Monday, February 21, 2011

Learning Stories - in the beginning...

Last week I started talking about Learning Stories with the children in my home group/studio. The idea for using Learning Stories with our students came from discussions with staff from Discovery 1 school, NZ.

Here is the summary of what we discussed: I posted this in a school based blog as we were talking and the students told me what to type:


Today we had a chat about Learning Stories.

We thought about these questions:

What is a learning story?

What does it need?

How could we do it?

This is what we thought:

A learning story is a story about learning (like a recount).
It is similar to a journal.
It's a record of work that you are proud of.
It doesn't have to sound like a recount - it could be written like a narrative.
It's a description of a person's learning.

A learning story needs to have
Describe what you've learned about.
It needs to be a decent length.
A picture/example of the work
You can include a plan if it's a big model
It needs to tell us what skills you learned along the way
It needs to have good writing.
It needs to have information.
It may contain pictures and diagrams.
A comment from another person, confirming that they saw your work and what you learned.
It could be done with a friend or a group.

We are going to experiment with learning stories in the following ways:

Blogs
Written in a book
Movies (Video logs)
Comic strip (Comic life)
Use the puppet apps on our ipads
Digital (keynote/pages)
Podcasts
Drawing
Typed in Pages/keynote


We actually set up profiles on blogger today - tomorrow I'll help the children set appropriate privacy settings and they will start publishing online! My idea is that Learning Advisors can comment, focusing on naming outcomes covered/proven in their learning story and a suggestion about where to go to next. Parents will be able to read them and comment on them at their convenience from work and home.
Other Learning Advisors and students will be able to read everyone's learning stories and leave comments too.

Possibilities are endless and the children are motivated as they love the idea of publishing online to a live audience and understand why they need to edit and check their work before publishing. It will be interesting to see how they develop their stories and experiment with different ways of presenting them. I'm sure that in time they won't all choose to publish online but look for other ways to share their learning. I wonder what they'll come up with??

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