Notes on 'Blog' Sharing - The Weekly Staff Meeting where the real PD Hides

Mark Maddren - Connected Learner's Young and Old
Just a few notes today on Mark Maddren's PD with our staff this week who is working with us on using digital devices in school.

- Interesting -  Woolf Fischser research program lead by Rachel Williamson hired students and teachers to engage with and respond to the children's blogging and posts over the summer break to maintain engagement and provide quality comments and feedback. Children were showing a high percentage of fluidity in writing and surface features in their blogging and commenting. This was notably different to the deficit idea that children's poor surface features (spelling, sentence structure, punctuation etc. ) would reflect poorly on the school or reinforce poor writing as these comments would not be sustainable to proofread and manage.

Some of our concerns  and questions about student Sharing:

Sustainability
 - How can we ensure quality not quantity?
-  How do we build classroom sharing into the classroom program without making extra work?
Accuracy
- How do we ensure that children's messages get across correctly? - eg. If they comment and spell things wrong.
- This is a public forum - How do we ensure that things are 'ok' and not a 'bad' reflection on the school eg, langugage, ideas, spelling


Proofreading or Not
Kate and Simon's response:
In our class there is a requirement to post one thing a week. Kate responded to some of the questions and concerns by explaining the modelling of good tasks to put on blogs and being perceptive about the children who needed their topic/subject matter learning directed to or helped in selecting which learning to put on blogs. Simon mentioned that 'best' bloggers (most prolific) would only post 3 times per week at most because they were aware of quality and effort required to give quality learning.
Rubrics have also been  designed for blog posts and comments. Children now know what to do with practice.

Marks response to proofreading - Use Google read/write. Teach the children to highlight and select google read so they can hear where they have made the mistakes.

 Other ideas we discussed were the deliberate and specific teaching of our children to analyse and reflect on what they were sharing and 'saying' (digitally)
Right time, right place, right thing...
Are our parents good models of these things?

Sharing parameters - require a lot of reinforcement and teaching on how to comment.

'A digital playground with no one on duty'
 'These children will grow up to be 'good' parents because they have been taught how to be responsible 'sharer's' Mark Maddren

Some ideas in reflection:
How much sharing do we do as adults?
What do we share?
 How do we manage all the different sharing forums? - Instagram, snapchat, facebook, twitter etc.


What the teachers think:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IKzKCFiYgktTAG7lFKqxBd236nANKgNaS6NQFOVaBB4/edit#slide=id.g15ff698af5_0_319

 'Teachers need to be willing to change their practice in the classroom. That is the only thing required for the children to begin raising their standards of learning.' Mark ( In the context of working with Mark Maddren on technology)