"One Book to Connect the World." That's the motto of the Global Read Aloud which kicks-off this week. The project, started by Wisconsin teacher Pernille Ripp, aims as connecting students around great literature.

Classrooms sign up to read one of five different books or author studies. This year's choices are: 

Author Study

• Peter H. Reynolds
  

Book Choices

• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo
  
• The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm
  
• One For the Murphy's by Lyndy Mullaly Hunt
  
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  

My class participated last year for the first time and read Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. We blogged our thoughts on Kidblog (our blog link) and connected with several 5th grade classes at Mars Centennial School in Pennsylvania to write and Skype. It was fabulous!

This year, we are reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo and again blogging on Kidblog (blog link). We have connected with several 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes through a blog roll and are sharing comments in a new way this year. The students are excited to visit blogs by schools in other states and countries and connect with the same reading they are doing within our classroom. We have our first Skype chat scheduled for next week and will start using a Mystery Skype format (trying to figure out where they are by asking yes/no questions). 

Many teachers are finding connections through Edmodo and are sharing artifacts of their students' thinking. One classroom even created a Google Map and invited other classes to pin their locations. The Global Read Aloud has just started, but it has already been a great example of global collaboration and learning.

I am planning to see The Giver this week and I'm excited. I loved Lois Lowry's ground-breaking novel and am curious how it will make the leap from page to screen.

A few years ago, I took a class on Children's Literature and Film because I was interested in how the two mediums connect. 

Before that course, I was of the opinion that the worth of a film based on a book was solely determined by how accurately it mirrored the book. If it deviated more than the slightest bit, changed characters or plot points, it was BAD. 

Ok, now some movies based on books do turn out badly (I still am so disappointed by The Lightning Thief) but I've changed my criteria for judging. Does the film honor the spirit of the book? Are the changes made necessary because film is a visual medium and elements need to be handled differently? It makes a difference. I have to admit, I loved the Harry Potter movies and they weren't always faithful to the text of the books. Plot points changed and, in my opinion, some of the best characters never even made it into the films (sorry Peeves).

Film is such a perfect medium for connecting students to books. It is multi-sensory and engaging for even the most reluctant readers. Visual literacy is a critical skill and film studies is a great way to incorporate it into the English/Language Arts curriculum. In my book to film unit, students read a middle grade book that has been made into a film. After some modeling by me, they take notes on the book and the movie and write an essay discussing how successful the adaption was in staying true to the book and being a great film. Since we read The Giver in our Battle of the Books program, this movie will definitely be going into my film library.

Lowry has been very involved in the making of The Giver and I think that is a good sign. There are things that will not be the same (characters are older, scenes left out), but will the movie capture the themes and spirit of the book?  I hope so!

February 5, 2014 is Digital Learning Day.  Sponsored by the Alliance for Excellent Education, Digital Learning Day is a celebration of how effective application of digital tools and resources can make a positive impact on student learning.

In thinking about how to celebrate the day in my classroom, I realized that true digital learning is less about one-off activities, but rather about changing the culture of how technology can be used to impact learning.  

So what did we do? Actually, it was a pretty typical day.  My students participated in the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program in November and wrote a novel of at least 4,000 words.  We put our stories to rest in December and last week, pulled them back out to start the work of revision.  

Last week, they did a full read-through of their work using a cool text-to-speech Chrome extension called Read and Write for Google.  Once installed, it drops a toolbar in Google Docs that allows students to have their work read to them with sentence level highlighting.  While listening, they marked places they thought lacked detail or needed work.

Our Digital Learning Day activity was to work in groups of three or four to share their stories and give feedback to each other.  Yes, we were using technology, but the work was not about the tools, it was about the thinking and collaboration.  In our classroom, student use of technology, such as Chromebooks and Google Apps, is merely a backdrop.  The tools have allowed a culture of critical thinking, creativity, and communication to flourish in new ways.

At one point, I noticed that a few students had large blocks of text highlighted yellow.  I pointed out that in commenting, they should only highlight the minimum text necessary to direct their partner to the section to which they are giving feedback.  One student responded, "No, one person didn't highlight the whole paragraph, that's just several comments from different people about the same paragraph."

Digital Learning Day is a great event and one that hopefully gives more students access to the power of digital tools for learning.  The challenge for us is to find ways to expand upon it so that technology integration becomes invisible and seamless.  When that happens, content and processes of learning can move to the forefront.  In that sense, I'm striving to make every day a "digital learning day."

The website for Computer Science Education Week lists that over 15 million students have spent at least an hour learning to code this past week.

My fifth grade students were part of that group and here are some reflections from them on what they thought coding meant, what they learned this week, and how it has changed their view of programming.

As mentioned in my previous post, I gave my students the opportunity to try three different online coding activities. They could use Khan Academy to complete a drawing tutorial, they could use Scratch to make a interactive holiday greeting card, or they could complete a coding puzzle and game using Tynker.

First, I think giving the students a choice was one of the best decisions I made. If kids found one platform confusing or they were having technical trouble, the freedom to move on to a different activity was built in. Having choice eliminated the complaining you sometimes hear with projects. Since the process was what I was interested in, not just the product, giving them the freedom to explore programming concepts however they wanted worked really well.  Below is a breakdown of what students chose. A few finished with one site and moved on to another or even tried to work a little in all three platforms.

Scratch Demonstrations

Here are two of my students demonstrating the Scratch projects they completed this week.

I had students write a reflection in Google Docs about what their experience has been during the Hour of Code.  The feelings they expressed were overwhelmingly positive and many shared that they thought programming was something hard, but now they feel it is easy and pretty fun to boot.

Reflections

December 9-13 is Computer Science Education Week.  An event that got my attention was the Hour of Code which encourages schools to allow students to spend an hour learning about computer programming or "coding."

My Language and Literacies curriculum is a blend of technology skills with Language Arts content, and this event fit perfectly into what I want my students to learn.  Last year, I introduced coding using Codecademy, and I will still do that unit, but this week was about dipping our toes into the water.  A few great new online coding platforms have emerged since last year and this was a perfect opportunity to let my students explore.

On the Hour of Code website, there are tons of great online activities already prepared for students.  My initial plan was to pick one, but after reading Vicki Davis's great post about her plans, I decided to give my students a choice.  I use Schoology as my class LMS and posted the following message to my students with the links to three different coding sites and information on how to log-in.  

The first thing we did on Monday was watch Code.org's Code Stars video.  The video really gave them a glimpse into what you can do with coding and why it is important.  They loved it and were ready to hear more after viewing.  

I then introduced the three sites from which they could chose during the week.  They were Khan Academy, Scratch, and Tynker.

Some students were familiar with Khan Academy's math tutorials, but many others did not know anything about the site.  I explained how Sal Khan began by creating math tutorials for his cousin and how that expanded to a website where people can learn dozens of subjects through self-paced video lessons.  The Khan Academy activity for the Hour of Code is a drawing lesson.  Khan Academy gives students finished programs and lets them explore how the different parts control the final product.  They can then "spin-off" a program and customize it or try to build their own from scratch.

Scratch offered a different type of programming experience.  With Scratch, students use visual programming blocks to create games, stories, drawings, and other interactive media.  The Hour of Code activity was to make an interactive holiday greeting card.  I showed students how to follow the steps in the "Tips" window to create the program using the videos and directions.  Very quickly, students were looking for ways to creatively add custom sprites, sounds, and backgrounds.  The majority of my students seemed to want to start with Scratch.

The last site I introduced was Tynker.  Tynker is a coding site that is based on Scratch.  That let me do a mini-explanation of "open-source" programs and how that can lead to innovations.  Tynker uses interactive media to walk students through coding challenges to solve puzzles or build games.  The site is very engaging and quite a few of my students decided to start with Tynker as their programming activity.

When thinking about how to assess what my students would learn this week, I decided to have them write.  At the end of our exploration, they will write a reflection in Google Docs and share it with me.  I think having them "think about their thinking" during this process is a great exercise in metacognition and gives them an opportunity to process the experiences in a deeper way than just showing me an end product.  When I told my students I was not going to grade their projects, but just wanted them to try to work through an activity to completion and then at the end of the week tell me what they tried, I saw them relax.  Coding didn't seem as hard.  It was like I had given them permission to play and take risks and not worry about making mistakes, which I had!

Some of the things I want to know from them at the end of the week are: 

• What did they try?
  
• What did they figure out or learn?
  
• What surprised them about coding?
  
• What was difficult and how did they handle that?
  
• What would they do differently?

I asked my students to take screenshots this week of things they did.  These will be shared with their reflections and should be a great artifact of their experiences.  I can post these in the classroom and say, "Look!  At the beginning of the week you didn't know what coding was, but look at these great programs you wrote!"  

Lastly, I saw this short video by Code.org about coding as a new literacy.  As part of my curriculum, I talk to students about how there are different types of literacies or knowledge that we build.  Reading and writing are traditional literacies, but we also talk about digital literacy, information literacy, and visual and media literacy during the year.  I agree that knowing a little bit of coding, or at least having a basic understanding of how it works, is important for students in the 21st century.   The Hour of Code is a great way to get that dialogue started.