Highway 21 Inspiration: Blogging as a Classroom Literacy Experience & Digital Portfolios

Each summer, our district offers a Tech Conference (Highway 21) in which teachers, tech specialists & tech educators lead workshops and lessons teaching about how to effectively implement technology in the classroom.  It always provides a nice refresher of cool new tech tools and strategies, and this year was no exception.

Unquestionably, my favorite session was actually the first one I attended, led by Chris Moore, a 5th grade teacher, who maintains a class blog to post assignments and activities for his students, and also requires his students to create their own blog (using Blogger), through which they build a digital portfolio.  Chris modeled how he uses blogging, commenting and comment mediation as literacy experiences--while helping his students to grow into responsible Digital Citizens who have amazing 21st Century Skills.

It was Chris' workshop that really motivated me to dive back in and start planning my tech integration for the 2014-15 school year, including development of my own personal blogs--one for sharing my tech experiences (here) and the other for posting student assignments and modeling Digital Citizenship for my students (still a work in progress--not yet live).  I'm psyched to begin implementing blogging within my classroom!

In addition to Chris' workshop, the other that I most enjoyed was by Madame Sabre, a language teacher at Thornton High School who has started having her students build digital portfolios using Weebly.  I too have started doing this, and it was nice to see how her students have utilized Web 2.0 tools to really demonstrate their language proficiency in reading, writing, and speaking.  The tool I'm most curious about is ThingLink.  She has her students find or upload photos on ThingLink that relate to a specific time period.  She then had students record audio in French using SoundCloud to discuss important aspects of the photo that relate to the time period.  Her students can then create "hotspots" on their ThingLink photos that link to their audio recordings.
 This seemed like a tool that could be used in a plethora of ways in science too...now to see what we can do with the iPad app!