Comments on: Focusing on Literacy, not Technology

By: Janet Ilko

Janet Ilko — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:01:10 +0000

I use Edmodo to communicate with our Writing for Change Club and for each of my periods at school. It is a great safe place to introduce how to respond appropriately, and I love the fact students can submit links and work through the site. You can even edit student work and send it back and that has worked well. I am learning to use the grade book to score student work to keep track of what has been turned in.

The kids love posting links and photos to the wall as we study a variety of topics. The frustrating part is you can’t focus the conversations as well as you can on a blog, hence our exploration of blogs this year.

We are currently using it a lot with our Writing for Change Club as some of our writers from the summer have continued to remain in our group and participate via Edmodo. We even have on student who tries to log in during our club writing time and posts conversations with her fellow writers as she had to suddenly move to a small outskirt town. This has unexpectedly created quite a support system for her.

So I am looking forward to seeing how you use it.

P,S, Are you presenting at the NWP conference in Las Vegas? I will be there and would love to see your work and share some ideas in person.

By: dogtrax

dogtrax — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 20:30:32 +0000

Thanks for the sharing. I love how you use it to connect with students and with colleagues. We’re moving in that direction ….

By: andersem

andersem — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:00:51 +0000

Kevin,

I love Edmodo! I use it with my fourth graders every week. Our main focus is on literacy and developing our own awareness of what an appropriate response looks like. Students in fourth grade are just learning how to type so everything needs to be modeled and taught. The students get so excited to respond to their reading using an interactive website. We have also used it as a “drop box” for their work. They love to post to their own library. I love added articles I find that may be of interest to them as well.

Our team also loves using Edmodo. We have a group set up for fourth grade teachers. We post interesting links etc. to the wall of the group. Most of these links come from Pinterest, which is banned at school. Since most of the links on Pinterest are blogs, we are able to post the link to the blog on Edmodo and access it from home or school. Have you thought about using it to post/share resources from colleague to colleague? I know you said you do it through writing and reflection but it may be great as just a sharing tool as well.

By: Maureen Devlin

Maureen Devlin — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:26:08 +0000

Hi Kevin, I’m just growing “multimedia literacy studio.” It’s based on what I know about related to Ellin Oliver Keene’s work. Here’s a post I wrote about Keene’s work: http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/02/ellin-oliver-keenes-literacy-studio.html

And here are a couple of posts about the Multimedia Literacy Studio: http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/creating-multimedia-literacy-studio.html and http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/multimedia-literacy-studio-structure.html

If your team has ideas, let me know. Thanks for all you do to forward our thinking and work.

And have the MTA Talks been published yet? I want to share with my colleagues.

By: dogtrax

dogtrax — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:40:41 +0000

Hi Maureen
Glad that we can share together and I would love to learn more about your Multimedia Literacy Studio idea.
Kevin

By: Maureen Devlin

Maureen Devlin — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:27:23 +0000

Just the inspiration I was looking for this morning. I want to follow your school’s work in this regard as it is exactly what my colleagues and I are trying to do. I hope you’ll continue to share stories and reflections of your work. Currently I’m working on employing iMovie to help students crreate movies about poems that “speak to them.” I’m excited about this project as the students will be meeting all the standards with a wonderful tech venue that they can share with others. I’ve started thinking of this as “Multimedia Literacy Studio.”