Blogging: Assessing Student Growth

June 7, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Assessing Student Growth Over Time

MAY 27, 2016 • RACHELLE DENE POTH •

@CESMediaCenter Ana works on KB post about buddy bench

Blogging is an effective classroom tool used to exceed learning objectives beyond traditional methods. It offers more than just a platform for writing and sharing ideas. It is a means for teachers to assess, connect, empower, and understand their students. For students, it is a way to to find their voice, while continuously learning more about their interests, strengths, and areas of growth.

There are many innovative ways to use blogging in the classroom to meet these goals. As a teacher, you simply need to be open to new ideas, implement creative lesson plans, and relinquish some control by offering the students a chance to choose their own inspiration for writing. These choices, this freedom in writing, lead to higher student engagement, more meaningful learning, and an enhanced classroom experience for both teachers and students.

Within my classroom, blogging has become one of the best tools to promote literacy skills, while building students’ confidence to express ideas without the fear of making mistakes. Additionally, it has become a way to learn about my students and create a deeper teacher-student relationship. Blogs offer teachers the ability to learn about students and for students to learn about themselves. Yet, what I have found most valuable is blogging’s ability to foster an engaging learning environment, personal to each student, while providing a means for student growth to be tracked and to promote student reflection in the process.

With Kidblog, we have an opportunity for assessing students in multiple areas of communication. It provides a unique, personalized environment for encouraging students to convey their thoughts, demonstrate understanding and make meaning out of content material. Because of Kidblog’s ability to be used class-over-class, year-over-year, students can begin blogging at a young age and continue into higher grade levels. At each phase, they further develop their skills, find comfort sharing knowledge and ideas freely, and continuously develop their content-rich digital portfolio. This ever-growing content can later be used as a focal point to help students see their progress and reflect on their work. They are able to review their first blog posts, compared to their current blog posts, and acknowledge their progress as writers throughout the year.

This progress is built upon the ability to engage students in the writing process through student collaboration and the opportunity to reach an authentic audience. In my class, students are asked to review the comments, to re-read their work, and to consider how they have developed over the year. It has proven to be an effective way to provide feedback to students, to teach them to reflect and work on goal setting, but in a way that puts the control in their hands.

Students often surprise themselves. They develop skills in ways that are personal to them, and they can use this to track their own growth throughout the year. Even those students who initially were not the biggest fan of writing have been motivated after realizing their progress throughout the year. Additionally, by taking a look back at where they started and where they are now, students will be inspired to take the next steps to keep moving forward.

Current Kidblog members: If you’re a teacher with multiple colleagues using Kidblog in your school/district, Admin Pro is simply a better plan for you. Email membership@kidblog.org to learn about benefits and volume discounts.

Storybird: Students tell stories with beautiful images.

May 9, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Recently posted on Edueto Magazine

The path to integrating more technology into the classroom

So if you have been following along with my posts since I started writing

for Edueto, you can see that my method of and path toward integrating technology has taken many turns. I first started by trying to find one area of my teaching and my classroom that I could improve. After some consideration, reflecting on my practice, observing the daily routines, I determined there was a “disconnect” occurring between my students and myself. I did not feel that I was as accessible to them and their needs as I could be or more importantly, wanted to be. But the counterpart of this was that I also felt the students should bear some of the responsibility and be accountable for accessing classroom materials and asking for help when they needed.

Over the past two and a half years, it has been an ongoing, evolving process. One which has led to greater reflection, additional changes, and more than I could have imagined. It all started with the simple addition of one tool into our classroom, Celly, for messaging. This first step solved that disconnect and brought about so many positive changes for my classroom. From the beginning of this tech integration journey until now, the variety of ways that we have found uses for Celly are tremendous.

Once I felt comfortable with that first step, I began working with other areas of technology integration. I began using Edmodo for our LMS, which helped with the original issue of “disconnect” and provided access for the class resources and a central location for students to get what they needed. Edmodo provides a lot for teachers and students and has many apps available which we use and enable students to connect with automatically.

These initial steps evolved into the integration of alternate assessment tools such as Kahoot, Quizlet, SurveyMonkey, Riddle, Quizizz and more. These are just a few of the great tools that can be used for formative assessments and some also for student reflections. Once I felt comfortable with these choices, and I could see the benefits for my students, my next step was finding more ways for the students to show what they had learned and what they could do with the material. My prior post focused on project based learning and the benefits, so I would like to share one tool, Storybird, and how it can be used to give students an engaging, creative way to present information.

Storybird

While I have always enjoyed the traditional paper style presentations, I found that moving over to digital formats and letting the students choose from a variety of the creative web tools available for completing their projects, served many purposes. It was important that I offer resources that would give students meaningful ways to demonstrate their learning, but also have fun and be creative in the process. I wanted something that could meet their unique interests. So I started looking for different ways for students to present their information, but still be comfortable with creating the end product and learn something new in the process, technology skills.

One of the first tools we tried was Storybird. It has been one that my students have enjoyed using in Spanish and for other classes, and have shared with family and friends.

I first came across Storybird in the summer of 2014 while taking a course in special education, and I had to create a project that would describe legislation in this area. While there were many choices out there for presentation formats, I wanted to create more of a book style presentation, with vivid images that would add to the information. My search led me to Storybird and so I decided to give it a try.

Getting started

It was really easy to get started. I created an account and searched the available themes, until I found one representing an educational setting, and began creating my project. The themes are full of images created by various artists that contribute to the book with their vibrant illustrations. Storybird was very easy to use, to add my information and also to select from a variety of very vivid and engaging images to highlight my content. Editing the images and changing the layout was simple, and I really enjoyed presenting my information in this way.

When I assigned the first project of the new school year, I added Storybird to the list of student choices and several students used it for their projects. Each student chose different themes based on their individual preferences and the end products were vibrant, engaging, and authentic, but most of all creative.

Student Reaction

The students were very excited about their work with Storybird and truly enjoyed being able to have a choice in how to show what they had learned and finding a theme that best suited their own personal interests. In addition to creating and seeing these beautiful books online, you can have them printed into a book and see the story come to life. I was truly amazed the day I opened the package and saw the beautiful books that my students had written and had been prepared by Storybird. Each student’s book had their name on the cover and I had placed an inscription inside the cover, to detail the purpose for creating the book. The students were excited to see their names on the book and enjoyed reading each other’s. I wanted more to add to our classroom library and so I asked the students to share their work with me so more of their books could be printed and displayed in our room.

Since then I have shared their work at conferences and with other colleagues, and the students have proudly shared their work during technology showcases. I recently found out about a few students who had used Storybird to create books for telling a story to a sibling, inviting someone to a homecoming dance and several other really neat uses for Storybird. Technology can really enhance the learning process and benefit students in your classroom, but it is when students extend this learning to other areas and uses, that you realize it truly has made an impact on their learning.

There are many other great tools out there for project based learning. Offering a variety of choices for students enables them to find something meaningful and enjoy the experience. If you have not used Storybird, try it out. Students have used it in many of their other courses after Spanish and have found exactly the theme they needed. I will continue to share some of these tools with you and some examples, as always feel free to send me your comments or questions I would love to hear from you.

Retelling the Story: Kidblog post

April 19, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Thank you Kidblog, my recent post published April 14, 2016

Retelling the Story: What Comes Next?

APRIL 14, 2016 • RACHELLE DENE POTH •

My prior blog posts have focused on the benefits of blogging for students and teachers in the classroom. Some of these posts included using blogs as a way to encourage students to write freely without fear of mistakes, as a way to build relationships with classmates and the teacher, and as a way to create with a new language and build their vital language skills. In addition to these, there are many ways to use blogs in place of a traditionally used assignment or assessment. It is simple to set up a loose prompt for students and use their blog as a way to assess their learning in relation to topics covered in class, while welcoming creativity.

Retelling the story:

Recently, I have used blogging as a means for students to retell portions of a story that we have been reading in class in a way that helps them better understand the meaning of the book. In my Spanish class, we use leveled readers throughout the year to build our language skills. Sometimes we will discuss the readers in class and other times students may complete a worksheet with comprehension questions. While, these are both great methods to determine what students have learned, they do not allow for student creativity or differentiation. To assure all students have the opportunity to be involved in the discussion, expressing their creative views and offering insights, I have the students blog.

What happens next?

Recently, I assigned the students the task of reading a chapter in the Spanish reader “Amigos Detectives” and asked them to write about what they read. I gave some guiding questions to provide ideas and spark their creativity. In addition to answering some of my questions, I asked the students to either predict what may come next in the story or to create a new title for the current or next chapter. Later, I asked them to create their own chapter and give some of the highlights of what might happen to the main characters. This encourages deeper thinking and creativity, while the blogging medium gives the students an opportunity to share their ideas and opinions on a higher level.

Student example

The benefit:

Giving blog assignments related to a reading has increased the levels of comprehensive reading being done by my students. The requirements given, a summarization, retelling the story, or creating a next chapter, lead to more student involvement in the reading process and makes it more interesting and personal process. Students are able to choose how they demonstrate comprehension of the language, which increases student motivation. Additionally, it provides a great prompt for classroom discussion. Using blogs as the medium enables students to narrate in their own personal way and hopefully have fun in the process.

Blogging provides a more engaging way to have students show what they have learned, to express what interested them, and to create with the language. Students truly enjoy sharing story predictions and choosing our favorites from the newly created titles.

Build Confidence Through Blogging, Edueto post

April 6, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Build Confidence Through Blogging

Regardless of the course one teaches, or the content being covered, it is important to provide opportunities for students to practice their literacy skills. As a foreign language teacher, I continually seek new, creative ways for my students to practice their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills and in the process, to become more confident in their language usage. Students today often struggle with a fear of speaking in class and of making mistakes. As a teacher, I try to support the students as best as I can by reinforcing that it is natural to make mistakes and it is part of the learning process. I share my own experiences to help build a connection with my students.

But even with these supports, the fear of mistakes continues to limit the willingness of students to participate in class activities. They are afraid to be wrong. I have noticed this is very common among students today and even in my own experience, as a teacher and even now as a graduate student, I experience this fear as well. As a teacher, it is important to provide support and model risk-taking for our students. We must work to find different ways to encourage them to use the language and express themselves, without worrying about mistakes.

So how do we do this?

A great way to involve students in expressing themselves and also to provide valuable feedback to them and to help boost confidence in the process, is through blogging. I decided to try this with my students as an alternate homework assignment, to provide some differentiation and to learn more about the specific needs of my students in the process. Blogging was something that I had recently started and so I thought I would give it a try with my students, as a way to help them be more comfortable in expressing themselves.

Because it is critical for students to practice their language skills, I focused on providing some unique and creative writing prompts that would be a comfortable way for them to start writing and blogging. I set some requirements, such as that they do not use translators, that they simply write their response, cast aside any worries about making mistakes, to just write in Spanish and do their best. I continued to emphasize that making mistakes is a normal part of the learning process and how we improve as a result of having made mistakes. It is important to also share stories of our successes and failures with our students, so they can relate and have the support that they need. So when I started assigning the blogs to my students for homework assignments, I encouraged them to focus on expressing their ideas, to write freely without worrying about the grammar and language accuracy, but rather to focus on using and creating with the language.

The first assignment

The decision to integrate Kidblog as my blogging platform, and to use blogging as a way to encourage my students to write, and create with the language, has had great benefits on their language skills. The tools available for blogging today are similar to what I had done many years ago, with students in my Spanish IV course, who had paper journals. At that time, I set aside ten minutes in class, a few days each week for the students to write a response to a prompt I had written on the board. I tried to come up with a variety of interesting, fun, content related prompts, to help with comfort level but also to have them practice the related vocabulary and verbs we had been studying. While they wrote, I also took the time to write because I wanted to be involved in the process, and it is beneficial for me to work on continued writing as well. Most of the prompts were created by me, but there were days that I left it up to the students, and their fun, creative ideas, led to even better prompts than those which I had created.

I would collect each of their notebooks on Friday, read their responses over the weekend, provide feedback and comments, but they were not graded based on grammatical correctness. I wanted to assess their skills, use the information to guide my instruction, and also quite importantly, use it as a way to understand the students and their interests. As teachers, it is critical to work on building relationships with our students, to better understand their needs and interests, and the journal writing was a great way to accomplishment each of these goals.

On Monday, I would return the journals, and the students would read my comments and try to implement some of the corrections or feedback that I provided into their work for the new week, and build their language skills.

Blogging: What are some of the benefits?

Blogging is a means for teachers to encourage students to express themselves, to be creative, to build literacy skills, to become more confident in their writing, and focus more on sharing their ideas without fear of errors. Blogging helps students to develop their creative side, to have a choice in what they are writing, to become more expressive and to have some individualized instruction. Paper is fine for students to being blogging and the most important thing is that students have the opportunity to blog and use the experience to build their skills in the language or in any area.

But rather than using paper, students and teachers can benefit by using a tool such as Kidblog. The blog can be written using any device for access. Students can personalize their blog by choosing from different templates, fonts, and more. The use of digital tools for blogging is great for tracking student growth and having the writing available, longer than a piece of paper would last. As teachers, and with our students, we can watch the student’s growth and track their progress in writing skills and more, over a period of time, and provides opportunities for self-reflection.

I enjoy creating new prompts for the students to blog about and I encourage them to find blogs of interest to read as well. Reading their entries provides me with valuable information to help guide my instruction, to give them feedback, but more importantly, I can learn more about the interests and needs of each of my students.

If this sounds like an area that might be of benefit to your classroom and your students, then I recommend trying it out. It is a risk, but it is worth it. Blogging might just be the way to open up communication, collaboration and enhance creativity in your classroom. Find your blogging tool and get started. Good luck!

Promote Student Expression through Storytelling

March 19, 2016March 19, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth 1 Comment

Published on March 17, 2016 by Kidblog. Thankful for the opportunity to be a Blogger for Kidblog.

Promote Student Expression through Storytelling

MARCH 17, 2016 • RACHELLE DENE POTH

Depending on particular class content, concepts, or topics, blogging can have a strong, positive impact on several aspects of the learning process. Recently, I have found that providing students with a short prompt and having them create or tell a story has been extremely beneficial. In doing this, they not only build knowledge and skills in the relevant academic area, but also improve their writing, literacy, and critical thinking skills. In addition to these learning opportunities, blogging also gives students a means to build skills in technology and become reflective writers in the process.

One way to guide students in writing successful stories is to provide them with writing prompts. Typically, I aim to supply a writing prompt focused on a certain theme we have been covering in class. This assignment enables me to provide differentiation in their learning and lends itself to more student creativity and choice. I post a writing prompt related to a recent class lesson or theme and ask the students to be creative with their responses. Being a foreign language teacher, I often provide my students with a few specific elements that I would like the responses to contain. Depending on the content area, these elements range from the use of a specific verb or verb tense, a focus on grammar usage, topic of discussion, specific style of narration, or a method of debating an issue.

One example in a foreign language class may be discussing one’s childhood. By providing a prompt which asks for students to discuss their childhood, they are focused on narrating in the past tense and using specific themed vocabulary. By requiring students to use a few specific verbs in the blog, it helps to guide their practice with an area in which students may be having some difficulty.

Using blogging in this way has helped promote student discussion and creativity and has served as an alternate means for student assessment. It enables teachers to provide reinforcement of specific content in an individualized way that promotes more authentic learning. For students, it provides a unique way to complete a homework assignment, share ideas, and develop critical thinking skills and learning in multiple areas.

Kidblog has been an awesome medium to get students creating and writing in class. One feature of Kidblog that has helped increase engagement for students in any writing prompt and, in some cases, may also be used as a prompt itself, is the ability to add a photo to your post. Using the photo as a focus helps promote discussion and increase curiosity. Kidblog provides students with the option to enhance creativity through the diverse images and formatting choices. Images and customized formatting brings students’ writing to life and provides a way for instruction to be personalized for each student.

Giving students options empowers them in their choice for writing, and leads to a more engaging and fun learning experience.

Putting All Your Teaching In One Place With An LMS

March 4, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Thanks again to Terry Heick for the opportunity! Originally published in TeachThought on February 10, 2016

Putting All Your Teaching In One Place With An LMS

by Rachelle Dene Poth

If you are starting to integrate technology into your classroom, it is easy to feel overwhelmed with so many options available.

The number of choices available for each area of integration are tremendous. The best advice I can give is to start with one thing at a time. Find an area that could use some enhancement, and work on it for a while. Learn about it, reflect on it, figure out if it truly is of benefit to your students and your classroom. The key words being you and your. It has to be something that will benefit your environment and your students.

Once you feel comfortable with what you have been using and your students are comfortable as well, then it is time to start thinking about something else that could help to improve the opportunities and learning in your classroom. There are many options, and I will share with you what my next step was, but it may not be the exact thing that you need. As a suggestion, perhaps the next step is to find a way to create more organization for your class materials.

How can your students access extra copies of their papers or review the requirements for a project that’s due the next day? Is there a way you have to share some web tools or review activities with them that is easily located? If not, this would be another great step. If this sounds like something that would be helpful, then what you might consider an LMS (Learning Management System).

Making The Choice

For myself, searching for a way to do all of these things was another way to solve the “disconnect” I felt was happening initially. So after doing some research, I came across Edmodo and decided to try it out for a while. Although I found and still use Edmodo, I will also say that there are many wonderful learning management systems available and depending on where and what you teach, Edmodo may or may not be the best choice for you.

But I believe that each classroom should have a common site. A place where teachers and students can access course materials, communicate and collaborate on assignments. A place where students can interact with their classmates and more importantly, receive help when needed.

For my classroom Edmodo is a great choice. I have spent time using and learning about several other LMS and I can tell you about them, because I think it is important to know the options. I have continued to use Edmodo because my students stay with me throughout their Spanish studies, and it makes sense to keep them in the system, so they can see their growth, so I can track their progress and have access to the materials which then become a part of their digital portfolio.

Maybe an LMS is not what you want but instead you choose to create a website, for example through edublogs, Google, Weebly, Wix or even use Wikispaces as a way to post resources and links. No matter what you choose you can’t go wrong. Centralizing your materials for your class and your students is a great idea and both you and them will benefit from it.

laptops-in-classroomc

What were the effects?

Going back for a moment to my initial word of “disconnect,” perhaps it is clearer now how these two tools really help to solve that problem. Individually either one would work in my favor to promote the communication and collaboration with the students and to make class materials and resources available.

However, the combination of them builds even more into what I can offer because the students can be assessed, they can have their voice expressed in many ways using Edmodo or Celly. Then, each year we can track their progress through tools like Edmodo. It took some time to learn how each of these could be used, but it was well worth it and I am still learning. And more importantly, the students are benefiting tremendously.

So again I ask you, what would help you the most? If you were asked to name one more thing that you could change, determine what that is, investigate and try something new. Take that first step, work with it and then continue to add more. Again, you may find that your choice is not the best but give it some time before making a final decision. There is always a risk involved, but as educators we are role models for our students.

Being a role model means taking a risk, confronting any roadblocks, and setting new goals after reflecting. All of these lead us to learning and growth and isn’t that what we want for our students?

Foreign Language Blogging: The Way to Express Yourself Freely

January 27, 2016Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth Leave a comment

Excited to start my blogging for Kidblog. Here is a link to my first post about Foreign Language Classrooms and the benefits of Student Blogging. http://kidblog.org/home/foreign-language-blogging-the-way-to-express-yourself-freely/

Throughout the twenty-some years I have been teaching, I have continued to seek new, engaging ways for my students to practice their foreign language skills. I want students to work on their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills and develop confidence using the language in the process. When learning a new language, an issue that often arises for students is the fear of making mistakes. As a result of this fear, they tend to shy away from participating in our class activities. They will note on their homework and tests that they are “probably wrong” or a some other general comment showing a lack of confidence in their work. Other times, before they provide a response in class comes a statement of self-doubt such as, “I’m sure I am wrong” or a request to not have to respond, “Can you please call on someone else?”

Students in general are afraid to be wrong. In the foreign language classroom, I have noticed this is a recurrent theme among my students.

Hearing students exhibit these feelings drove me to look for ways to help them become comfortable in expressing themselves. Students need to practice language skills, so I focused on finding methods to encourage students to cast aside doubt and find confidence in expressing themselves through the language. Initially, I started each class by reminding students to “just go with it,” to simply read their answer, write their response, and not worry about being wrong, just participate. I tried to help them understand that it is normal to make mistakes – that is how we learn. I even shared stories of my own mistakes to emphasize this point.

I chose to integrate blogging as a way to encourage my students to take a chance with writing and to be more creative with the language. I started having my students write blogs for a few homework assignments. I encouraged them to share their thoughts, write freely, and not worry so much about grammar and being right, but to focus on expressing their ideas and using the language.

I had done some blogging with students in Spanish many years ago, although at that time it was called “our daily journal writing.” I set aside 10 minutes in class a few days each week, created a prompt, and encouraged them to write. I asked them to write without worrying so much about grammatical accuracy, but rather focus on expressing their ideas. I also took the time to write alongside them because I found it was important to be involved in the process. The prompts I provided were fun to write about.

At the end of each week I would collect their notebooks and read their responses. I chose not to grade their entries based on correctness, but rather provide feedback where needed. I also used it as a way to learn about the students themselves. Building relationships is such an important part of what we do as teachers and, for me, this was a great way to learn more about the interests of my students and to build their language skills in the process.

The students would read my responses and as part of the following week’s writing, try to implement some of the corrections or feedback that I had provided into their work.

Blogging has proved to be a tremendous way to encourage students to be creative and express themselves without worrying so much about being right. They are now focusing on talking about things that matter to them and, therefore, creating with the language.

Photo Credit: WELCOME by prayitnophotography; CC BY 2.0 license via flickr