K12online keynote for the "Inside the Classroom" strand: Rachel Boyd's presentation, "A Peek for a Week -- Inside a Kiwi Junior Classroom"

This "keynote" is really a view inside the various learning strands for which Rachel Boyd uses online tools in her New Zealand classroom of six-year-olds. While she has only three classroom computers, she does have an interactive white board that she uses extensively. Through a class blog and a class wiki, both accessible from the classroom computers or the interactive white board, Boyd makes extensive use of web 2.0 resources in almost every area of her curriculum. Her students spend some of their reading and writing time reading class blogs from other schools and writing comments back. While Boyd pulls guided math groups, other kids play math games, some of them online. They even exercise to songs and music videos from U-Tube, shown on the interactive white board!

One really impressive thing is that Boyd's six-year-olds got a turn to be the tutors for a group of teachers that I think meets regularly to learn about web 2.0 tools! The kids had just completed an animation project (on the features of a healthy stream) using XtraNormal, and they taught these other teachers how to use it! Really neat for such young students to be able to officially take on that role!

Boyd fosters her students' online independence by having easy-to-find links to all of the sites that they will need readily available on their class wiki. She uses www.delicious.com to bookmark these sites, if I understood correctly.

It's clear from her presentation that Boyd has integrated internet resources and web 2.0 technology into almost every area of her curriculum, with very young children and only a few classroom computers plus the interactive white board (which is certainly a significant "plus".) It's clear that her students find these tools and the associated activities engaging. At that age, of course, almost any literacy activity is probably worthwhile in some ways! Sometimes I felt like I could see the added value in using an online tool, and sometimes I couldn't. I *did* think it was really neat, though, that her students got to teach the adults in the building about one of the tools they had become "experts" with!