PBS Holiday Blogging Update

Wow! Just Wow! I can not believe how well our leaders and bloggers stepped up to this challenge. Last term I was trying to think of a way to keep the learning conversations and achievement gained over the term in our class, going over the holiday period. To do this I came up with the idea of creating our own holiday blogging challenge that was loosely based on the Woolf Fisher Holiday Blogging format. 

I know my learners and I know that if true buy-in was to take place the task design needed to be created by my learners for my learners using the language we use in our learning environment. As mentioned in my previous post our student leaders were challenged to set this up for their peers. We decided to go on a virtual trip around Auckland visiting the Sky Tower, Rainbow's End, Kelly Tarlton's, the Museum and the Zoo. Each task required my learners to use their smart searching skills to find and use the information provided on each of these websites to create a DLO or respond to a question that was then posted on their blogs.

This was not sold as a compulsory task but rather a way of strengthening their 2017 learning journey. 27 students signed up to take part and out of those 23 completed the challenge during the holiday break, with 5 more students electing to complete the tasks this week. 2 students took responsibility for not taking part and emailed me their reasons and 3 decided not to complete the challenge. Once again we had a significant number of boys take part. Our leaders had organised who would monitor which day and our participants had to take responsibility for adding their links to our Holiday Blogging Record. This worked extremely well and has given me a wonderful piece of learning evidence. 

The focus of my CoL inquiry this year has been to see how I could get my learners talking about their learning. In total our learners published 208 blog posts and between them made 924 comments on each other's blogs. From a teacher perspective that is 924 times that someone read a blog post, noticed the successes and errors, and gave their feedback and feed forward. Many of these comments are part of a thread which means learning conversations have taken place and are embedded in our learning culture!

Screenshot of the student managed blog post and comment record