k12online Presentation Reflection: Kelly Hines, "Little Kids, Big Possibilities"

Hines begins by stating that those who work with elementary-aged students (under age 13) should be concerned about following the provisions of the Internet Children's Protection Act. (I forget the exact acronym. I wish we'd discussed this more in class! I know that most of the people left in the class teach middle school or high school, but there's still a big sixth-grade contingent, and it's as relevant for them as it is for me in fifth grade.)

Hines also assumes that teachers will agree with her that social networking online is useful for students this age. I still feel that this needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Time is always an issue worth considering, whether it's classroom time or homework time. Some of my students panic if I assign homework that's due the next day and required either real creativity (finishing a story) or online access. They have very busy schedules, and count on being able to get some of their homework done in little bits of time, perhaps in the car or over breakfast (?) or something. My students have been very happy with the couple of online (on our class wiki) homework assignments I've given then so far, but only when they have a couple of days to do them.

Hines recommends Wallwisher as a safe site for social networking with students under age 13. This is partly because you don't have to create accounts using students' names or email addresses. She discusses a number of potential uses of Wallwisher with elementary students: working on academic skills such as sequencing, summarizing, and distinguishing between fact and opinion, sharing ideas and responses, providing a "back channel" to classroom discussions,

Here's an example where she used Wallwisher for "backchanneling", reinforcing content learning, and practicing the skill of organizing information: Hines showed her students a "Magic Treehouse" video on animal adaptations to a desert environment. During the video, students individually took notes using "sticky notes" on the Wallwisher site. Afterward, each student (I think individually, but I wasn't quite clear about this) sorted and organized the class's (I think the whole class's) notes. Then they discussed the different sorting methods that different students had used.

. . . This actually sounds to me like a great application of online technology to real classroom learning goals, with two caveats: (1) At this point in her presentation, Hines hasn't yet stated whether each student in her class had a laptop during this presentation, or whether they were in the Computer lab. In my building we currently don't have a classroom set of working laptops, or really any laptops for student use that work well. I could do an activity like this in the Computer Lab, but I'm not sure whether there's a VCR in the Lab (I guess that's a fairly easy problem to solve), and I'm not sure that having the whole class watching one video together, even with them writing these interactive sticky notes at the same time, is the best way to use our Computer Lab time (although we do watch Brainpop videos sometimes -- But students then take the quiz after the video at their own pace, and go back and study their missed answers at their own pace, so that feels a little different). . . . (2) My second concern is that most of my students do not yet touch-type. Some still have to hunt-and-peck for the letters. So, wouldn't taking notes using a computer keyboard distract them from watching the video as it continued to play?

She goes through how to set up and use a Wallwisher account in some detail. It looks pretty intuitive. You can register either directly or through a Google account, and you can maintain multiple "walls" (for multiple classes or multiple projects) through one dashboard.

Next, Hines speaks very enthusiastically about Wordle. This was interesting to me, since (although I have used Wordle once with my students, following a colleague's lead for a "getting to know you" project early in the year) I have so far seen wordle more as a "toy" than as a useful tool. I'm not completely convinced by Hines' examples of using it as a useful tool, but they are intriguing. She has made wordles of newspaper passages (using the rss feed from their local newspaper), and had students use deductive reasoning and inference to figure out which section on the paper the wordle came from. (I can see some value in that, but am not sure that it really targets the inference skills I would want to target, since it forces students to look almost entirely at the word level in order to make their inferences. I think my students would enjoy this particular activity and would get something out of it, but I'm not sure that I could completely justify it as the best possible use of our language arts time. Maybe, though, on occasion.) Another example, that I found more convincing, was that she made a wordle of an account of a stock market crash, and then students had to figure out what it was about (which was pretty easy) and also which of two possible time periods it came from (which was harder, and apparently led to a great discussion which included a lot of historical ideas and information as well as good deductive reasoning). Interesting uses of a tool that I had previously mostly dismissed! (To get an embed code for a wordle, choose the option "Save to Public Gallery". ... There are editing tools at the top, to change a wordle to make it more readable, etc.)

She discusses Comic Creators (I think that's a particular site) and comics.com. By using comic creation sites with drag-and-drop functions and the ability to get characters, etc. from sites such as Garfield.com, Hines has had her students creatively review the four basic types of sentences, sequencing in retelling a story, etc.

The final site that she recommends is edmodo.com. It's a social networking site for students and teachers, which can be used for students to turn in assignments, for the teacher to write comments back, etc. . . . My concern, here, is that the Sharon Schools have their own platform for this in Moodle. So, if I started using edmodo.com, would I just have to switch over to Moodle shortly afterward, as it comes to be used more and more within the Sharon Schools? . . . In general, after talking with Leo in the hallway one day and then seeing the email about new features coming to First Class, I have this question about a LOT of what we've learned in this class and a lot of the tools I'm seeing in these conference talks. Which ones are worth investing time in learning, and which are not because our administration and / or our computer people are going to want us to use Moodle or First Class, instead, to do similar things?