DigiLit Sunday: Growing Communities in Digital Spaces

As part of a continuous collaboration among educators interested in digital learning, Margaret Simon hosts a weekly Digital Learning round-up on her blog:  DigiLit Sunday.  Stop by Reflections on the Teche (today's link-up) to read, discover, and link.  

As technology and educational practice evolve I find myself constantly asking new questions. Are the changes I am making improving education for children?  Are the changes I am making helping learners to build connections with other learners?  Do these changes give children more control and ownership of their learning and work?  Is what I am doing best practice or am I just working in old ways in a new space?  

I think we constantly have to ask ourselves if this practice is empowering children in new ways.  If we are just delivering content in the same way, we have missed an opportunity to create spaces that provide information, share resources, encourage interaction and put students in charge of their learning.

One of the greatest gifts of digital spaces is the power to connect.  Digital spaces allow us to connect in new ways within, and beyond, our learning community.  Digital spaces equalize the voices in our learning community.  Everyone can contribute, ask questions, and seek more information.  Digital spaces allow learners to not only create and share with others, but to receive and give feedback to other learners in authentic ways.

Learning in digital spaces can create possibilities for students to own their learning in new ways.  In digital spaces, students can own the work they are producing and collaborate with other learners.  They create content for, not just their teacher, but for a much larger audience.  They can choose learning opportunities that match their personal interests and fit their needs.  They can find answers and revisit challenging material in digital spaces.

Joining Digital Learning Communities:  Slice of Life

Our Slice of Life Writing Group

New connections are possible in digital spaces.  This week begins the Slice of Life Writing Challenge.  Two Writing Teachers host this challenge on their blog, connecting writers and classrooms around the world as they work to write every day in March.  This will be my fourth year in the challenge, and my second year to have a group of students to join the event.  The digital space hosted by Two Writing Teachers will allow us to connect to other classrooms and writers.  We will give and receive feedback from a variety of people, and learn new things about ourselves as writers along the way.

In this event, children aren't writing for the teacher; they are truly writing for an audience that reaches beyond the teacher.  Through the event they will connect with other writers.  They'll learn the power of their message and ways to get people to respond to their writing.  They'll understand the importance of making their writing clear and easier for someone else to read.  The process, and the feedback they will receive, will change them as writers.

Creating a Hub
Anytime I work with a community of learners, I think it is important to create some type of hub.  This is a digital space everyone knows they can visit for links to other spaces, important updates, and other  information that becomes useful as we work together.  Typically I use Weebly to create hubs with student learners.  In the case of Slice of Life, I chose Weebly for my hub as it will allow me to create a page for updates, links, information, insert video, and build a space useful for writers.  By adding a page to my Merely Reading website, I can easily bring together our community by putting all information in one space:  March Slice of Life Challenge.  On our page you'll find:    

Students learn to start at the hub.
Once students arrive at the site, they can click the blue
button to get our blogging space.

Buttons will take students directly to the
blogs of friends participating in the event. 

Here we will grow important links to other
participating classrooms and build resources for
helping writers.

The page allows me to continually
share important information with students
and families.  (Yes, snacks are important.)

I can also create short video tutorials
to answer questions commonly asked by students.
(I can also post video created by students here as well.)

This year my group of writers are students in grades 1-5.  They come from a variety of classrooms, and have a varying amount of knowledge of writing and digital publication.  For this reason, I know I will need space to create short video tutorials and share important updates.

New Possibilities
Digital spaces allow us grow our learning communities so students can access information outside of our school day.  Writers will be able to go to the website from anywhere, at anytime, to get to their digital writing spaces, access important information, receive help, and connect to other writers.  These possibilities completely shift the dynamic of learning.  No longer are conversations only teacher to student, but instead student to student, student to community, student to world.   Digital spaces make new things possible for young learners as they work meaningfully to discover, learn, curate, collaborate, create, and connect in purposeful ways.

Literacy Through a New Lens

Today is another day of learning at Hilliard's Summer Academy (#hsa12).  Julie Johnson of Raising Readers and Writers and I are talking about the changes we have started to make in our classroom as we begin to look at literacy through a new lens.  How has literacy changed?  How should our classrooms look different as a result of these changes?

Writing and Reading Our 21st Century Lives (presentation link)



Other Helpful Links
Following are a list of bloggers that often push me to think about literacy through a news lens.

• Kathy Cassidy:  Primary Preoccupation   
• Kathy Cassidy's Class Blog
• Katie DiCesare:  Creative Literacy
• Deb Frazier:  Primary Perspective  
• Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn:  A Year of Reading
• Mr. Schu Reads

A Google doc of Some Favorite Literacy Links

"Publishing" Our Writing

Audience is a powerful motivator in writing.  When you know a piece is going out into the world, you are much more careful with your words.  When you know a piece is going out in the world, you're willing to work hard on your message for your readers.  In my transition to using more digital tools in our classroom, I still find the time to write during Writer's Workshop to be essential.  There's something about capturing the stories of young writers in their words and pictures.

In our classroom, we've started "publishing" some of our favorite pieces digitally using Pixie.  Though there are many other ways you can accomplish this with other software, Pixie has worked for us as it is a software we have much experience using.  In Pixie, students take a picture of each page of their story, then record their voice on each page.  After taking pictures and recording I am able to turn these into a Podcast that can be shared via email with parents, on our blog, or on our news page.  There's nothing quite like seeing the pictures and hearing the voice of the author.  (Note:  You can also create a video which has sharper pictures, but takes more memory.  Podcasts are more easily shared though some quality is lost.)

Students manage this process on their own as I conference with writers.  Students take the pictures, record the voice, and get the story recorded to the best of their abilities.  The only thing I do is convert it to a Podcast which students could probably learn to do too.  

Here are a few examples of published pieces:  

Baseball

Chicago

I Love the Piano

The Forget Man