Colorado Conversation: IT’s Elementary February 23, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Conference Sessions.trackback
IT’s Elementary: Collaborative Classroom Practices from the Lenski Elementary Teachers (Linda Jones, Boni Hamilton, Trecie Warner, Marcia Parrish, Jen Leavitt, Dana Wilhelm).
Quick introductions around the room. Participants include computer coaches, building reasource teachers, classroom teachers, tech coordinators at both building and district level, librarians, school principals, district network director.
How is technology used to support writing at Lenski? Where have we been, where are we now, and where are we hoping to go? Wikispaces will allow for student accounts that do not require student email accounts.
Step-up-to-writing teaches organization well, but the work all sounds the same. One key is to adopt vocabulary school-wide so that each grade level builds on the previous.
Selecting text and converting to table allows a process to deconstruct their writing and facilitate peer editing. Setting a goal, like every writer needs to make at least three changes, allows all levels of writers to focus on improving. Sometimes numbers can be too literal. Color coding is a key to understanding the organization of the writing, for example, one color for first sentences, one for concluding sentences, another for supporting ideas etc. Directions and examples are on the Lenski writing wiki linked below. It may be helpful to tell students (once they have learned to put them in) to remove transition words like ‘first’,'in addition’, and the students begin to vary those transition words on their own.
Only the classroom teacher can truly integrate technology into the curriculum, because only the teacher know what happens before the lab, what will happen after the lab, and what individual students will need. Classroom teachers should view the lab as an opportunity to enlist the support of additional teachers for writing. - Paraphrased from Boni Hamilton.
The focus at Lenski has been to move up the chart on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
http://colearning.wikispaces.com/IT%27s+Elementary+Collaborative+Classroom+Practices
http://tied2lenski.wikispaces.com/
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