue has received your e-mail and appreciates hearing from you. You will receive a direct response from him shortly.  With the very high volume of messages and mail, we hope you will understand if there is a delay in responding.  If this is an urgent or time-sensitive matter, please call us directly at 404-656-1776.  Again, our thanks for your comments and input.

Please do not reply directly to this message.  Thank you.

Isn't this exciting? We all will eagerly await his answer.  Great work Emmy!

Proud as a peacock

This is a quick post to let you know how proud I am of all of you. In fact I am as proud as a peacock!
We have had network problems at the school for the past two weeks. You have not let it deter you though. You adapt, find solutions, and go right on with your commenting and blogging. You're storing it on Word for the time being but we will get it moved over to your blog.

Flickr photo credit to Dom|M

Mary made a great podcast thank you to Lani and it even includes music.  Let's listen!
Download MaryThankYou.mp3

Michael created some dynamite idiom sentences. His are not posted yet but hopefully will be soon displayed on his blog. They need to be celebrated on the class blog right now. Here goes:

Cut your eyeteeth on them: To acquire wisdom in blogging. I cut my eyeteeth on blogging.

Old Hat: Out of date. My October posts are a old hat.

Sweep you off your feet: To make an impression. I always sweep the audiences who read my post off of their feet.

Take off your hat to someone: To admire someone. My commenters take off their hat to me.

Walking on air: to be very happy. People are walking on air for my posts.

These are fantastic! The kicker is that Michael is going to do a post at home about a creative way he and his mom came up with to help him with his learning at school.

You were all having a blast writing your idiom sentences. It was so much fun walking around and joining your conversations and having you share your work.  Terrific!

Other highlights today -

Victoria and Tina are also working on extra posts that they want to share - all of this is about their learning and the fun they are having with that learning.

Emmy and Johnny took home CDs full of pictures and other goodies highlighting the good work they did at the legislative event.

We missed Eddie who was absent this week. Hope to see him next week!

Well I said a quick post so I need to get back to work. I'll close with one of Victoria's idiom sentences:

"I get a shot in the arm when I am blogging."

I couldn't agree more! How about you?

 

 

Special recognition to legislative bloggers!

Traits of a successful school blogger

Now in our wiki on Safe and Responsible Blogging we list these as Traits of a Successful Elementary Blogger but of course it could apply to any age student. I want to list them here so we can continue the conversation we were having last week in class. You had your thinking caps on! Now we need to work at getting our thoughts written in such a way  that makes it come alive for others reading it! You can do it!

• Accept the challenge of blogging to their “personal best.” Having challenging assignments provides the opportunity for them to demonstrate higher levels of performance and successful elementary bloggers welcome that challenge.

• Show improvement on their posts (or comments) with practice and guidance from others. Posts are thoughtful and show sharpened thinking. This includes not only good content, but – because these are school-related blogs – also follows writing conventions including spelling, grammar and punctuation.
• Respond to posts (or comments) by others. They begin to understand the power of blogs is in their connectedness – they are connected to a larger community of ideas. They anticipate and enjoy those connections.
• Work toward including posts (or comments) that include textual references to support their opinions. They begin to add quotes or links to other works. Their voice is apparent.
• Respect others. It’s okay to disagree; it’s not okay to be disagreeable. Be respectful of others and their opinions, and be polite when you disagree.
• Dare to take responsible educational "risks" to "bump their reading, writing, thinking and blogging up several notches!"
• Celebrate their own and their peers' successes!

Two sessions in one week!

Two sessions in one week! Now that's the kind of week I like! We got so much done. We couldn't post but we will later. TypePad was acting up a bit on Tuesday so your posts will hold in Word until next week. We always have to have a back up plan when working with technology, right? You showed your flexibility by regrouping when you could not make comments due to TypePad glitches and then there were further posting problems. You didn't let it stop you, you simply went into Microsoft Word and started typing your thoughts and ideas about our guide for blogging. I think this project is going to develop into something special. You have learned a lot about blogging so far this year and you are trying to put that together into a product that could help others beginning this journey. We had good discussions.

We also had a visitor in class - Ms. Ricketson from a nearby high school. She is interested in blogging next year with a gifted class. I know she learned a lot from all of you as she went around the room talking to the different groups who were working on specific topics we brainstormed on Inspiration. She plans to come back again. We welcome her!

These are some of the points that we listed as far as the mechanics of blogging goes. It's a good beginning! Emmy was a great note taker. That's not always an easy task when everyone is talking but she did it well. We took her notes and then worked in pairs to get our thoughts together. The first part is the mechanics but we know there's a lot more to blogging than just mechanics. We discussed that a bit but will get back to those important discussions.

Then Friday's session was really productive. Emmy and Jhonny have posted pictures, podcasts and their takes of the interviews with legislators, GSU personnel, and others at the GSU Legislative Appreciation Night. They plan to add to their posts but worked diligently to get the podcasts and pictures up! Good blogging takes time! We can't post some pictures we would like to post due to our research but Emmy managed to get a picture of herself with our governor, Sonny Perdue! And Jhonny got to shake his hand and appear in other great pictures with our government officials. They'll get to take a CD home of all those fantastic pictures. Great week in Geogia!

Review, Reflect, Retell

Today is a day to review, reflect and retell. It is also a time for you to be in charge of your learning. The first thing we want to do is review our "Safe and Responsible Blogging" wiki. Then you are going to take it from there! Oh the places we will go!

The question is....What is literacy?

From Mrs. C.....

When you are actually really blogging it means that you have read something either in class or on some other blog or on some other website. And then once you read you question and think about what it is that you have read. You do this first in your own mind. You think about it and then you blog about it. Then you collaborate, which means you network with other kids, other students, other teachers, other bloggers  and you think some more about it. You reflect, then you may comment on another blog. You may do another post.   You may provide  some  links to extend the learning. Further conversations may develop on blogs. Those are the basic steps.

Think about how we  can use blogging most beneficially in the classroom. That's why you're using your blog to talk about your learning, to learn more, to share, to reflect, to let your teacher and others know your understandings, what you need help on and what you’d want to learn more about.

It is about literacy. Literacy is .................

Learning about literacy is our next quest. I will see you in one hour or so and we will put our heads together and come up with our own understandings. I can't wait to see you!

Emmy's Quip

Emmy provided some humor about this delightful picture of Mrs. B, your principal, and Mrs. A.  She quipped that’s what happens to technology teachers (on left), that’s how the principal looks in the morning (center photo), and that’s how the classroom teacher looks at the end of the day. (on right). Yep, laughter synthesizes learning. Check out this post, Kid's Voices,  where I let other edubloggers know  how well Emmy and Jhonny represented the blogicians at the legislative event. Then enjoy this podcast where  Emmy and Jhonny are interviewed by Mrs. C.