Our live poetry cafe continued today with 11 more sessions. Again, we broadcast each reading through Google Hangouts and encouraged people to Tweet about our poetry using the hashtag #barrowpoems. You can read about yesterday here.
I always love the surprises that come up from students: a student reading from a computer, a student who barely speaks who reads an incredibly descriptive poem, a student giving his teacher a standing ovation, a student who shared a poem in Chinese and then English, students encouraging their friends with a “you can do it”, a student sharing a poem about his home country, a student reading a poem for another student who was too shy to come up, and a student handing me her poem to carry in my pocket.
Today I added a little sign to help with our traffic in and out of the library for checkout.
Poem in Your Pocket Day has grown to be one of our favorite days of the year. Each year, we’ve found new ways to celebrate this day. We write poetry to prepare. We hold a poetry contest. We encourage every person in our school to carry a poem in your pocket.
The thing about Poem in Your Pocket that people look forward to the most is our poetry cafe in the library. I decorate the library with tables, tablecloths, lights, and poetry. There’s a fancy microphone and a poet’s stool. Every class in the school comes the library across 2 days to share poems into the open microphone. This year’s poetry cafe will be on Thursday and Friday April 9th and 10th.
For the past few years, we’ve used Adobe Connect to broadcast and archive our poetry readings for the world to see. This year, we are once again trying something new. We’re still broadcasting, but now we are using Google Hangouts. Each class has a Google Hangout setup. I’ve made one Google Site that contains all of the links to the hangout feeds. At each scheduled time, the hangout will go live for an audience to view.
This year, we are encouraging our viewing audience to use Twitter to talk about our poetry. Comments for classes or individual students can be tweets using the hashtag #barrowpoems I’ll have a Twitter feed up on our board so that our students can see what people are saying about their poems.
I encourage you to tune in and watch on April 9th & 10th. Please share this event with everyone you know. It is sure to be a great 2 days of poetry!
Last year, I tried something new with the 2nd grade. My library schedule was packed and it was hard to get all 4 classes on the calendar, so I used Google Hangouts to teach all 4 classes at one time. It was an experiment, but it proved to be a lot of fun and also showed the students and teachers how to use a Google Hangout and collaborate on a Google doc.
This year, we planned it again and added on a few layers. One of our favorite kinds of poems to write is list poetry. You take a list and add descriptive words to each item on the list so that the reader can experience the items on the list. Our goal in our Google Hangout this time was to learn about list poetry, hear a mentor poem, practice list poetry together, and then create one collaborative list poem.
In advance, I setup a Google Hangout on Air.
I sent the link to the hangout to all of the teachers participating in the hangout. I also created a blank Google Doc for our collaborative poem and shared editing rights with all 4 teachers.
I gave the blank doc a title and wrote each teacher’s name inside the doc to create a space for each class to add to the collaborative poem without writing on top of one another.
On the morning of the hangout, I emailed teachers a reminder that included the link to the doc as well as the direct link for joining as a participant in the hangout.
At hangout time, I went in my office and awaited the classes. As they entered, I did a sound check to make sure microphones were working. Then I used the control panel in Hangouts to mute all of their microphones to eliminate feedback.
I opened our lesson by reading from Falling Down the Page, list poems collected by Georgia Heard. We focused on “In my Desk” by Jane Yolen. I pointed out how she gave describing words for each item found in her desk so that we would be able to picture it or experience it. I built on the reactions of students to the line about a “great big hunk of rotting cheese” found in a lunch box. These kinds of words cause us to react which is exactly what we want in a poem.
Next, I opened up a blank doc and started writing a grocery list: bread, milk, eggs, cereal. Then I assigned each word to one of the 4 classes and had them brainstorm describing words to add to each item on my list. Each class had a chance to speak in the hangout as I added our words to the poem.
Finally, I invited all of the classes to work on a collaborative poem about things under our beds. Each teacher facilitated the work in their own classrooms. I checked in from time to time to give an update on when we would stop working. Then, each class read their stanza of the poem to close out our time.
While we were writing, I invited people on Twitter to watch the doc in construction. We had lots of viewers engaged in our work in progress, and students loved being published authors with one tweet.
This lesson certainly saved me time in the library to give to other classes who needed a lesson, but it was much more than that. Rather than having each class in the grade level feel isolated, this lesson allowed them to unite together to create a piece of writing that immediately reached an audience outside of our school. It allowed us to collaborate within the walls of our school without the disruption of shuffling kids from class to class. It gave each class a space to think and work with one another and also a space for all classes to work together. I don’t think that every lesson would work in this type of setup, but it does make me curious to think about when this type of learning is the better choice than scheduling each class individually.
Under My Bed
By Barrow 2nd graders
Under my bed you will find…
(Yawn’s Stanza)
Slimey Socks
Lost High Fives
Stuffed animals, toys, and books
Scraps of paper
Remote control plane
Hairy, mad Tarantula
Dusty Boogers
Junky Legos
Clothes and shoes and jackets
Hairy Monkey Eyes with a big chin
Tv, coke can, and baseball cards
Football cards and a zipline
Dirty underwear, rotten bread, and an old sandwich
(Ramseyer’s Stanza)
Two fat picture books
A fake diamond sword
My playful black kitten
Giant Lego parts
Huge dead bugs in the corner
A stinky, rainbow sock
A blue crate filled with Adidas shoes
A chewed up puppy stuffed animal
(Brink’s Stanza)
Hiding under my bed with my big, hairy monster
you will find
smelly dead cockroaches and dust bunnies
old paper candy wrappers
a big purple three horned monster
basketball shoes
an empty shoebox and an old toy
a skeleton reaching for water
a stinking mummy, rotten eggs, and a stinky sock
cuddly stuffed animals
a golden chair, medals, trophies
smooth rocks I found in the street
lost, overdue library books
a racing track
paper plates
(Wright’s Stanza)
Under my bed, I look and see
Flattened books
moldy food
cute and sleepy puppies
old broken legos I used to play with
misplaced and forgotten toys
and ripped, dirty money
So many things under my bed.
Following this lesson, I did a very similar lesson with one Kindergarten class in person. We didn’t do the hangout, but we did share our work with the Internet so that students’ voices were already reaching an audience even in their beginning steps of writing. It was so much fun to get a comment from one of the viewers of the doc.
Our 2nd grade is deep into their project on six people from Black History. Most classes are finishing up their research for our Barrow Peace Prize Flipgrid project. Before students begin the writing process, we want them to understand what the Nobel Peace Prize is and consider the character traits that someone might have who receives this award. Every class needs the exact same lesson, but they need the lesson before students can really move forward with their writing. Sometimes the library schedule can get in the way of these kinds of projects. I don’t want the library schedule to cause a project to be delayed simply because we can’t fit everyone into 30 minute slots across a day or two. This is the perfect time to use technology to maximize our time.
For the 2nd time, I did a Google hangout with an entire grade level in order to save time. Before the hangout, I setup a Google Hangout on Air and sent the participation link to all of the teachers via email. I also created a Google doc where we could do some brainstorming and invited all four of the 2nd grade teachers to be collaborators. I made sure that the link to the doc was “view only” for anyone else with the link.
Before the hangout started, I opened the hangout, turned on my cam, and muted my microphone. As the four classes joined, I could easily hear if their microphone and video was working or not. Then, I could use the control room tool to mute each teacher’s microphone while we waited on all classes to join. Periodically, I came back on the microphone to update the classes who were waiting and remind teachers to open our shared Google doc.
The purpose of the hangout was to help 2nd graders get familiar with Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize as well as to develop a list of characteristics for our own Barrow Peace Prize. After a quick intro, I read the book Alfred Nobel: The Man Behind the Peace Prize by Kathy-jo Wargin and illustrated by Zachary Pullen. Then, I told the students just a bit about Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. We watched just the beginning of a CNN video of her acceptance.
Then, I invited each class to look a the shared Google doc and brainstorm the qualities that we hoped would represent the Barrow Peace Prize. I muted all microphones while classes discussed and added to the doc. While that was happening, I shared the viewable link to the doc on Twitter so that an audience could watch the list be constructed.
Watch as our 2nd graders create a list of character traits for our Barrow Peace Prize. #tlchat @flipgrid https://t.co/dvdvzZ5WV9
We immediately had multiple viewers of our work in progress.
Each class had an opportunity to step the microphone and share just a bit of what they discussed. I was in charge of calling on each classroom and muting and unmuting each teacher’s microphone.
Finally, I closed by reminding students to use their research as well as the character trait list when writing their piece about their person from Black History.
What would have taken 3-4 hours on the library calendar took only 30 minutes and now the 2nd grade can move forward with the writing process. I want to check in with the 2nd grade teachers to see how things felt on the other side of the camera, but from my side, this seemed like a great model for whole grade lessons that lend themselves to a hangout. I certainly wouldn’t want all lessons to be like this one, but this format felt right for this situation.
On March 4th, we will celebrate World Read Aloud Day with LitWorld. This special day “calls global attention to the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories”.
For teacher librarians and other educators, it has come to be a week-long celebration of sharing stories through Skype and Google Hangouts. This year, these connections will happen on March 2-6.
Connecting through stories is always such a rewarding experience for our students. Students often discover that we are all very much the same even though we are different.
Shannon McClintock Miller and I invite you to post your schedule to our shared Google Doc and start making connections for this special week. You may even discover a long-time collaborative partner through this one experience.
Be sure to check out the LitWorld site for more information on planning for World Read Aloud Day. They even have a special classroom kit with ideas for schools.
If you are interested in connecting with others on this day, please add your name, schedule, and ideas to the informations in the Google Doc that we started. This will begin to fill up with others around the world as they want to connect their students and schools too. We plan to celebrate throughout the entire week of March 2-6th.
We think it’s important to know that there’s no “right” way to plan for World Read Aloud Day. Whatever you decide to do will be the right plan for your school and your students. Whatever you do, your life will be richly rewarded with the power of spoken word and voices connecting together across the miles to lift up our right to read!
In the words of Kate DiCamillo, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, “Stories Connect Us”. We can’t wait to connect students around the world through story.
Our 2014 Picture Book Smackdown was a huge success. Students in 5 states including Georgia, Texas, Connecticut, Maine, and Pennsylvania shared their favorite picture books along with 2 amazing authors, Dianne de Las Casas and Anne Marie Pace.
Anytime you host an event like this, you worry about technical difficulties. However, today the internet gave us smooth sailing. I do want to take a moment to uncover some of the pieces that went into making this event successful. There was a lot of preparation that went on behind the scenes.
I created our Google Plus Hangout on Air event page well in advance so that we could advertise our smackdown to all of our networks.
All of the authors and participating schools have been communicating with one another via email, twitter, and a shared Google doc. The doc contained tips for making the hangout run smoothly such as keeping our microphones muted unless we were speaking as well as listed the order that we would speak.
All of the participating schools had students prepare in advance. Many of our students wrote our scripts or memorized a brief blurb about their books. Some of us hosted a practice for our students to run through their talks.
We opened the hangout well in advance so that we could test our microphones as needed. I sent everyone a direct link to join the hangout rather than sending everyone a G+ invite.
Many of us had organization to how our students came up to the microphone. For example, I setup my chairs in groups of 3 so that students were already sitting in the groups of 3 that would come up to the microphone.
Some of us had helpers who were assisting us behind the scenes. I recruited a parent volunteer, a UGA student, and UGA teacher to help me. The parent volunteer took pictures and assisted students to the microphone. The UGA teacher created a Google doc of all of the picture books that were shared during the event. The UGA student helped students to the microphone. Since I was in charge of the hangout, I wanted to be able to focus on the technology and supporting any issues that came up with our event.
I have @ilovethisclass creating a list of all of the picture books that are shared during #pbsmkdwn Thank you! On the blog later.
As we had time, we tweet pictures or publicity about the event while it was happening.
I hope that you will take time to listen to the archive because it truly was miraculous. We heard from Dianne de Las Casas about why Picture Book Month was started and it was amazing to see how many authors and illustrators she has recruited to be picture book champions.
We also heard Dianne de Las Casas and Anne Marie Pace share some of their favorite picture books. I wish we could have heard more from them, but they were gracious enough to step aside so that students could voice their love for so many wonderful books.
We heard titles, authors, and summaries. One of my favorite things to hear from students was why picture books matter in our world. To hear their own reasoning about why picture books matter was truly inspiring.
What's better than having an author read her picture book? Listening to it with @barrowmc kids #pbsmkdwn
This will definitely be an annual event for me, and I encourage you to think about how you might host your own event like this to get kids connected and sharing their passions and interests. Happy Picture Book Month!
This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to collaborate globally. In the past, I’ve participated in amazing events such as Dot Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and World Read Aloud Day. Each of those events has connected our students to classrooms and authors around the globe, and I’ve found so many collaborative colleagues through these events. It’s these very events that have pushed me to wonder what more we can do with our students. I’ve been pondering how we can have collaborations that allow our students to make a difference in the world and share their ideas, their questions, their problems, and their solutions.
When our spectrum teacher, Natalie Hicks, came to me with a flyer about America Recycles Day, I knew that this day had potential to spark some action projects with our students and students around the globe. I made a Google doc, crafted a blog post, and started inviting anyone and everyone to connect for America Recycles Day. It didn’t take long for some of the very people I’ve connected with for other events to start posting their own schedules in the doc and making connections. I want to thank Shawna Ford, Jenny Lussier, Cathy Potter, Donna MacDonald, Misti Sikes, Ly Phan, Kathy Schmidt, and Craig Seasholes for taking a risk with me and trying something new. These people put their schedules out there and started making connections.
This week, my own students started making connections for America Recycles Day. Each Skype or Google Hangout offered a little something different.
Ms. Clarke and Ms. Haley’s 3rd grade class connected with Kathy Schmidt and her 3rd graders in Gwinnett County, GA. We learned about how her students are collecting items from home to put in the library’s tinker lab rather than throw them away.
Ms. Wright’s 2nd grade class connected with Cally Flickinger in South Burlington, Vermont. We read the book Here Comes the Garbage Barge by Jonah Winter. The story sparked a great conversation about how our trash can take over our world and how important it is to recycle or reuse instead of throw things away.
Ms. Ramseyer’s 2nd grade class connected with Donna MacDonald in South Burlington, Vermont. Her students shared how they are using Drew Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit to inspire a save the crayons campain. Students are collecting crayons and sending them to be melted into new crayons. Our students took time to offer some other ways that the crayons might be used such as making candles, melting crayons for artwork, fusing crayons together to make two-sided crayons, and investigating what crayons are made of so that they might discover even more things that crayons could make.
I'm amazed at all of the ideas that kids come up with for reusing materials instead of throwing away. #AmericaRecyclesDay@dsmacdonald
Ms. Li’s Kindergarten connected with Misti Sikes and her Kindergarten in Forsyth, Georgia. They shared how they recycle at their school by separating white paper and color paper as well as other ways that recycling has to be prepared before it goes into the bin such as removing paper clips and staples.
Ms. Boyle’s Kindergarten connected with Holly Esterline & Katie LeFrancois’s grade 1 & 2 class in Bolton, Vermont. We shared the book Compost Stew and heard about how their school is doing TerraCycling. Even with our connection issues, we still learned a lot about something we don’t do much of at our school.
@plemmonsa Students want to create TerraCycling video to share with you. Thanks for organizing this! #americarecyclesday
Ms. Tesler’s 4th grade students gathered a lunch bunch together to connect with Cathy Potter and her students in Falmouth, Maine. The 1st graders at her school showed us a Google presentation with pictures of recycling and composting efforts in their school. They have a whole process of how their scraps at lunch get put into a bucket to go to the composting bin.
Finally, Ms. Spurgeon’s 3rd grade class connected with Karre Sloan’s 6th grade students in Nashville, Tennessee. They shared the recycling program from their school and how their 3rd graders are in charge of recycling. They also shared their ideas and tips for our own recycling problem at our school.
In every connection, our students shared our own school problem. We have recycling bins in every classroom, but we are finding that people are still throwing away recyclable things. Even when we recycle, we have an additional problem. People are parking in front of our recycling dumpster and the recycling truck can’t get to the recycling to empty it. We posted these problems onto a Padlet. We showed each connecting class the bins that we have in our classrooms and read the recycling instructions that can be found on the bag inside. Sometimes our connecting classes gave us new ideas right on the spot or shared what their own school is doing that might support our problem. Other classes added to our Padlet after we disconnected. We also added to the Padlet.
Our next step is to take this Padlet and share the ideas with our environmental committee which is chaired by Natalie Hicks. We also have 2 enrichment clusters that we can share the Padlet with. Our hope is that some of the ideas that came from so many perspectives will spark change within our school problem. We want to connect back with some of the classes we met this week and share what we’ve done to improve our problem, and we want to see what they have done since our connection.
I loved that during our very last connection, students arrived in the library to put signs on our recycling bin that were sent by our recycling department.
We saw that we weren’t alone with our problem and that there were multiple things to test out to try to reach a solution.
We learned that recycling is very different from place to place. We are so fortunate in Athens to have a state of the art recycling facility and single stream recycling. Some communities have to put forth a lot of effort to recycle, and it is so easy for us.
We realized that there were so many things we could do with our “recycling” other than put it in the bin. The concept of makerspaces is really causing a lot of us to think about turning trash into functional creations.
We saw that together we could come up with out-of-the-box ideas. We often started with “put up posters about recycling”, but with the energy of collaboration, new ideas surface such as make smaller trash cans, create a recycling contest, write a catchy song about recycling to sing on morning announcements, and more.
My hope is that this week of connections really does spark change in our school and others. At the very least, I think it made us more aware of what we are throwing away. These types of connections have the potential to grow into large-scale collaborations around the globe. The combination of powerful texts such as Here Comes the Garbage Barge and Eyes Wide Open along with the innovative ideas of students, teachers, and families fosters a healthy environment for long-lasting collaboration. Our students are the future of our world, and when we allow them to unite with one another around authentic dilemmas in our world, we are equipping them with problem solving skills to keep our world a peaceful place.
November is Picture Book Month. It’s a time to celebrate the power of picture books and why the matter in our lives no matter what our age. Picture Book Month was started by author Dianne de Las Casas to bring awareness to the role of picture books in our lives. Each year, multiple authors and illustrators contribute daily posts about why they think picture books matter. The Picture Book Month website has a wealth of resources for you to celebrate picture book month with your students, including a calendar, logos, bookmarks, and certificate.
At our school, we host a Picture Book Month Shelf Challenge. Students set their own goal for how many picture books they will read during November. I like allowing students to set their own goal because it allows for differentiation and also allows for surprising goals from students. Each student receives a sheet to document their reading for the month.
At the end of the month, students turn in this sheet. They receive a certificate, a bookmark, and get entered into a drawing to win picture books that I’ve collected for prizes.
For the 2nd year, we will host our annual Picture Book Smackdown. On November 18th from 1:30-2:30PM EST, students in multiple schools across multiple states will gather online with authors in a Google Hangout to share favorite picture books and why they matter in our lives. The event will be a Hangout On Air, so it will also be archived for future enjoyment.
To prepare for the event, I’ve sent a Google form to students to identify students in various grades who want to participate.
As students share their interest, I’m sending them a script to help them prepare for their sharing during the smackdown. They don’t have to use this script, but many find it helpful to remember all of the pieces of sharing. The day before the smackdown, they will gather in the library to do a quick practice.
I hope you will join us on November 18th to watch the smackdown and help spread the word about the event in advance. During the smackdown, students and authors will step to the microphone in their own states and share a favorite picture book. We also hope to capture all of these recommendations in a Google doc.
On November 18th, watch the smackdown with your class or on your own by visiting the event page or watching the stream:
Tweet about the event and your favorite picture books. Even if your class isn’t in the smackdown, they can still share their favorite picture books with the hashtag #pbsmkdwn as well as leave comments for our authors and students. You can also include the picture book month hashtag #picturebookmonth
Many thanks to all of the schools and authors who are participating in the smackdown so far this year:
Participating schools include:
Andy Plemmons, school librarian in Athens, Georgia
Jenny Lussier, school librarian in Durham, Connecticut
Cathy Potter, school librarian in Falmouth, Maine
Kathy Kaldenberg, school librarian in Solon, Iowa
Shawna Ford, school librarian in Weatherford, Texas
Julee Murphy, school librarian in Texas
Christina Brennan, school librarian in Pennsylvania
Participating authors include:
Dianne de Las Casas, founder of picture book month
Anne Marie Pace, author of Vampirina Ballerina
How are you celebrating Picture Book Month? It’s not too late to get a plan together and promote the power of picture books with your students.
September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. There are so many fun pirate stories out there, and each year we seem to discover a few more thanks to the connections we make around the globe through Google Hangouts and Skype. Planning a day of connections like this definitely takes some time but students love talking with people around the globe, sharing a story, and learning a bit about one another. It always seems to reinforce the idea that we aren’t alone in our bubble of routines of day to day life. There are other people out there doing the same things that we are and quite possibly they are doing those things in different ways. I love the spontaneous conversations that take place on days like this that you could never plan through a standard or a lesson plan. Students always bring up a question or a comment that makes the day special.
This year, 8 classes came to the library for Talk Like a Pirate Day and we connected with 6 different schools in 5 different states.
We connected with Edie Crook in Gastonia North Carolina to read the book No Pirates Allowed Said Library Lou. We had a great conversation about “treasure” and students took turns stepping up to say what treasure meant to them. We were delighted with words such as being kind, family, friends, Skylanders, and baseball.
We connected with Jan Pelias through Google Hangouts in Frisco Texas to read the book How I Became a Pirate. It was fun to connect with someone in another time zone because we could talk about how time is different at the same moment around the world.
We connected with Melanie Thompson in Jefferson City, Missouri to read the book How I Became a Pirate. Melanie’s students had researched pirates and they took time to share all of their facts. This made our students very curious about pirates as well. I have a feeling all of our nonfiction pirate books will be checked out for a long time. I also love how Melanie embraced her inner pirate as we chatted with each other through Skype chat prior to our connection!
We connected with Okle Miller in Tampa, Florida to read the book No Pirates Allowed Said Library Lou. Tampa has a pirate festival called Gasparilla . Students loved hearing how pirates take over Tampa during this festival and kidnap the mayor (all for fun). The class we connected with even called themselves pirates and used the word “pirate” as an acronym for their classroom expectations and beliefs.
Both of our PreK classes came to the library for their first visit of the year. In class, they made pirate hats and hooks as well as added some pirate mustaches to their faces. We read the book Pirates Go to School and made a class video chanting the pirate chant at the end of the book.
We connected with Carol Scrimgeour in Essex Town, Vermont to read the book No Pirates Allowed Said Library Lou. We noticed that all of the kids were wearing warm clothes, so we had a great conversation about how cold it had been in the northeast. It was sunny in both places but with a very different temperature.
Finally, we connected with Shawna Ford in Texas and she read a new pirate book we had not heard before: No Bath No Cake Polly’s Pirate Party. Now the students want to get it for our library.
Before each connection, we looked at a map from our school to the school we were connecting with. We talked about distance, travel time, and also all of the decisions that go into choosing your route for a trip. We also created a Google tour of our trip using Google Tour Builder. After each connection, we wrote a summary together.
Finally, we spent a lot of time creating pirate sentences, phrases, and even conversations and practicing them aloud. Students had access to a list of pirate vocabulary words as well as multiple pirate stories to get ideas.
We used Flipgrid as a place to record our favorite pirate expressions. Students also had a great time trying to imitate a pirate voice and pirate faces and gestures. Take a moment to listen to them because they are quite entertaining! I loved how this evolved from a sentence writing activity into a practice of fluency, oral speaking, and performance. Again, Flipgrid became a place for us to crowdsource our voices with the voices of our connecting schools.
I love how these events connect us with new people around the world. This year we connected with some old friends, but we also met some new teachers, librarians, and students we hope to connect with again. I also want to continue to think about days like this to build long term collaborative relationships.
International Dot Day is one of our favorite days (weeks) of the year. It gives us permission to be creative and see what we can do just by making a mark. It also connects us with so many classrooms around the world. Classes are always looking to connect on this day, and we have made many collaborative relationships with schools because of this one day of the year.
This year, we used Dot Day as a way to explore our goal of dreaming, tinkering, creating, and sharing. We explored Google Drawing, which was a new tool for most students. We used Dot Day as a time to tinker and see how Google Drawing functioned as well as how to collaborate on a drawing with another student or class.
We also used colAR mix again this year to make augmented reality dots. This year, I encouraged students to think more globally as they made their dots by embracing the them of “making your mark on the world” that is the essence of The Dot. Students were encouraged to design a dot that represented their talents, hopes, dreams, and passions. I loved this new twist on a tool that we used last year because it revealed so many stories from students. One student drew a picture of an airplane flying through the clouds because of his dream to be a pilot when he grows up. Another student drew an astronaut and UFOs because of his desire to explore space. Another drew her whole family because they are what she loves in life. Some students chose to highlight their creativity as a way that they make their mark by designing unusual dots with their favorite colors. These were empowering stories because they allowed students to have a voice to share something personal about themselves in a way that they might now have shown before.
One amazing thing that happened while students were using the colAR app was how they discovered different ways to scan their dot. It started out as what some people might see as a mistake. A student’s hand was on top of their dot while they were scanning their image, and the hand became a part of the rotating sphere on the iPad screen. This resulted in an uproar of excitement as sharing began and the idea spread like wildfire. Soon students were trying to put their faces on their spinning spheres. Others stacked towers of crayons on top of their dot and tried to see if that would scan into the 3D image. All of this happened because of an opportunity to tinker. When we give kids a space to explore, they figure out amazing things and they willingly share and teach others what they learned. They get excited about their learning and they want to do more. I bet that these students would have spent an extended period of time continuing to experiment with colAR mix to see what else they could figure out, and they would have done this without getting tired or bored. These are the things that days like Dot Day reveal.
We had numerous Skype connections. Each one had its own unique twists and conversations between students and teachers. In many of these Skypes, we collaborated on a Google Drawing dots after reading the book. This included dots with our friend Okle Miller in Tampa, Edie Crook in North Carolina, and Crystal Hendrix in North Carolina (just to name a few). Sometimes this was live during a Google Hangout or Skype and other times it was after we disconnected. One of our hangouts was a large hangout between Matthew Winner in Maryland, Nancy Jo Lambert in Texas, Donna MacDonald in Vermont, and Esther Uribe in Texas. It was fun to read The Dot to students in so many states at one time, but what was even more fun was drawing with all of them at the same time! We definitely did some tinkering with this one. Many of us learned of the challenges of younger students but found ways to involved them even with computer-use difficulties. The students loved seeing drawings “magically” appear on our shared dot.
Our multi-school collaborative dot
With Jennifer Reed in Massachusetts, we accidentally deleted all of our work on our collaborative dot. The kids were in a panic, but it was a fantastic opportunity to do an impromptu lesson on the power of revision history in Google Drive. We were able to recover our work and learn an important trick. We even talked about how revision history is one way that work is never deleted, which can be a positive but also a negative if you have written something that you wished you hadn’t.
Mrs. Clarke’s class had a Skype connection, but we weren’t able to do a collaborative dot with our connecting class. Instead, we split the class in half at our 2 projection boards and they created a dot together as a class. They got just a bit competitive as they tried to cover up each other’s work, but even this was a great opportunity to talk about how to work with others on a doc without being disrespectful of the contributions.
Mrs. Clarke’s class competitive dot
Some classes that we connected with had already spent a great deal of time being creative, and they shared with us dots that they are going to physically mail to us. Jenny Lussier in Connecticut had colAR dots as well as Morse code greeting cards. We can’t wait to decode what they say! We also discovered with Jenny that there’s more than one version of The Dot floating around out there.
It has been fun to discover today that The Dot has different words depending on the version of the book you have! #dotday@peterhreynolds
Cathy Potter’s students in Maine read the book Ish to our students and shared their own illustrations for the book. We had a great conversation about the connections between both books.
Students and teachers alike love this day, but I do leave this day with a wondering. I’m thinking so much this year about global thinking and global collaboration. This day is filled with thousands of Skype and Google Hangout connections around the world. We connect. We read. We dream. We create. But then what? We leave one another until the next big event. I’m by no means being negative about Dot Day. I’m a huge advocate, but I do wonder about why we don’t build upon these connections we make. If we are really going to “make our mark” on the world, shouldn’t we be taking some actions together beyond connecting, reading, and creating? I would like to gently nudge us all to think about this. I’m just as guilty. I connect every year and then I move on, but I can’t help but carry this on my mind, reflect on it, and consider what more we might do beyond today. Think with me! Let’s keep our dots connected.
Expect the Miraculous 