YA Lit Class Project

This weekend I went to the last meetings for my YA Lit class. It was a great class that I loved. I focused my project on books for boys and concepts from Teri Lesesne's Reading Ladders. Here is the Google Docs presentation.

Guest Blog Post

I have a guest blog post over at Two Writing Teachers today talking about why I want to incorporate blogging into my writing workshop. I will be continuing my reflections here throughout the school year.

Boothbay "Final" Reflections

I never had a chance to do a comprehensive, concluding thoughts about the Boothbay Literacy Retreat on my blog. Right now I will be logging off my computer soon so that I can gather what I need for summer school tomorrow and get to bed, so I know that I will not be able to do the retreat justice. The reason why the title says "Final" is because while this is my last official retreat post, I know that the ideas will be at the forefront of my mind for quite some time.

There is always a lot of ideas and thoughts to absorb and reflect upon in professional development opportunities like this, so I was thankful that I decided to earn college credits based on my learnings from the retreat as an independent study. It helped me to go back through my notes and synthesize my learning, reflecting on what I want to implement at the start of the year, as well as other ideas that I will continue to mull over.

All of the presenters complemented each other nicely, each bringing their unique assets. It was fun to see the personalities of authors whose books I had read and from whom I had learned so much.

The most immediate learnings from the retreat were I absolutely loved ideas that Robert Probst and Kylene Beers shared called Notice and Notes. While they were able to give us an overview, I am very excited to see their forthcoming project from Heinemann early next year. I could instantly see how it would fit perfectly into my reader's workshop, and I am also going to talk to the Reading Support TOSA at my school about it because we share some students in common. I will be posting more about this as I get started, and when the materials are released.

I also loved Story Bird, which I posted about recently. I will use it for sure in my classroom, but I also thought about how fun it would be to use with my girls (ages 4 and 7). They can choose pictures and I can write down their words to accompany their thoughts. This will be so much fun. It made me think about the potential for Story Bird in the younger grades as a center. I can't wait to see my students embedding their Story Bird stories into their own blogs, and I will probably embed my daughters into my personal blog to share with family. So many possibilities...

The retreat left me feeling energized as a writer. This summer I have been trying to utilize my writer's notebook more, and the retreat provided me with thoughts to jot down in my notebook. I have been reading Penny Kittle's Public Teaching every time I have a little bit of extra time here and there. It continues to inspire me.

Those were a few of the big ideas that struck me from the retreat. It was definitely worthwhile, and I wish that I was lucky enough to be able to go every year. However, it was also a financial sacrifice to go, so I know that won't be realistic. I think my husband and girls deserve a family vacation next, rather than me going somewhere on my own. Nonetheless, even if I only get to go once, it will impact me for many years to come. And if I do have an opportunity to go again? I will jump at the chance!

Airport Literacy

I love going to the airport. It is not uncommon to hear comments about how people are not reading as much anymore, but one trip to the airport is a testament of all the reading that people do. From time to time I would just look around and marvel at all the signs of literacy. Newspapers, Kindles, iPads, books, magazines, children's books. People from all ages were reading a diverse mix of genres. Others were busy typing or writing away. Ah, what a breath of fresh air.

Decisions, Decisions - Technology Integrations

Among my goals for this summer was to decide which platform to use for student blogs and to explore wikis. During the school year I posted about how my attempt to begin blogging with my 6th and 7th graders did not work out because not all of my students were 13, the requirement for Blogger. Later in the spring I heard about Kid Blogs via Sara Kajder's discussion of her book. I had briefly looked at the site at the beginning of the summer, but hearing her mention it again at the Boothbay Literacy Retreat was a good reminder to look into it more seriously. I figured the best way to find out would be to sign up, so this morning I took the plunge. My initial thoughts are: I love the easy set up for classes, the privacy/safety settings with school integrations in mind, and it is free. However, they look pretty blah. When looking at the design templates, it looks like there are only two. One of the other participants at Boothbay had also mentioned her concern that students might think that a name like Kid Blogs could put a quencher on their motivation for blogging. Creativity with design is one of my favorite components of blogging, and I would hate for my students to miss out on this.

With Blogger, on the other hand, there are many positives. It is where I have always blogged, so I am very familiar with it. It would save me a lot of time because I have already figured out a lot of the tricks and stay up to date on new changes via the Blogger in Draft blog. It also has privacy settings available for free, which is what originally shifted me toward Blogger instead of Edublogs. It is also my hope that some students will want to continue their blogs after they leave our school. Even if their parents decide that they would like them to keep their blogs private initially, it would be as easy as clicking a button on the control panel and their blog could be live if they wish. Having it on Blogger would be a little bit easier to network with other bloggers that share similar interests, as compared to Kid Blogs.

The one downside that I can think of right now is that there has been an increase in spam comments on my blogs. That is the reason why I ended up switching my setting to having all comments approved by me before posting. Yet, I do not know that this is really that big of an issue because before any student makes the shift to go live, I would use it as a teachable moment to be cautious with this transition. It they prepare to make the shift when they are already leaving my classroom, then a potential scenario would be to have a parent meeting to discuss blogging safe guards with the students and parents.

I feel confident with the decision to follow through with Blogger for my 8th graders. If I decide to start blogging with my younger students at some point in the year, I am glad that I know about the Kid Blogs option.

On the wiki front, I have been grateful to get some hands on experience - the best way to learn. One of my classmates in my YA class set up a wiki for the course, and Sara Kajder set up a wiki for Boothbay. Wikis seem very easy to navigate, especially coming in with a blogging background. The one drawback that I was not previously aware of was that if a couple people want to write on the same page at the same time some people lose their input, as only one person can edit at a time. When we would be in a setting where all students would be on at the same time in any given class, this could be a nightmare. For now I am planning on focusing on getting the blogs up and running. The main reason that I wanted to explore the wikis was for on-line book club discussions. I will keep wikis in mind as I approach the first book club. However, I might decide that blogging meets our on-line discussions well enough. If Blogger had threaded comments, it would be an even easier decision for me to just go with the blogs.

Boothbay Literacy Retreat - New Technology Resources

One of the benefits of the Boothbay Literacy Retreat was Sara Kajder's technology sessions. Two of the tools that she showed us that I am most excited about are Storybird and ZooBurst. Both are means to create digital books, providing art work as a scaffold. I am excited to integrate them in to my writing workshop; I can imagine students really enjoying them.

Here is a quick example of a project that I did using Storybird. I look forward to exploring with it more in the future:

This I Believe... A Brief Snapshot of Some Literacy Beliefs on Storybird