Praise in the 21st century

Problem:
We teach in a time where praise of our students is acknowledge as uber important, but I found myself reflecting recently on the types of praise I use in the classroom and whether I was effective in this element.

2 scenarios were front of mind:

1. I had been commenting on blog posts of my class.
2. Had decided not to send a "postcard from your teacher" praising a boy for good start to the 1st 2 weeks of term because he'd ruined with some terrible behaviour on 1 day.

So, my thoughts:
What praise is the most effective? What praise do kids like receiving? 

I was impressed by Kauri's question, were we talking about 10 000 page views or comments, I inferred that he valued people commenting on blog posts.
Sara's excitement at being "favourited" on Twitter.
Had I done the right thing not sending the postcard?
I wonder how much praise I give in the classroom? How much is noticed by the students?


What forms of praise do I use?
Many of the traditional forms (located in the poster), but ones that are specific to our school include sending a "Postcard from your teacher" praising students for the positive behaviours for learning and writing children into the "Honours Book" for assembly. I also use the Class Dojo programme in my room, students are given points for positive behaviours only and the winner for 2 weeks gets a 15 minute free choice to be used in class.

The class loves ICT tools and they love the connection with other students/teachers, like me they feel good when they get page views, comments, retweets and favourites etc 

Action
I want to identify how much praise I give out in a day.
What praise do the students like the most, clearly it will be different for each child.

I will share results here. I'd love to know what praise your children find the most effective or ideas you're happy to share. 

Quick review: 5 Apps

Pic Collage
Designed for creating montages and posters this can be used in a number of ways in the classroom. My class love using them as quick writes to demonstrate their learning after reading books, but we've used them to produce Wordwalls, drama explanations, funky text only posters while I loved the way some students made on-the-go posters while on field trips. Some cool features is the ability to search for images on the Internet, use photos on the tablets own library, use stickers (free & paid sets). Available for free on both Android & iPad.

PuppetPals
Choose your characters, backgrounds, can throw in a few props. Record your audio, playback and share. What's not to love. Haven't used this a lot in my class but as a practice run used it with the junior school age nephews in the T2 holidays, together we had heaps of fun creating a zombie attack puppet show. A good tool for publishing all forms of writing but could also be used to break the monotony of teacher instructions.

Tellagami
An app where you can design your own character, background and then either your own recorded voice or typed text to produce a Gami. Kids love the easy manipulation to build their character but its the ability to make and share the audio aspect that is the real goldmine. Another tool that can be used for writing, reading as well as classroom management.

Explain Everything
A slide based tool for presenting information through your tablet. Allows for recording of audio while you create and you can also insert movies (yours or off the Internet). A little bit of effort is required to figure out all of the functions when first using but is worth persevering with as the finished outputs will show you.

Little Story Maker
I'm writing this without having used it in class myself, but had a play over the holidays based on many recommendations from other teachers. As the name suggests its for creating stories and allows you to illustrate, write, record audio and publish your own story. I am looking forward to using this in my class and believe many other teachers will be pleased with the results they get using this in their class.

*Its worth noting that if you are considering blogging in the classroom that neither Tellagami or Little Story Maker have an embed function as part of the app.

Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore

The final 2 weeks of term provided some great highlights. I had bought this book (pictured) at the end of last year and put it away for a rainy day but an idea shared through twitter got it off the shelf earlier - it has an App...

Last Friday, I read this to my class and was amazed with the level of engagement. We had predictions coming left, right & centre and they were commenting about all sorts of language & plot features. The book also contains some beautiful artwork, ranging from full colour to black & white and everything in between as the mood of the main character changes. The class had picked up on this and were getting very excited as they progressed through the book.

Once we'd finished they were uber-excited about doing some work to demonstrate their learning and this resulted in the creation of several posters including posters, a PicCollage, many pieces of writing. It was awesome to see the kids so engaged with a book but the best was yet to come...

On the last day of term I planned to show the class the Imag-N-O-tron App, we knew that it was an interactive version of the book but weren't prepared for the awesomeness that occurred. First, we visited the book's website where we saw a sample of the short movie the book inspired and then read the real book again using an iPad/projector combo to show the pages on the smart board. The App features Augmented Reality images that blew the classes mind, I'm not going to describe these images here except to say the class applauded the app at the end of the book! 

Next step is to find more books & apps of this quality for the class and I recommend that you get the app & book for yours

Shhh don't tell Mr Walker...

My mentor teacher came and taught a science lesson yesterday for me to observe, the first part was run of the mill discussion, questioning, sharing, hands on learning with rocks. I sat there recording how some of my students were going, his management of them and all the usual BT type stuff.

In the 2nd part of the lesson, there was a rock identifying challenge and I pulled out the iPad to record what the students were doing. The challenge was team based and my class are a competitive lot but I soon found just how competitive!

MT got the classes attention and told them he thought I should take part, I could hardly say no hence the teacher quickly became the student. Room 1 automatically became more competitive as they strived to beat my score, prevent me from seeing all the rocks, attempted to see my answers on the iPad and generally outdo me. Like any red-blooded male I wasn't going to back down...

I loved how they were telling each other off for showing me when all 12 rocks were, "Shhhh! Don't tell Mr Walker" was the catch cry for the 30 odd minutes we were doing the challenge.

When it came time to share our responses, they were really interested in how I scored, particularly when their team work had resulted in a correct answer. I didn't get them all right, but that was one of the reasons behind having my MT deliver this lesson. I earned some respect along the way and got a kick from their interest in my results.

Created on PicCollage

Learning with your students can be so rewarding, I am able to orchestrate this with ICT, Te Reo & Visual Art easily but find this can be difficult in other curriculum areas. If you have any suggestions...