It's Elementary

Have a listen to a special edition of It's Elementary Webcast / Earthcast09 Echo / 350.org promo show.  This is a call to the Edtechtalk community to global action to save our planet. Please join our sister site Puente Al Mundo in putting together 350 podcast of up to 350 seconds each on message to world leaders on saving the Earth.  All interested please send us your podcast link to twitter @coordinatortwo. 

Listen as the It's Elementary Team dicusses our summer activities such as NECC 2009, Building Communities, Edbublogger Con and local conferences. We also had a special song by Kevin Honeycutt "Love Them and Let Them Go".  Hope you enjoy the show and remember we broadcast the 2nd and 4th Mondays of each month. Our next show will be Monday September 14th where we will dicuss; "Bringing it Home", how we take what we learn in our online spaces with to our day job.  See you then.

Join us, as we talk about elementary student blogging with our guest Jan Smith, a sixth grade teachers in British Columbia, Huzzah! http://huzzah.edublogs.org/  She started with a strictly controled class blog, but found that it lacked conversational give and take.  She started again with an edublogs account, and this time she encouraged a more "conversational" approach both in student's writing, giving them a voice, and how they interacted with each other.  She started a practice of "gradual release" giving students more authority, and control over their blogging and blogs as they showed responsibility until many had earned their own blogs and were self-moderated.  She also shared how she dealt with problems and conflicts when they came up, respecting students, and making them responsible. 

Link to Text Chat.

We talked about various projects we are doing with our students. Some are in classes during the school day, and some are outside of school hours.  We're building connections with our peers, both far away and in our schools and districts. We're filling in our network, and making some rich and surprising connections   Link to text chat

The It's Elementary cohosts talk about mutlimedia projects in the elementary classroom. We compared teacher produced versus student produced. We talked about assessing multimedia projects, rubrics, and portfolios. We welcomed a 4th grade teacher to our conversation at the end who is using multimedia projects in his bilingual classroom.  Pertinent bookmarks are at our Diigo group http://groups.diigo.com/groups/itselementary. We look forward to you joining us for the next show on June 8, 2009 6:00pmPDT/9:00pmEDT.