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.