Woo hoo! Students digging deeper into learning through their blogs!

At the end of Term Three, I started jumping around showing colleagues my student blogs with huge enthusiasm.  I was excited because my students were asking questions of each other about their learning in the comments and then responding.  They were also responding to my questions in their comments.  This is something I'd been looking to achieve since 2016, when my year 11 students looked at me, first patiently and then with gritted teeth and explained that under no circumstances would they be interested in sharing their learning on blogs or using the comments to give feedback to each other.

In 2017 I didn't have a junior class, and juniors are the best playground for new ways of sharing.  I played with other aspects of learn-create-share with my seniors, and made sure I had a junior class for 2018.  At the beginning of 2018, I had lots of pastoral and literacy data to help me decide on what I needed to focus on with my year 10 class.  I participated in several meetings where we looked at this data in larger groups, and we hypothesised that improving key competencies in our year 10 students would lead to improved academic success.

I had my own hunch about the role that blogging could play in promoting both improved key competencies and academic success.  We looked at the Seven Principles of Learning, and I focused in on the importance of the 'social nature of learning.'  I knew that blogging by itself would not achieve change automatically - it needed to be part of a range of interventions.  I've reflected on the steps which I found work for getting students to blog earlier in the year here.

I had early adopters in the class who made it easy for others to follow on after them.  Nina enjoyed the film The Freedom Writers, and she wrote about it here.  When we trialled Prezi, she reviewed it here.  Nina was one of several students who liked having the work up on our class blog so they could work at their own pace.

Everyone worked on a visual mihi at the beginning of the year, and put it on their blog.  As we went through this process, I could see where students' skills were with technical aspects like turning the google drawing into an image and uploading it.  Our Toki Facilitator, Madeline, directed me to some pre-existing tutorials to share with students and even more importantly, I could get students to help each other.  I could see where students didn't have a blog, where addresses were not matching the student or not matching the school blogs list, where one student was using another blog entirely... all this took quite a few weeks of choosing 1-2 students per lesson to look at their blogs with me.  I didn't do more per lesson, because we were continuing our learning on other topics at the same time.

Another key message for me as I looked at students' visual mihi was that often when students wrote about what they didn't like, it included reading, like this one from Poppy:

or school, like this one from Jayden:

or Julia:

Another theme was students wanting to be able to sit comfortably and listen to music in their learning space, and I'm lucky that I have a large classroom to enable lots of sitting on the floor or couch or more conventionally at desks.

Also in Term One, each student made four posters charting the changes in the relationship between Rowdy and Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. We each had to select key quotes to illustrate an important aspect of their friendship at each key stage in the novel, and develop our images to support this.  Some students were embracing the blogging aspect and giving each other thoughtful feedback at this stage, such as Grace and Zoe, but certainly not everyone.

In Term Two, we focused on The Freedom Writers, and then we presented on the connections between the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian and the film The Freedom Writers. Some students posted their slide show on their blog (e.g. Byron), but we focused at that point mostly on students sharing their work in class orally with the visual support of their slide show.

Term Three was focused on Research.  I was really keen to develop students' reading skills in this unit, and provide opportunities for student selection of topics and texts.  It was also time to get some more blogging going, and to see if we could get to my holy grail - students commenting in ways that deepened learning.  Blogging for feedback was going to need some careful scaffolding.

As students were choosing their topics, we also worked on common texts to develop our reading, note taking and evaluative skills.  I pulled on my old favourite, SOLO, to help students to understand what 'evaluate' means, this time using an analogy with a ball.  Although in some ways 'SOLO' is indeed an old favourite of mine, developed when we worked with Pam Hook about five years ago, it's not an 'old favourite' for my students, and the rewards of spending time on SOLO with 10QI were worthwhile.

We blogged a midpoint on our research which was focused on evaluation.  Some students had evaluated thoughtfully at this point and others were finding their sources and reading them.  What was important to me was that each student was progressing, and that they were confident to share their progress on their blog without it needing to be 'finished' or 'right' or 'perfect.'  Malachi shared his research process and it made my day - I saw engagement and a link to Malachi's personal interests, and I saw (and still do) growing confidence to share.  Jameila began to make connections to her research work in Global Studies, and I realised I needed to post instructions on how to remove formatting in blogger.  I wish they would fix that unnecessary glitch!

Then we got our research write ups completed and it was time to share and get feedback.  I wanted to raise the stakes on comments so that students actually answered their commenters with new information.  So I set up the task for posting, commenting and responding here.  Here is an image of our research blogging tracking document from 21 September:

As you can see, almost everyone (absences notwithstanding) has posted on their final research paragraphs.  There has been more commenting and responding than currently shows on this document, but I was careful to stand back from managing this document beyond where I've indicated that I've commented.  Everyone had edit rights to this document and no one misused the document.

I saw so much that I was really pleased with as I worked with students and watched them work with each other.  Jenna wrote beautifully on Maui and discovering Aotearoa, and began to see herself in the story.  Jameila shared her passion for dinosaurs and wrote thoughtfully in response to both her peers and her teacher.  Marshal shared his thoughts on PubG and gave me an idea for more research I need to do on gaming.  Jon wrote on a topic dear to many of us: ice cream.

If we were still researching, I would like to carry this on, with a Friday session each week where I work with individuals on their blogging and others work on giving feedback and responding to it and updating our tracker.  It's definitely a model I will use again.

We are now back into testing season, and we've been brushing up our skills on writing to describe. I wasn't looking for lots of blogging on this topic.  In a class meeting recently, many students were enthusiastic about getting out of the classroom and moving more as part of English, so that was what I wanted to incorporate next.  But what absolutely warmed my heart as we wrapped the term up, was to see the growth in confidence of students to share their writing with the whole class and in an online open-to-the-world context.  We had a writing task about our school skatepark, and we spent time outside collecting ideas on a grim and wet day, and then sat around the skatepark (anywhere people felt comfortable) and wrote on the next day which was gorgeous.  Some students ran up and down the skatepark before settling to write about the experience beautifully.  On the last day of Term Four, everyone chose their favourite sentence or paragraph, or their whole text if they wished, and shared on this padlet, which was posted on our class blog.

Everyone who was at school on the last day posted something they had written.  We had one student, Ashleigh, who had only joined our class the week before, and she was happy to post.  I have an ORS student who has written beautifully on this padlet and several students who have been very reluctant learners this year who have written beautifully.  Someone posted my writing for me!  I made brownie for this class for the last day of term and we all finished the term feeling good about English.

It's not far from asttle writing and PAT reading testing now, and I am hopeful that the great work that 10QI students have done this year will show in their testing results.  If the results are great, then we have plenty to celebrate.  If they are not, then we work on how we can grow our learning more in the last part of the year, and strategies for success in NCEA.  We will look at approaches to reading texts which we wouldn't choose in order to nail great results this week coming -  a useful life skill for sure. Then we are moving on to Shakespeare!