Pohutukawa Island

As part of a Social Studies/English unit my students are learning about laws, rights and responsibilities thanks to a couple of fantastic units from English Online and Social Studies Online. We have created an imaginary island where each student has taken on a character with an occupation that we brainstormed as being vital to the survival of our community. We are sharing this journey on our wiki http://pohutukawa.wikispaces.com. We are updating it pretty regularly if you would like to check it out.

Wiki

The students of M3 (who are aged between 8 and 10) have started adding content onto the class wiki. They are responsible for a certain graph or compenent of statistics and in pairs have to write an explanation and show an example of how to do this. This has taken their learning to another level as they are now having to consider how to best explain their topic. The fact that they have a worldwide audience means that they are harder on themselves than I would be! They have had to learn how to edit the wiki, how to search for info on google, creating graphs using excel as well as how to work with another person! They are still getting 'taught' how to do stats but then they are actually doing something useful with the knowledge. Check out the results on our wiki

Blogs 2

Blogs are going incredibly well. There seems to be ao much interest in celebrating their learning. The first thing we do every day is check out recent posts and look at our cluster map to see how many visitors we have. The kids are excited to offer friends and family the opprotunity to visit their blogs. They are getting the hang of it and are even learning new things about using them and teaching me which is great. I love to see that they are posting out of school hours too!

Blogs

Today my entire Year 5 and 6 class began their own blogs. I am using 21classes.com as I have found it very straightforward to use and a good starting platform for younger children (especially as it is not all bells and whistles!). The kids are super keen and they have even blogged after school hours today. The best thing about 21classes is that you do not have to have email addresses for all the students. It also has a class portal that sits in front of all the student's individual blogs. So far it seems ideal. Will perhaps introduce blogger later in the year when they have mastered the basics. Check it out at http://m3rbs.21classes.com