#HurricaneSandy: An Authentic Twitter Adventure

Last weekend my student visited NYC and got stuck as Hurricane Sandy rolled in.  Luckily, his family was able to take shelter at a friend’s house in Brooklyn.  On Monday morning, I projected our classroom Twitter account on the Apple TV and suggested we tweet our classmate to see if he was ok.

He responded much to the joy of my six and seven year-olds.  

After connecting with he and his mom via Twitter, I asked if they could update us throughout the day.  The family was generous with their time and tweeted frequent weather reports and photos from the storm. 

As our day continued, my class used The Weather Channel app to learn more about Hurricane Sandy.  We looked at radar maps and talked about the timing of the storm and how it would fall on a full moon when tides are at their highest which would cause flooding in many areas (a nice connection to our current solar system inquiry).

After seeing photos and short video clips on The Weather Channel, my class had lots of questions. Here are few they tweeted to their classmate:

                                                                                                  

My student in NYC took the role of Hurricane Sandy reporter very seriously and answered all the questions his friends posted. 

In class, at least once every hour, students asked, “Did we get any new tweets?”  I sent an email to our staff and invited other classrooms to learn along with us via Twitter. Soon, our 1^st grade friend was sharing his storm experiences with our school.

The following day our Hurricane Sandy reporter continued to update us in the aftermath of the storm.  He walked around Brooklyn and shot various short videos that he posted to Twitter explaining some of the damage and storm clean-up measures.  Back in class, my students felt knowledgeable about the storm and were excited to learn more.  It also became an outlet for kids to connect with their classmate, since he would miss several days of school.

As the week progressed we continued to get updates from our reporter.  Checking in with Twitter became an opportunity to connect with our friend who would end up being out of school all week.  Throughout the week I watched my students—both near and far—share their learning and use social media to connect and collaborate.  Hurricane Sandy provided us an authentic opportunity to thoughtfully use social media in the classroom.   

Here are a few take-aways:

My students were empowered to be part of a learning network that was for students, by students.  So often, young children only have access to information that is filtered through an adult channel. While oftentimes that is appropriate, kids also need the model of other children as information providers.  By watching a peer research, report and field questions, student now have a "mentor" experience for what it looks like and sounds like to be an information sharer.  As Peter H. Johnston shared in Choice Words (2004) kids need to visualize themselves as a "can do" kid.  When young learners internalize the belief that "I'm the kind of kid who works as a reporter. I'm the kind of kid who asks good questions. I'm the kind of kid who ________," they experience the success, feedback and confidence that inspires them to make additional attempts in the future. Over time, this repetitive process produces kids who desire to think, learn, share and are inspired to do it again and again. My students were thrilled to see their classmate work as a reporter and now believe that any first grade student can do this important work. 

For the first time,  students saw Twitter as a place to ask questions, conduct research and gather new information.  Previously we had only used it to tell others about our learning. Now, students see Twitter as a tool for learning.  I spend a lot of time in first grade teaching my students where they can go to find answers to their questions; now they can add school-supervised Twitter to their list of resources. 

Connecting with a classmate via Twitter allowed students to emotionally process the storm.  Their peer told about his safety plan and how residents were told to prepare for the storm.  My students were able to see that unusual things--like superstorms--do happen, but that adults around the country prepare for these events and have a plan for when they occur. Watching their peer's video tweets and seeing NYC clean up and get back to normal was therapeutic for all  involved.

After tweeting and blogging to our reporter, my class now sees social media as an effective tool for connecting with others.  In addition to our classroom tweets, each day students commented on his Kidblog.  Students posted comments to see how he was doing or to ask for an update on the hurricane.  As a result of this collaborative learning experience, my kids now think like connected learners.  This was apparent Friday afternoon as we said goodbye to a student who was moving.  As students sat on the rug and said goodbye and good luck to their friend, one girl said,  "Make sure to tweet us ok?  And send some of those video tweets so we can learn about your new house and your new school." Another child chimed in, "And leave lots of comments on our blog!" 

YES! I cheered silently in my head as I saw my students think like connected, empowered learners.  This is why we do this!  I am very grateful to my student and his family for engaging in this authentic learning experience.  Together, we have provided students a foundational experience for using social media in the classroom. I can't wait to see what we learn next!

Do you have a classroom Twitter account?  We'd love to connect with you! Follow us @Burley106

Video used with permission from the family

Active Literacy With the iPad: Part 1

iBooks and ePUBs

When I’m teaching reading, I’m teaching students how to be active readers.  That means that they need to engage with what they are reading.  They need to think, talk, and write.  They need to leave tracks of their thinking.   Students do this by writing post-it’s and annotating the text they are reading.  (Depending on they type of text.)

When I first began exploring the iPad I was thrilled to learn that iBooks allows students to write notes and highlight things.  Now they could have virtual post-it’s!  What was even more exciting to me was that they could e-mail me these comments to me.  Here’s an example of what one of these comment pages might look like.
As you can see, the comments come up but not the text that the student is referring to.  This can be fixed if the student highlights the sentence or phrase that inspired that thought.  This is what I plan on teaching my students next.  I think that it will be very powerful for them to articulate specific words or phrases that have triggered their thinking.

I find this format really revealing and easy to look at as well as assess.  I have enough rag tag stacks of paper and this document is a quick assessment glance at the thinking my student did during the day’s lesson.  I also think that when these comments are listed out like this it makes it easy to look for patterns in thinking.

In the example above I see the student is demonstrating an emotional connection with the text, they are questioning, and they are linking to their background knowledge.  The comment about Pandora reveals  that the student is probably connecting to their background knowledge of the mythological person Pandora and when the article refers to Pandora as a place he is attempting to reconcile this information.  This would be my opening point in a conference about the text.

So what’s the catch?
Well, the catch is that this only works with iBooks that you purchase…which I have no money for, and ePUBs.  The good news is that there is a way to turn any internet article into an ePUB for students to use.  Thanks to Bruce “Awesomeness” Ahlborn for this tip.  dotEPUB is a site that will do this dirty work for you. All you have to do is install their bookmarklet on your computer or iPad and a few simple clicks will send the article to your device.

Bam!  Presto!  Any internet article becomes a tool for practicing active literacy.

Management Issues 

I would suggest that you, the teacher, use dotePUB on your computer and then drop it into ibooks to sync to the devices.  You can install this on student iPads easily so that they can do it themselves.  However, itunes will sync all of the student articles off the devices and back on to all the other devices.  Which means that you now get every single article that each student Epubbed.  (Is that a verb?  If not you heard it here first!)  It's not a huge issue but a minor headache that you can avoid.

Accessing Web Content with Read It Later

I've been experimenting with Read It Later, a free app and website that allows you to save web pages for access on your iPad or other device. My colleague Begoña Cowan discovered this tool during a frenzy of app-hunting over the holiday break, and I think it has a lot of promise for organizing and sharing online resources for student access. Here's how it works.

The teacher logs in to a single shared account at readitlaterlist.com. There are a variety of third-party plug-ins and applications for managing Read It Later content, but so far I am content with the Read It Later bookmarklet. By dragging the bookmarklet to your Safari bookmarks bar, you enable your browser to save and tag web pages for future access.

When you click the Read It Later bookmarklet, a box pops up

telling you the page has been saved. You can then tag or rename that page if you wish. I am tagging links with the room number of the students who will need the link, as well as the general topic. First graders are studying Native Americans right now, so I have tagged this page as 106 tlingit. Students in 106 who are studying the Tlingit tribe will be able to find this resource easily on the iPad.

When viewing pages on the iPad in the Read It Later app, students can choose either the article view (text only) or the full web page view. The pages are downloaded to the iPad when the app is opened, so you can access the article later without an Internet connection.

Students can also add and tag sites as their research skills become more sophisticated, making Read It Later a handy shared repository of sites to support learning and research.

There are other apps, such as Instapaper and Evernote, that have similar functionality. I like the simplicity of Read It Later for our young students, but you may want to investigate other apps as well.