I am just starting individual blogs with this year’s group of fifth graders. I have been wondering how to set up my curriculum so that my students are reading and responding to blogs outside of our community. I may have hit upon a bit of a plan. As I introduced the blogs, I told them that part of the power of having their own blog was that it could help them share the things they care about, and it could connect them with other people with the same interests.
They got it. As they began their first posts, words poured from their fingers. Students who seemed to struggle with writer’s block in other situations were writing amazingly well crafted first drafts on topics such as video games and golden retrievers. Maybe my next step is to help them set up Bloglines accounts, as Clarence has done, and help them learn to find those other blogs of interest.
My fear is that they will find and aggregate inappropriate feeds. I agree that fear-based decision-making isn’t a place I like to go, but I also don’t want to sabotage this first blogging venture in my school, possibly my district, by taking on too much too soon. For now, I’ll just take the first step; I’ll check in the blogging permission forms, and start pushing my administrator publish button in our Classblogmeister account.
Essays and fifth graders are not a natural combination. Unlike most of the forms of writing in the fifth grade curriculum, children have no experience with essays. No one sits their preschooler on their knee and reads them essays. No one is making picture books or children’s movies of essays. In short, I’m asking them to write something for which they have no internal schema.
Earlier this year we made a few quick jabs at essays. In truth, they were more opinion pieces rather than essays. They were written in response to questions from the local newspaper, such as “What do you fear?” and “Who has it harder in life, children or adults?” A few of the more advanced writers understood what I mean by introduction, body and conclusion and made good beginner’s efforts at including them. Most kids just wrote a few sentences.
After our environmental trip, I assigned them to write a real essay. I took them through all sorts of prewriting to generate ideas of what they learned on the trip. We did mapping exercises to discover ways to organize their ideas. We practiced writing introductions.
After all of that, we went to the lab and they wrote. What they wrote bore no resemblance to an essay. The first ones “done” wrote one informal paragraph with no apparent organization. The ones who took longer to finish wrote lovely travelogues that began when we boarded the bus and went straight through until they got off the bus back as school four days later.
I wasn’t surprised to see that we had no essays. In the past I would have tried to conference with my students. However, as I’ve mentioned before, that hasn’t worked well for me. The conferences rarely lead to real change, and the students who aren’t in the conference at that moment are difficult to keep on task.
This time, I had them upload their essays into an assignment module in Moodle. I added a copy of the assignment rubric as a resource. As the projects came in, I was able to score them against the rubric, and then leave the children comments.
Before the class logged in to Moodle the next day, I discussed the difference between a travelogue and an essay. I assured them that we would keep their travelogues. They were worthwhile and a good way to remember the trip. The advantage of word processing was that we could save a copy of their travelogue and turn that into an essay without having to start again from scratch. We also revisited the rubric which to make more sense to them now that they had their writing in front of them. Students gamely logged in, read their comments and went about revising their work.
When I logged in that evening, I was amazed. The students were truly transforming their pieces into essays. They had introductions that introduced the topic and their main ideas. Each main idea had it’s own paragraph with supporting details. Some students had even written a semblance of a conclusion. These are recapping conclusions, rather than “draw it all together and then make a further point” conclusions. But at this stage in the game, I’ll take any conclusion I can get.
Of course not every student was at this point, but the majority of them were. This is much better success than I’ve ever had with face to face conferences. I’m not sure why this has been so successful. Is it that they can reread the comments? Maybe, but I’ll wager that it is the combination of comments with an easy way to revise their writing without having to write it all by hand, again.
None of this is rocket science. I’ve seen for years that word processing generally makes fifth graders more willing to revise. But this Moodle conferencing has taken it all to a new level.
I’m excited for our next assignment; I’ll set it up as a workshop instead of an assignment. Students will receive two other students’ assignments to score and an attempt to score their own assignment. I’m hoping that evaluating other people’s writing will be educational for them. This entire process is proving highly educational for me.
I was writing a letter to a dear friend and former colleague. I was blathering on about…
- what I’ve been doing with the Moodle
- how it is helping me get a handle on my overwhelming paperwork
- how the children are appreciating the immediate feedback on quizzes
- how my students who hate to read and write don’t seem to realize they are doing both when they take part in the chats and the forums
- how kids are logging in from home to journal with me
- how the journals are helping me forge connections with children who now seem to see me as an ally instead of just another person getting in their way
- how the ability for me to leave comments on their assignments is leading many children to improve their writing through revision
- how I look forward to logging into the Moodle– a feeling I don’t get when staring at a pile of worksheets
After I sent the letter, I had second thoughts. I thought, “Oh no. Too much Moodle in that letter.”
Imagine my delight when she wrote back very excited about Moodle and appreciative that I’d gone into so much detail because now she is getting ideas on how to implement it at her school — I feel like a grandparent who just discovered someone who actually enjoys looking at pictures of my grandchildren.
I’ve been exploring Moodle’s workshop module. For now, I learned it is too complicated for me to use with my current essay assignments. I really love the idea that students would be scoring and commenting on their own and two other students’ essays based on the rubric I gave them. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting it working and in the interest of time, I switched it to an assignment. Now I see that for this point in our Moodle experience, that was wise. It is the next step up in terms of complexity. I think after students understand how to upload files and better understand scoring writing projects with a rubric, then we will be ready for a real online workshop.
Even just doing this as an assignment, I’m loving the interactions that Moodle allows. When I try to conference personally with 26 kids, it doesn’t work. The other students are not focused enough to be gainfully employed while I conference, and the face to face conference isn’t giving me all the impact that I want. Students generally enjoy the feedback, but it doesn’t often lead to improvements in their writing.
With the assignment module, I am able to leave students replies, either inline or separately. I am also able to give them a score that I can change later. This is good for students since they can refer to the comments as much as needed, and the comments don’t get lost. It is good for me since I can write the replies outside of class, freeing me for lots of mini-classes during class time.
I’ve been a slow learner this week. Although I know about our browser woes, I started new discussions with students in their private forums that we are using as journals. I ended up with sad children who thought I hadn’t written back to them because they couldn’t see the second message since Internet Explorer mashes all of the links together. I finally figured out what was going on and happiness reigns once more.
I did my first grading in Moodle. Since I will be coordinating the environmental ed trip next year, I set up two forums. One is for students to tell me what was great about this year’s trip; these are the things I shouldn’t change. The second forum is for discussing ways to make the trip better.
My initial standards are quite low. If they successfully posted in both forums, and their post was at least remotely on topic, they earned full points. The grading itself was easy. In the forum set up, I designated how many points were possible and that I was the only one who could give grades. Now when I read a response, there is a drop down menu to let me select the score. The students don’t see that option.
If I had allowed them to give grades as well, there are all sorts of interesting options. They could grade each other’s comments in regards to relevance or with points. The Moodle can even do some fancy score balancing if numerous scores are given for one response.
For now we kept it simple. I scored the responses that were submitted. The next day, I showed the children how to access their grades primarily so they had an easy was to see if they had posted in both forums. They seemed to like checking their grades, especially since they were getting such good ones.
I don’t keep my main gradebook online yet, but this lets me see the power in doing that. I think there is some sort of plug in that would allow me to post my Easy Grade Pro records online with parent passwords. I may look into that for next year, even though that really ups the pressure on me.
In any case, I once again had children pouring over each other’s responses, and when their computers allowed them to do so, they left replies. This still enchants me since the children reading through all these responses are so often the ones who refuse to read during our silent reading time, and refuse to write on writing assignments. I hope they never figure out that these ARE reading and writing assignments.
One step forward, two steps back…
Our step forward was that our wonderful technician put Netscape on the old computers in lab B while we were gone at camp last week. Those that are running Mac OS 9.2 are now working well in Moodle using Netscape.
The steps backward come on the oldest computers. Those running Mac OS 8.0 or 8.1 still aren’t working well. If students try to post anything, they run into trouble in Netscape because the post button is missing. In Internet Explorer, the posting works fine, but they can’t read anyone else’s posts because all the post links are smack on top of each other, making it impossible to reach more than the first one or two posts.
Amazingly, the students are making it work. Despite the computers being really slow and them needing to toggle between browsers, they are managing to post and respond. They like Moodling enough to hang in there, ploughing through the difficulties.
I like that they are getting so comfortable with computers, with online environments, with troubleshooting. More importantly, I like that we are now hearing from everyone. When I post a forum question, everyone responds instead of just a few kids. On top of that, lots of the kids receive responses to their ideas. This is in great contrast to a typical fifth grade discussion in which a majority of the kids are so busy thinking about what they want to say next that they aren’t listening to what anyone else is saying.
So maybe I need to revise what I said. Maybe it isn’t one step forward and two back. Maybe with all this shuffling, side stepping and spinning around, we are getting somewhere. It’s a strange dance, but it seems to suit us.
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