Chapter Chat: a reading adventure

Chapter Chat is a group of primary school classrooms who read the same chapters of an assigned book each week. The students get a list of questions to answer that are the main source of conversation in the Twitter group (this discussion format with prearranged questions is the same used with teacher twitter discussion groups). The students also get a range of tasks to choose from to show their comprehension in a creative way. I provided my students with a weekly template of the tasks and questions (you can see last years one here), this was a collaborative document and groups duplicated the question page and made it their own.

Organiser (Stephen Baker) started Chapter Chat to foster a love of books, and as a way to get his kids to connect with others while giving them an authentic audience. As Twitter is a social media platform, every Chapter Chat is an opportunity to discuss and guide students in the many aspects of Digital Citizenship. As well as learning to understand a platform like Twitter, it is an opportunity for my students to practise their quality commenting (positive, helpful and thoughtful) and writing skills. As the Twitter chat id displayed on the class whiteboard we have an ongoing discussion on the comments posted in relation to Digital Citizenship, quality commenting, and writing skills. 

What I enjoy about Chapter Chat as a teacher is that I and my students get to enjoy books at their level, and get an opportunity to discuss it with other students around NZ. While it also provides deeper thinking about the contents of the book with questions for an independent reading task.

So what do the students think? Before deciding on whether to continue Chapter Chat next year I surveyed my students. As you can see from the results to the left, the majority of my students love it and wish to continue. So we will, and hope to see you there too.

An example of my students comments on Chapter Chat. I used Storify to capture a selection of our class tweets.

My Classroom in 360

Earlier this year I posted a 360 photo of my classroom using Photosynth - the app is no longer available :-(.  However I like to record how my classroom looks at the end of the year because it reflects the learning and wonderful things my class has created over the year. It shows a bit of our personality.

I think my classroom is more vibrant this year with more student work up, mainly because our wonderful caretaker put up hanging wire around my class to help with the lack of wall space. I love it, the students love to see and show of their work on display, and parents enjoy being able to walk around and view the students art and learning. Now it's time to clear the walls for a fresh start next year.

Learning to Teach Online

I am the type of life-long learner who likes to manage their own learning pathway, and so I seek out courses where I can manage both my time and learning context. Coursea is one of my favourite online learning provider because they have a huge range of courses designed by top universities around the world.

This week I completed The Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) MOOC which aimed to develop an understanding of successful online teaching strategies. This multi award winning open educational resource developed by Dr Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson was easy to follow as well as being a good model on online teaching and course design

Hour of Code

It's that time of the year again when we get to inspire students and teachers alike by exploring the learning, problem solving and fun of the Hour of Code; of course the site is available all year round. The bank of code games themes has grown huge and there is something for every age, gender and interest. Of course my favourite is the Minecraft coding.