Facilitating a Digital Publishing Program in my new Education Commons Role

Last year started out as an exciting year, where I had the opportunity to launch a Student Publishing Program in our Library.

Inspired by the SAMR and Technology Integration Matrix, and the TPACK models, I decided to design a Digital Publishing Program.

As I continue with this initiative in this new school year, I hope to inspire and motivate students to Publish the wonderful work that they are already doing in their classrooms. It will provide many new opportunities for, but not limited to, collaboration, differentiation, sharing, creating, and consolidation of learning. Work stations will be set up with iPads, netbooks, laptops, and other devices that students may have.

This program will also be linked with the Forest of Reading initiative through the OLA.  I will also be presenting this model at the BIT 2014 Conference in Niagara Falls in November. Don’t lose the forest for the trees!

This program will meet criteria from:

• Board Improvement Plans
• School Improvement Plans
• School Effectiveness Frameworks
• Essential Practices
• Digital Citizenship & BYOD policies and Procedures
• Curriculum Expectations
• Community, Culture & Caring
• FNMI knowledge and FNMI-friendly strategies can be infused

Students can come down to Publish their work!

This certainly is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the suggestions of what students will be able to do:

• • Publish short Stories on iBooks
  • Blog your reflections instead of journal writing OR re-blog your journal writing
  • Create a ‘Fakebook’ page for a character in a book you are reading
  • Publish poetry into an eBook
  • Classroom Newsletters & website updating
  • When a class finishes for example, art work, send a student down with all of the pieces, and we can take pictures of them all and put them into a dynamic presentation
  • ‘Explain Everything’ where students can explain what they are doing in math to teach another group of kids, or show to their parents.
  • Publish work anonymously to your website/blog
  • Take pictures of your work in class at various stages, then come back later with those pictures to put them into a slideshow presentation that demonstrates a continuum of learning
  • Record your findings of an experiment
  • Create oral or written ‘Book Reviews’ to share with others
  • Drama Presentations turned into iMovies and even use of Greenscreen
  • Create infographics, or other visual representations of data from your findings in math
  • Record music you have made
  • Discover new ways to demonstrate your knowledge from your readings to replace traditional  Book Reports

The benefits of Student Publishing can include:

• Safe ways to publish student work
• Motivation for students to get their work done knowing that they can work on it using technology
• Feelings of Pride and accomplishment for seeing a Published piece of work
• Something to share with parents
• Opportunities for students to teach other students
• Knowledge consolidation
• Creativity and Imagination
• Differentiation
• Collaboration and support from other people in the school
• Gives student work new purposes
• Ideas can be shared and transferred into different classrooms with students teaching other students about new tools they learn about
• Inspiring others to do new things with their work
• Inspiring new types of learning
• Feedback that Teachers can use for summative assessment and evaluation:
• Assessment OF learning
• Reinforces the learning process
• Ability to share work ‘anonymously’ with other classrooms and students. Peer feedback from others.
• Meeting different needs of students to provide motivation or enrichment to some, but not mandatory for those students who may be overwhelmed or be experiencing processing difficulties with the myriad of visuals and text, for example.

Please feel free to share some of your ideas based on what you have done or would love to do in your own classroom or Library! 

Deborah McCallum

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