Meeting updates and making progress in classrooms

DY Prep educators using Blogger

The Learning Portfolio Project sites are officially in full swing and things are getting real. The laptops are coming out and young people are posting away. This month at our meetings with educators at DY Prep and the DY Art Center we decided to focus on hands-on technical skill building. Sometimes educators just want time to play and create too - so we gave it to them!

First though, as always, we all shared some successes and challenges. Here are some of the highlights:

• Using a school issued email is a no-no for tumblr. We knew tumblr was blocked in most public schools, but we didn't know you also couldn't use a student email address to create a tumblr blog outside of school. Some of our Art Center participants created tumblr accounts with their NYC DOE emails and they were deleted soon after. So we need to make sure our Art Center participants don't use their DOE email addresses. 

• We are starting to have young people blogging in multiple programs/classes and it's great. It's not a surprise, but the young people that have more practice with blogging are feeling more comfortable with it. The ideal is that blogging becomes just a normal way for them to share what they are learning and we spend less time on HOW to blog (tech and design skills) and more time on WHAT to blog (content). 

• Access to technology is still an issue at times. Teachers who have less access to the laptops feel like it is their biggest challenges. Emily said the more often the young people blog, the more comfortable they are doing it. So when you have sporadic tech access in the classroom it slows the whole process down. We are working on this with a combo of acquiring more laptops and scheduling them out.

• Teaching basic digital literacy skills needs to be baked into our teaching practices. Rudy is the BEST at modeling practices at our meetings for the educators. He showed them a keyboard shortcut recently and several of them had never learned it. These kinds of basic computer skills (shortcuts, typing, using a mouse, etc) are still so necessary for making blogging and other digital learning activities fit into the school day - at the educator and student level. We need to share more of our best practices (and honestly good posters to hang in classrooms) around how to teach these skills. 

• A lurking question remains: How should we grade a blog post? We hope to have some answers to this soon.

Keep reading for more on our progress...

At the DY Prep meeting, Rudy led the educators in creating their own blog posts. He wanted the educators to try an activity that they would ask their students to do. This would help them understand the process of posting to the blog and also give them a model to show their students. Everyone dove into the art of making a blog post and some of us even got into the HTML behind it. Formatting on Blogger can be a little tricky - especially when you are mixing images and text - so we are going to have a guest from Parsons faculty come next month to lead a workshop on basics of blog post design and formatting.

A worksheet of suggested tumblr themes for portfolios

A worksheet for picking a tumblr theme and planning the blog layout

For the DY Art Center, our meeting was really more "lab" time to work with tumblr. The group wanted to know more about themes (which create the look of your tumblr page) and how to customize them. I presented the group with some things to think about and different styles of themes that work better with visuals, text or both. Then each educator went into their own tumblr site and played around with the themes and customization options. In the end - BAC's blog got a nice new facelift. We all realized the power of the tumblr platform for customization, but also found out how easy it is to get lost in all of the options!

Fashion participants blogging

Meanwhile in the classrooms, all the educators have begun blogging with their students. Rudy is helping each class get started and is also training his MOUSE squad and Technology classes to help other students. He and Emily are working on an idea called "exponential learning" where they start by teaching a couple students a skill and then have them share it with more students and on and on.



At the Art Center the BAC participants have already blogged on three Saturdays, the ACTION seniors are working on a digital yearbook which will then lead to personal portfolio sites, and the Fashion participants mostly have up their first posts [see pics to the left]. The young people were so into it, we had to ask a couple times for them to log out and turn over the computers for the next group of participants.