Share the Buzz

I hope that you know what I'm talking about, because I wish that every teacher could hear the buzz on a regular basis.  It is why I go to work every day.  One of my favorite things about the collaborative projects that I have completed this year is listening to the buzz that my students make when they're really REALLY excited about their learning.  It's that quiet chatter of excitement mingled with laughter and awe as students collaborate and work on a project together.

This semester one of my goals has been to share my students' writing digitally.  During third quarter, students wrote research reports and published them on Storyjumper.  They were able to share their digital stories with parents during our research author celebration.

In addition to sharing our research with parents, we were able to share it with third graders digitally.  Sara Tracy and Angie Zulkoski had their students log into Storyjumper using my teacher account and make comments on my students' work using two stars and a wish.  Here are some of the comments that we got:

• Work on spelling.But I liked the bolded words keegan
• I liked your book those rattlesnakes and it was cool book by sajad
• I like that you put a lot of detils.But you need to put puncshuion.

For fourth quarter, my students published their Explanatory writing using Puppet EDU.  Once I had the links, I organized them in a symbaloo to make it easy to collaborate with others.  My students were able to share their work with many parents on our Campbell Technology night.  After viewing students' videos, parents and students left sticky notes with feedback on the published research.  The next day, my students also got to share their Puppet EDU videos live with a 4th grade class.

Today my students got to experience the other side of collaboration.  They got to be the audience.  I put students in groups of two and they logged onto Sara Tracy's third grade Storyjumper account.  Before I had students comment, I explained that I wanted them to include their name and a star.  We reviewed the sentence stems for giving a star for writing.  I wish you could have been in my classroom to hear the buzz as my students read the third grader's fractured fairytales together.  Since you weren't there, I have posted some of my student's comments below.

My new personal challenge is to provide meaningful activities to create that buzz in my classroom.  Have you heard the buzz lately?  In what ways have you used collaboration to enhance learning in your classroom?