Wonder Moodle

In January, I started a new position in our district that will last for the rest of the school year.  I am the Elementary Technology Coach for two of our elementary schools.   The were able to purchase some iPads and laptops for classroom use, so I will be helping teachers integrate them into their teaching.  I will return to my teaching position next year.

One of the projects I am helping with is called the Wonder Project. This is a grant based project that involves four of our 4th grade classes in two of our elementary building (two classes in each building).  The classes are reading the book Wonder by R. J. Palacio in their classes and then having discussions about it online.  We are using our district Moodle to house this project.

Here is a description of the book from the author's website linked above:



The publisher's description:

August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial deformity that prevented him from going to a mainstream school—until now. He's about to start 5th grade at Beecher Prep, and if you've ever been the new kid then you know how hard that can be. The thing is Auggie's just an ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, despite appearances?



The purpose of the project is to encourage students to look past appearances and to build a community of respect for others.  Since all of our elementary schools only go up to 4th grade, and every 5th grader will be attending the same school next year, the hope is that the students will have a better understanding of each other when they come together as 5th graders and be models for the other 5th grades on how to build respectful relationships with others.

We started off by getting the students enrolled into the Wonder Moodle.  We then spent time making avatars using Bitstrips and using the snipping tool to capture just the faces.  We asked the students to make their avatars look as much like themselves as possible.

We also talked about the purpose of an avatar why we use avatars instead of our own pictures.  Once we had the avatars saved to their h-drives, we upload them to Moodle.  The students were very excited to see everyone's avatars.  Here is an example (my avatar):

From there the teachers came up with some open ended discussion questions that I added into Moodle.  They also broke their classes in to four groups for discussions to make sure students were connecting with each other.  We used a Q & A forum so that students would have to respond to the teachers' question first before they could see other posts.  We also set it up so that they had to wait about 30 minutes before they could see posts from other students.  This helps us manage the time the students spend on the questions.  

When the students reply to the posts, they follow what I call the CCQ method.  I had learned about something similar to this when I was working on a Flat Classroom Project a few years ago, and have adapted it to my classroom.  I shared this with the teacher working on the Wonder Project and we use it to help the students make strong replies to each other that encourage further discussion.  Here is the sheet the use as a reference:

CCQ Stands for:

• Compliment or Comment (depending on what type of post they are responding to) - State what you like about the post or tell about something you found new or interesting.  
• Connect - Make a connection between the post and your own post, yourself, or the world around you.
• Question - Ask a clarifying or follow-up question that encourages discussion (can't be answered with just a Yes or No).  

The students really seem to be grabbing onto this concept and it bothers them when others don't follow the guidelines, because they want to continue the conversations.  It has been really encouraging to see them working to better themselves through appropriate replies.

So far I think the project is off to a great start.  I look forward to seeing how the students learn and grow throughout the rest of the project.