Our school is a TRIBES school.  Being the first TRIBES school in Australia, it is very heavily embedded in everything we do from planning to relationships with students and the community.  If you have not seen or heard about TRIBES, I would highly recommend visiting a school that implements it and signing yourself up for a TRIBES PD.  Even if your whole school doesn’t do TRIBES, one classroom is a great start.  Hands down the best PD, course, or learning experience I have had in my life was the two TRIBES trainings I have done: Tribes Learning Communities and the Artistry of Learning.

So when it came to blogging, I knew the TRIBES Agreements of: Mutual Respect, Attentive Listening, Appreciations/No Put Downs, the Right to Pass and (Personal Best and Reflection) would have to be embedded in our commenting as well.

Kathleen Morris and Kelly Jordan have a great poster that we have used for the past year and provided a great start for our students in blogging.  This is an excellent resource, but I knew our students could create something more tailored to their approach to blogging keeping in mind the TRIBES agreements.  We set about brainstorming how the agreements fit into our commenting and came up with this list of quality commenting agreements ….

Having used my darling husband’s iPad 1 and our school’s iPad 2′s, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of iPad 3 before I spent the money on my own iPad. I was interested in the better camera capabilities and the better screen.

There is no doubt that when you pick up the New iPad (apparently it is not called iPad 3.. ha!) the first thing that strikes you is the clarity of the screen. It truly is “brilliant! In every sense of the word.” Zooming in on pictures, playing videos or animated apps is a new experience.

But educationally does this far better visual experience make a difference? Probably not.

There is one feature, however, that is not publicised much at all.  In fact it is the last thing Apple mentions on its website tucked under all the other whizz-bang features.  I think this slight improvement could make a huge educational impact.  It is the Dictation feature.  On iPad 1 and 2, I used Dragon dictation for this sort of feature, or within apps such as Sound cloud or Posterous. But there is no need for dictation apps anymore, as literally anywhere there is a typing pad screen, the dictation function is available: writing notes, contacts, update twitter, and any apps!

This will make for seamless dictating possibilities for reluctant writers, for extending early finishers, for debating, for persuasive writing, or for language learning.

I am looking forward to trying out some dictations this week and will report back in.  Just wanted to make a case for an iPad 3 if you were still hovering on the fence between the cheaper iPad 2′s.  I think the money is well spent on the iPad 3′s features, especially the dictation feature.

Any other features of the iPad 3 stick out for you?  How have you used Dictation in the classroom?

Limbo Land is when you are roaming between having set up your class blog the best you can (hopefully using the guidance of @kathleen_morris here) but you are not ready for it to reach its full potential due to permission forms and paperwork! I just thought I would offer some things I have done in the past few weeks whilst in Limbo Land… please add to the list.

* Paperwork

Nobody likes it, but permission forms are required for students to use blogging platforms to share their work, post pictures, etc.  Writing a clear permission form is key so parents know what they are signing up for.  Are they signing up for work being shared? pictures? An explanation of what blogging is also accompanies my permission forms, which @kathmorris kindly shared with me and I expanded and changed upon to suit my school and students.  This should include the benefits of blogging and a basic introduction to blogging.  Information sessions are another important part to getting blogging up and running.  Blog-uage is another language for a lot of people, so explaining in person what a blog is, the purpose, and how their child’s learning will improve from it is vital. Checklists to ensure all students have blog permission forms back in are extremely important especially if dealing with a large volume of students ( for example a specialist area where the whole school might have to respond).

* Inclusion 

Obviously we can not build up a safe online space, if the our social/emotional space in the classroom is not also safe.  This means building a community of learners that feel safe and secure to share and collaborate with each other. We are a TRIBES school, so inclusion activities are our highest priority at the moment. We begin each day with community circles.  These past few weeks we have worked on the Tribes agreements, Ideal classroom activities, T-shirt outlines where students draw dictated areas about their personalities and life in certain areas on a paper t-shirt, I like my neighbor who, and appreciation pictures. This week also saw us build a strengths wall in the classroom where each student has chosen a strength card to suit them and then we will move to some goal setting for strengths they wish to develop…. which brings me to….

* Goal setting!

What do I want to achieve out of my blog?  So until I have all permission forms back, I am working on my goal for this term 1 2012. My goal this term and probably term 2 is on writing really GREAT comments.  I blogged with these students last year on our Spanish blog. It was a great start to blogging for us all.  My goal for 2011 blog was to reach out the the families so they could continue their Spanish learning at home, and just to get them excited about blogging. 

I feel that went really well, and that goal was achieved.  BUT I felt sometimes that the comments had area for improvement!

With only an hour a week with the students, I did not have the time to go into commenting in detail, so I am delighted that this year I can do that.

* Writing

I will of course be using guidelines such as this to help students learn how to write a really GREAT comment, but until the blog is up and running THIS is not an authentic writing task.  So, I had to come up with something more creative.  Enter the mailbox:

At the start of the year, I wrote a letter to all my students.  I told them about myself, and my family.  As a writing tasks, all students wrote me a letter in return telling me anything that they thought I should know about them.  It was a wonderfully insightful activity!  After they wrote the letter, I felt that so much of themselves went into the task and I could not leave them unanswered.  I also thought, what a great opportunity to model that letters/comments deserve a response.  Therefore, I responded to each and every letter and placed this letter box out as a means of opening the lines of communication, having students practice writing to me, practice responding to letters.  I also opened with Dear and From, and even after week one they were also doing the same in the notes I received in my post box.  At the moment, I am not sharing students’ notes/letters with the class or modelling responses, but more modelling the fact that if someone puts the time and effort into writing a letter, a response is best etiquette!  I am also modelling the structure that I hope to see in their commenting.

* Visiting

We have been visiting other blogs at every opportunity, just to show students what other classes are doing and getting them excited about working with other classes.  I have also spent this time introducing myself to other teachers via Twitter and on their blogs in an attempt to develop some blogging buddies and global collaboration partners.  The power of Twitter amazes me (so if you are not there, get there!), within a day I had more classes to collaborate with than I had the means to do. We have already set up a Flat Stanley project which will begin this coming week.

What else do you do when you are in Limbo Land between fake un-permissioned blogging and real life blogging??

Well if you didn’t know yet, I might as well tell you one of my secrets, I LOVE PREZIS!  And I love talking about becoming a teacher.  So a Prezi about becoming a teacher is like peanut butter and banana… they belong together.

While tutoring on the Graduate Diploma of Primary Teaching at Deakin with @kath_morris, I made this Prezi to share with my students. Compiling such a list was extremely reflective and made me forever grateful for the teachers and friends I have met on my path to becoming a teacher.  It made me grateful for the inspirational teachers and principals I am lucky to work with.

So this 10 step Guide for Graduates became a list of inspirations of things in my first year teaching in Australia that were memorable and worthwhile. It also became a list of minor frustrations, things that I wish someone had forewarned me about!  Some of these warnings may have been useless perhaps, as it is as much about the journey as it is about the destination.  But, I thought I would share with other graduates out there some of what I learned, and feel free to pass on to share with graduates you may know.  I hope even if one thing strikes a chord with a Grad, it will add to the inspiration pile and help avoid more in the frustration pile.

Tags: Applications, Education, Graduate Teachers, How to, Technology

I have always loved the term Digital Natives coined by Mark Prensky (thanks Heather)… UNTIL… I had a conversation with my fantastically inspiring Principal.  She got me thinking about the word native and whether a native was the most entirely appropriate word.  Pedantic yes, but a fun topic of conversation for a geek such as myself!

A native belongs to ONE place, living and growing there.  Do our students belong to ONE place?  Or are they able and capable of belonging to more than one place? Is the one place they are from Digital-Land?  Or is this whole myriad of technology that they are confronted with where they roam?  I would lean towards an adaptable generation.  A generation that is able to move from place to place, from technology to technology, able to handle multiple digital literacies all at the one time.

When the ever inspiring Mrs A, mentioned the word Digital Nomads, light bulbs flashed upstairs, and I knew she was onto a good thing.  Our students have no fixed abode in Digital-Land.  They were not born in one technology and remain there until the end.  They are nomadic and move from place to place from gadget to gadget.  The move with the seasons, with the teachers, with friends and parents. They are staying within the boundaries of technology of course, but they are not from one land with one language and one literacy.  I would argue that our students are Digital Nomads, and my job is to help guide them while they are in my corner of this technology territory and nurture some skills that they can take with them as they move to the next place, next season, next year.  This blog is my digital residence for now where I can share some of the nomadic wanderings of my class this year.  I hope you join us as we experience the nomadic life of some Grade 3/4′s in Victoria, Australia.

Tags: Blogging, nomads, Technology