Quality Commenting Update.

In January I took part in a quality commenting meme started at the Langwitches blog.  I returned to school in February with renewed enthusiasm to teach and support my class to write quality comments.  I have not expected them at this early stage to write blog posts.  Rather I have put my efforts into teaching about quality commenting.  Many of the students have made a flying start - the experienced ones.  I still need to support those less experienced.

I prepared the  following slideshare, to use with my class. The slides I made contain comments from my students of last year.  I am not sure if they were horrified to see them, but I was!  

Commenting presentation

View more presentations from Miskaytea.

Here are a couple of comments left by students on the class blog.  I am delighted with the stepping up that the students have managed since our exploration about commenting.

Great video Miss T! What movie making tool did you use? I guess I’m very lucky getting the opportunity to go sailing!

I was really surprised how easy it was to sail. I’m also glad there was two to a boat because it was really hard sailing back to shore with just me to a boat. I also think I was lucky that I was with Jordan because he was really good at controlling the sail. I got better at steering as the day went on and by the end of the day we could easily avoid crashing against other boats. (If we didn’t want to ram into them)

I’m also a little disappointed because for most of the day there wasn’t much wind so we had to skull. (using the rudder/steering to propel us along slowly) But when the wind picked up, Jordan and I went speeding across the waves.

Hope we can do more of the same fun activities during the year, Antonio.

Hi Miss T,
I really enjoyed the the Yachting yesterday. It was fun, and wet. During the day, I had 2 partners, Cameron (before lunch) and Neo (after lunch). I ended up in 3 yachts though. 1,6, and 1. I really wanted to go in a red yacht, but they were all taken, so I used 2 white yachts instead.

Dean was really fun, and enthusiastic about yachting. He made sure that he told us all the safety precautions, gave us all a life jacket, thermal under layer, and a water proof top.

I really enjoyed the Yachting and I really want to do it again.
Daniel S

Hi Miss T,
Nice video, I really enjoyed the yachting as well. I was quite surprised about easy it was to get the yacht going. I held the sail while Monique steered. The hardest part of the day was getting in a line and swapping boats in the middle of the lagoon. The best part was the two races because Monique and I came first in one and second in the other.  During the boat swap the boat Monique got into floated away from the one I was in, so for the second half I was with Cameron.

The only negative of the whole day was almost suffocating in the terribly hot thermals underneath the bulky life jackets, and leaving to go back to school of course. 

The instructor , Dean was really nice, he gave me a ride on his boat and did spins and stuff. He made sure we were all completely safe at all times.

The yachting was a great experience and I can’t wait to get the display up!

Have you ever been on a yacht?

Teegan

All comments are far superior to anything written last year.  Thank you to the initiator of the meme and a special thank you to Kathleen Morris.

Plans for 2012

As I do every summer over the holidays I think about the coming year and what I want to aim towards.  As I found last year, as well as setting those goals, I need to be open to what just suddenly inspires me and follow that track as well, it can take me down surprising paths.

However for now I am thinking just about from February to April - our first term. Term two will be a sabbatical term, and who knows where I will want to track after that.  I find that writing and publishing my goals helps, it makes me more accountable.  I have said it, and now I want to live it out.

At this time of the year this picture shows  how my brain feels,  getting something written helps to put some shape on things, and the picture more complete!

School goals


1. Read children's books, during school term at least one a week - leading to at least 52 in the year.

2. Encourage some of my students to join Goodreads where they can discuss books among themselves and keep track of their reading.

3. Teach students how to write once a week a reading response in the form of a letter that will provide ongoing discussion between them and me about what they are noticing in their reading. (see" Guiding Readers and Writers", Fountas and Pinnell.) My goal is to respond to each, one from each student each week. This will be rotated - 5 students per night.

4. Sharpen up my skills with conferring with reading conferences first and then writing conferences. At present I am reading "Conferring: The Keystone of  Reader's Workshop" by Patrick Allen.  I have used his form to make my conference form.

5. Use Evernote for recording notes from reading conferences.  I am not sure at this stage whether I will revert to paper and pen, which for me is a lot faster, however I like the organisation that will result with Evernote.  I have already drawn up a page for it.  I was very pleased as once I had a master done I was easily able to put a copy in each student's notebook.

Screenshot from my ipad.

6. Give my more able Maths students more control over their own learning.  So I am going to trial using a Maths Daily Five type schedule with them but modified to suit us.  Hopefully they will be able to work at what they set as their goals and I will conference them individually once a week, and meet with them in smaller groups as needed.

 I am going to give five options that they will engage in:

1) Maths problem solving and writing an explanation of how they solved it.

2) Maths with a partner - I will have some options for them, I think our Figure it Out series will be a good  beginning.

3) Maths work by self - I will have a variety of text books that they can choose to use to practise whatever they believe they need within Number and Algebra for Term One.

4) Maths using technology - I will have some digital pathways from Digistore set up for them as a start. NZ Maths have it all well set out. I will set up a wiki where the students can easily access these learning objects. This slot could also involve making Showme type videos as tutorials for others.

  

5) Maths game with one or two others.

I have another group of students who will need a lot of hands on from me, and that is where I hope to spend the majority of my time.

7.  Track and meet the commitments made for global connections.  I have already made myself a page where I can see easily what projects we are involved in, who is running them, what we need to do when and a link to the web site.  Now I am not holding it all in my head.  I need to visit the plan at least twice a week to keep on track.

8. Improve the quality of commenting on blogs in my classroom.  See my previous post. 

9. Settle into a new classroom space. Adapt it as we need, explore the possibilities of it.  Just moving to it has been a big job. Still not settled in there yet.  However I am organising it more thoroughly than I ever have before.  Organisation of things etc is not my strength - it doesn't come naturally.

What are your goals at the moment?  Do you set goals or are you more of a let's see what happens person?  Personally I think there is merit in both ways.

Quality Commenting Audit Meme

I have been invited to participate in the Quality Posting and Commenting Meme, begun at the Langwitches blog.  Thank you Tracy for passing on the challenge, it has challenged me to stop and reflect on the commenting that my students engage in.  

Commenting is an important part of blogging.  At its best it carries the conversation on, adds ideas, enables others to think further about the topic, to agree or not agree with the writer of the post.  It also allows the person commenting to give support and encouragement to the writer.  Every writer likes feedback! 

As teachers we would like our students to engage in writing quality comments.  There are teachers out there that certainly model this and set high expectations.  Two such teachers are Linda Yollis and Kathleen Morris. Although they are two that come to my mind readily, there are other teachers endeavouring to do the same with great success. For example, just read the wonderful posts linked in my first paragraph.  These teachers challenge me by their professional approach and expectation of high standards from students.  They awaken in me the need to reflect on my own journey teaching commenting to students.

As a class we have talked about commenting and together we have set guidelines.  However as I reflect, I have not followed that up enough to ensure that quality commenting is taking place.  We haven't examined quality comments enough, nor examined our own comments and worked on developing them further.  Therefore it is very timely to examine the kinds of comments that are happening in my classroom and to plan for some intervention when we return to school in February 2012.

The two comments I examine below are really the pre-assessment.  What is happening with commenting in my class?  Let me examine that and see where I need to go.  At the end of the term I am going to commit to another teacher post on this blog  in April to  reflect again on where my class is with the making of quality comments.

                Commenting Guidelines

"It is better to make one quality comment than many poor comments"

Ø Be positive and respectful.

Ø Give details about what you agree with or like in the post.

Ø Write a comment that might make the reader of your comment think further, or connect to in some way.

Ø Share your feelings, opinions, ideas and questions in relation to the topic of the post.

Ø Make sure you write everything so that the person reading the comment will understand what you want to communicate.

Ø Use correct spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Ø Begin your comment with a greeting and end with a signature.

Ø Use formal language – think about your word choice, sentence fluency and paragraphing.

Ø Double check your comment before posting – reread it.

Ø Finally ask yourself how will the person feel when they receive your comment? 

Ø Publish it.

Ø Remember to check back so that you can respond if the person you left the comment to furthers the conversation.

Ø Copy your comment into your word document, My Commenting, so that later in the term you can reflect on your commenting.

Tip: Clicking on each comment image will enlarge it for easier reading.

On the very first day back in 2012 I commit to sharing with my students a powerpoint that I have begun with the four slides above, we will revisit our guidelines and refine them if necessary.  I am also thinking of setting some kind of challenge - for example make 15 -20 quality comments in Term 1.  (10 weeks)

Your turn.

I would now like to nominate two more teachers to take a turn at sharing in a meme how they see quality commenting.

J Salsich   on Twitter @jmsalsich

Stephanie     on Twitter@traintheteacher.  Stephanie I know you may not want to do this post straight away, but in your time.

11 Things to Know about Commenting and Students.

1.  I have come to know that we need to teach our students the skills needed for commenting.  I have been mainly guided in the last year or so by L Yollis and the work she does.  Last week while attending the webinar run by Tech Talk Tuesday, I realised just how precise we need to be.  If you weren't at it,
I advise you listen to the recording.  The enthusiasm of the teacher and the modelling by the teacher is really important.

2.  As a teacher encourage thoughtful commenting.  How many times have you, on your class blog received a comment?  "Your blog is cool, come and visit our blog."  It's a start but there is no real engagement.  So teach your students that they need to read the post and respond with a positive comment, perhaps a connection or a question, or added information or an opinion with reasons.

3.  Many of your students may see commenting as something similar to comments they send each other by
  texting!  So commenting needs to be taught!  So correct spelling, grammar and punctuation are important.

4.  Students love to receive comments.  Many of mine watch the count and celebrate with a post when they get to 75 or 100.

5.  As a teacher value the adults who leave comments on your class blog or your students' blog.  Email them and thank them.

6.  Especially value other teachers from other classrooms who leave comments on your class blog or your
student blogs.  Students feel very special when they get such comments.  Once I left a comment on a student blog of a student in the USA.  Later an aunt of his ( a teacher) emailed me to thank me, he couldn't believe that something he had written was read and responded to, from so far away.

7.  As well as students loving getting comments from other teachers, as their teacher it thrills me when I see a comment from another teacher coming in for them.  I feel like someone else is helping to develop them. It
seems to be like we are all fostering their writing and web 2.0 skills.  I also love comments that tell a student their post is being used by a teacher in some way. 

8.  Teach students that pingbacks are something to savour as well.  It means someone has valued their post and has linked to them.

9.   Teach students about spam comments.  Examine some together so that they know just to delete them.

10.  Be aware there are various kinds of comments.  Not all comments call for a detailed comment.  Perhaps
 it's just a short one.  For example today on our class blog we got a query asking were we okay, because
of the recent earthquake in Christchurch.  Or it might be a quick comment of some other kind.  There is a time and a place for a variety of comments.

11.  Yes one more, it takes time!  Not all comments are going to be what you quite want, but what counts I think is the evidence that they are improving at commenting.