Efellow2009

What has my E-fellows project involved?
This project was primarily carried out in Term 2, 2009. The focus of it was: “To enhance the attitude towards reading of reluctant and/or at risk readers, by creating online blog ‘Reading Conversations’. This will explore a combination of text, photos and podcasts by students, in order to share their enjoyment of what they have read and promote this with others.”

View my presentation to the NZ Reading Association Conference - Queenstown - September 2009

The Action Plan/Timeline has looked like this:
· Children who had been part of the group at the end of the previous year (6), · Children identified by their class teacher as suitable for this project (3) · More students to be selected later in the term as abilities come to the fore within classrooms and from diagnostic testing. || Sessions on: · Support of ‘buddy’ – affirmations, supporting them, making them feel ‘good about themselves and comfortable with mentor. “If you had a buddy supporting you, how would you like to be treated?” · Questioning in regards to texts read. · Skills in uploading book information onto the blog – emphasise the working alongside the buddy and not doing it for them. ‘Coach’ to meet with Blogger to carry out Attitude Survey (modification of NEMP Reading Survey)
 * TERM 1 Week 1 || Bloggers (for our school blog - [|http://oamaruint.edublogs.org]) to be selected.
 * Weeks 2-6 || School blog ([|http://oamaruint.edublogs.org]) is maintained and updated by the students. Their brief is to keep our school community and beyond up to date with the happenings in our school. Photos taken, Bubbleshares created, reports written, audio files uploaded. ||
 * Week 7 || School reading blog started ([|http://oisreading.edublogs.org]). Bloggers continue with school blog, but also add to this one. Format in a book review type upload. (book name and author in heading, snippet written about the book that will lure people into finding out more about the book, photo of book cover and audio file sharing an extract from the book). This to continue from the remainder of the term. ||
 * Week 8 || E-fellows – 3 days in Christchurch to clarify, direct, and plan for clear implementation of the project in Term 2. ||
 * || Identify and confirm ‘Reading Bloggers’ for Term 2 project. ||
 * Week 9-10 || Focused teaching of Bloggers group in preparation for their mentoring role. Use Cool Schools Peer Mediator aspects where possible.

Letters home to Reading Bloggers re participation in project. || Hopefully comments from others in the school will come in and we can use these as a guide as to making refinements to what we are doing. ||
 * TERM 2 Weeks 1-2 || Buddies and mentors work together to get first posting on the blog for the Buddy.
 * Weeks 3-4 || ‘Reading mileage’ – how many reviews can we get up? Look at responses we are getting. ||
 * Week 5 || I am in Kuala Lumpar – does it happen here with another adult in the school? Mary? Mike? T/A? ||
 * Week 6 || Take stock of where we are at – how are we going? Do we have Reading conversations happening between our classrooms? What could we be doing better? ||
 * Week 7-9 || Continue with the Reading Bloggers sessions. ||
 * Week 10 || Reflect/Review as a group – Maybe survey monkey? Survey comment contributors too and others in the school who didn’t contribute.

Plan for Term 3 – how might this work across the school so that it can be more classroom based? Can the Bloggers and their Buddies be the leaders in the class so that anyone in the school can contribute to the blog reviews? ||
 * TERM 3 || Term 3 has seen a number of students added to the group (most in the 'buddy' role) and a few decide that they are better to be back in their classroom reading programme.

Buddies are now more independent, which is allowing mentors to have more time to publish reviews also. Our biggest issue now is that in the beginning we only needed one computer to every two students - now we need one computer per student. The reluctant readers are focused and now wanting to work independently to publish their book reviews. || AND BEYOND || I am wanting to move towards this being a class based programme. Currently students come from classrooms all around the school to join me in the computer suite twice a week. Ideally it would be great to have three or four mentors in each class who would be trained to support their classmates so that ALL students can have the opportunity to post a review. Not only will this involve more students in the reading conversations, but it will allow more students to be familiar with such things as podcasts and blogging. ||

For resources used in the project - please see below.
 (Page updated September 27 2009)

To view the reflections of the actions of my project visit my blog - [|My Little Space]