GBS holiday learning programme update

As of Saturday 11.51 pm, there are 53 students who have signed up for our holiday learning programme. I have to admit the holiday programme is taking up a lot of my mental space at the moment. There are so many aspects of the programme I am thinking about and worrying about.

How will I ensure the activities for the holiday learning programme is exciting for the students and caters for years 4-8? I have been thinking, since this is happening during the school holidays and I am mostly working from home while the students are working from home, I want to have whanau involvement as much as possible in the programme. It will give parents, caregivers and whanau opportunities to be active supporters for students participating. I have also been thinking of including my own whanau especially my daughters as I believe it will excite the students to see the little girls, a lot of students enquire about.

How can I ensure all blog posts are commented on and are allocated points? I have a spreadsheet I have created for my team and I which has all the names of the participants listed under their class. I have also shared the link for the feed with my team to check as blog posts are updated. However, there is still the WHAT IF worry. 

I have already encountered some challenges with the blogs for some of the students who have not been blogging for some time. Some blogs are showing that they need to be upgraded. I have sent a request through for support from the Awhina team to upgrade these blogs. 

I know for a lot of our students, they will be busy during their holidays but if we can engage them in some learning activities during the holidays through this programme, then our mission is accomplished. I am really hoping this is the start of exciting our students to utilise their blogs to share the excellent learning they do in their classes and also their unique and wonderful creativity. I am a strong advocate for promoting creativity in learning and through the blogs, our students can shine in their element.

Holiday learning programme - empowering students through leadership

Students who wanted to be blog commenters had to apply to me by submitting an application letter stating why they wanted to be blog commenters for the holiday learning programme. Out all the applicants who applied, I chose only four for the roles. 

Their role: 

Revise the Cybersmart challenge about making quality blog comments

Go to the blog posts posted by students and post a comment 

Give points to the blog points they commented on 

Meet with me regular during the holidays to discuss how the programme is progressing

Direct our team to a blog post they believe is worthy of golden points 

Be strictly confidential about the points system and who the winners are

The photo above was taken during our meeting today. I am so proud to see how proud they are of their roles and more importantly, how empowered they are as leaders through this opportunity. The questions they raised during our meeting indicated to me that they have been thinking about their role throughout the week.

Some questions asked by the blog commenters

How do we record which blog we have commented on?

How many points do we give the blog posts and what are the criteria for the points?

Can we also participate in the holiday learning programme if we are the blog commenters?

When will we announce the winners in Term 4?

I am looking forward to the collaboration between our team during the holiday learning programme. We discussed that each blog comment they make will earn them some money and we will calculate their earnings at the end. We will also have a shared lunch to celebrate our team at the end however, there is a lot of work to be done before we cross the celebrating at the end bridge.

Referring back to the title of this post, giving students different opportunities to challenge themselves, learn from and collaborate with their peers and teachers are just some of the work we as teachers do to build our akonga. 

Launching our Glenbrae School holiday learning programme

Today I launched a project I have been planning for a few weeks. The Glenbrae School Holiday Learning Programme.

The objective of this programme is:

• For students to maintain learning during the school holidays
• Encourage our students to blog and share the wonderful learning they do with others through their blogs
• I wanted to give my students the opportunity to apply for a holiday job (blogging fairies had to send me an application letter if they wanted to be a commenter)

Signing up

The students had to sign up using a google form.

How the programme will work

My Class blog will be the launching blog for the students to access the daily activities. Each morning at 9 am, the activities will be posted for the day. The activities are different for each day but there is always a high emphasis on being creative for the tasks. There are two choices for the create activities for each day. 

• Level 1 is a create activity where there is no sound or evidence of motion. For example - blogging slides, a google draw, text.
• Level 2 is a SISOMO blog post. SISOMO stands for sight, sound, motion. We can see them presenting or we can hear them talking about their work. Level 2 earns more points.
• We will also have GOLDEN points for extraordinary blog posts

Monitoring the programme

I am assigning myself as a subscriber to the blog of every student who signs up for the learning programme. Each time a student blogs, I will receive a notification and I will then update a spreadsheet I share with my blog commenters or blog fairies. The blog commenters will then go and view the blog and leave a comment. The blog commenter will also assign points for the blog post they commented on and alert the blogging team if there is an outstanding blog posts which is deserving of golden points. Prior to the commencement of the holiday programme, the blog commenters and I went through Manaiakalani Cybersmart site and reviewed how we can leave good quality blog comments.

End of programme

The programme will run from Monday - Friday in the two weeks of the school break. At the end of the last Friday, the blog commenters and I will have a meeting to finalise the winners.

This is the first time we are running this programme and I am hoping it will encourage our students to continue learning during the school holidays and to share the awesome creativity they are capable of in their learning. 

Here are the slides from the launch this morning.

Considerations during planning

1. How will I manage the blogging? How can I be alerted every time a student posts a blog post 

Solution - assign myself as a subscriber to each participant's blog. I also advised the students today in the launch that they can email me if they do not receive any comments in two days of posting blog posts. Vicki Archer also shared a link which has the blog feed for our school. I will also use this to check the students' blog posts. 

2. What activities will I have in this learning programme, considering the students are from Year 4-8.

Solution - have activities which cater for all year levels involved and not be curriculum level focussed. The objective of the programme is for students to blog and to Learn, Create and Share. 

3. How will I manage the blog commenters and the comments they do. 

Solution: have a shared spreadsheet with our team of blog commenters. I am to post the link to the blogs with posts and each commenter can assign themselves to a post they will comment on. The commenter will also post a link to their comment on the spreadsheet so I can follow up if a comment was good quality or not. (Also a way to calculate their pay/reward for their work).

Above are just some of the considerations, like I mentioned earlier in this post. This is the first time I am running a programme like this and therefore, a lot of learning will come through this experience.