Have you seen Zigazoo?

 

Have you seen the new app, Zigazoo? Zak Ringelstein, co-founder of Zigazoo describes it as a "Tik-Tok for kids."  I discovered this app early this summer. I discovered it right about the time I was getting disheartened with all of the tech tools that went against so much of what I know about children and their learning.  When I saw Zigazoo, I was so happy to see something that is so grounded in what we know about children and their learning.  This app is brilliant--it shows all that technology can be for kids. It invites playfulness, and creativity and joy.  You can read more here, here, and here. 

Zigazoo is a Video Sharing App that gives kids of all ages (mostly preschool and elementary although it seems fun for adults too!) a daily challenge.  The challenge could be anything from "What's the Weather?" to "Can you make a treasure map?" to "Can you make a hopscotch design?" to "Can you read to a stuffed animal?"  to "What math problems can you make with 5 things around home?" And kids respond with a video.  Every single day, a new question for kids to answer.

I love that the questions are interesting to so many ages. I also love how open-ended they are and how many different ways kids can respond. Kids can work on these alone or with families. They can spend 2 minutes or 200 minutes.  Everyone can approach things in a way that makes sense for them.  For families looking for fun things to do, this seems perfect. 

There are also huge education benefits. The topics cover pretty much everything from music to science to literacy. The app builds oral language skills as kids work to think through and explain.  It invites creativity and confidence. Kids in charge and sharing their own brilliance every single day.  And it highlights the power of technology. Zigazoo has created a safe online environment for kids to use technology to share learning and to learn from the ideas of others.  So many lessons about digital literacy and being a digital citizen in one fabulous app.

Zigazoo has grown incredibly since I discovered it.  They have projects organized in a few different ways and they are adding more exciting components. I see so many possibilities for families and classrooms and it is a piece of pure joy during this pandemic. It seems like the perfect invitation to use this time at home well and to create fun!

With remote learning (or not), I see huge possibilities for Zigazoo in the classroom.  Remember when I started the Solve It Your Way site? I have always believed that when we throw out a question for kids, they have the chance to show their brilliance in ways we could never imagine. I see Zigazoo as an app that does this--invites kids of all ages to show and celebrate their brilliance, to share their thinking and to find joy in learning. 

Zigazoo has also worked on safety and moderation and you can read more about this on their safety page.  

I had a chance to talk with Zak Ringelstein, Zigazoo's developer last week and I asked him a few questions. 

What is your hope for families and classrooms?

During such a challenging time, our first hope is that Zigazoo's projects and video creation tools simply make life a little less stressful by removing some of the planning burden. Our other hope is that families and classrooms can find joy in the learning process together by doing Zigazoo projects that engage them in the stuff that matters. Life is already stressful enough and we feel like students should be exploring and creating and dreaming and growing in their self-confidence with peers instead of doing meaningless busywork quietly over a video call. Zigazoo is built in the philosophy of project-based learning, where children have ownership over their own learning and aren't just regurgitating facts.

Which have been the fan favorites of daily challenge?

Students like hands-on activities in all subjects, but I have really enjoyed watching students fall in love with science! They've loved exploding ziplock bags with chemical reactions and making slime in their kitchen and doing "sink-or-float" challenges and making raisins dance in seltzer water. Of course, students also like to sing and dance and do yoga and find ways to express their emotions through social-emotional learning activities.

What features other than the Daily Challenge are on the app or coming soon?

Starting next week, teachers can create their own private communities where they can assign Zigazoo projects to students. In early September, we have invited museums, zoos, puppet acts, children's musicians, authors, and more to create their own channels on Zigazoo! Teachers will be able to use their media to jumpstart projects with their students.

We know that our students know how to use technology for entertainment. And, as I've said for years, I think it is our responsibility, as schools and families, to help our students see the power of digital tools for learning. Zigazoo is definitely a learning app that is also VERY entertaining. Zigazoo is a free app with so many possibilities for families and classrooms. Check it out!

Thoughts on Teaching and Learning: A Fun Break (with some thinking about writing...)

Over the past several weeks, I have found myself doing a lot of reflection trying to get this online teaching right.  I keep meaning to get my thoughts on paper but then get caught up in the day-to-day work of teaching in this pandemic era.  I know if I can catch my breath, there is a lot to learn and reflect on during this time. So, I decided that every day in May, I will share my thoughts on Teaching and Learning.  This is Day 14.

I am not often a binge watcher. It is a frustrating thing to my family, but I can't sit for 10 hours and watch 20 episodes of a Netflix series. However, I did find myself binge-watching The Holderness Family videos this week. You might remember them from a Christmas Pajama video a while ago. I remember watching it and thinking it was cute, but their quarantine videos have made me become a big fan. A huge fan.

This What Happens Now? video popped up in my Facebook feed and I was quite amused. Not enough to start binge watching but a few pleasant moments laughing at this.

Then (you know how these YouTube videos conveniently go right on to the next one...) I saw this one and boy I could relate.

But I couldn't help but notice the brilliance in the song rewriting.

Then I was hooked. This family is hysterical, and they are capturing so much of what the world is going through. So, I kept watching.

Holding Out for a Haircut

If Disney Songs Were About Quarantine

My writing teacher brain kicked in and I could not get over the brilliance of these videos.   Pure entertainment--but what must it have taken to create these? They are telling really important stories in this fun format. They are capturing lots of history in a clever way. The writing and word choice, the music, the visuals, the video special effects.  I couldn't help thinking about digital writing and what these videos could teach me about possibilities for our kids. Does this genre of writing have a name? How do all of the pieces of each video fit together? How do we make room for things like this in our writing classrooms?  I keep watching these over and over, thinking about the creation process.

These videos REALLY made my day a whole lot better when I discovered them and binge watched.  One of the best purposes for writing and creating I can think of. Granted, the Holderness Family brings professional knowledge, tools and access to these videos. I continue to be amazed at all that people are posting these days --from their homes--it really does open up the possibilities of what our students can do, in and out of school with creation and digital tools. The writing process, word choice, added visuals, etc. make these Holderness Family videos very complex pieces. They have reminded me that I have to continue to expand what I think writing looks like and think about what I can learn from all the videos, podcasts etc. that are helping us get through this pandemic/quarantine.

The Power of Choice During this Online/Pandemic Learning

**Mary Lee, Franki and Julie have been talking and thinking about choice during this time of Online/Pandemic Learning.  We decided to share our current thinking about choice and writing today and would love to hear from others on what is working when it comes to choice, writing and online learning. You can find Julie's post here.


From Franki
Writing Workshop is the heart of our classrooms and we believe student choice is so important for authenticity. Typically during the school year, we do 3-4 genre-based units of study and then between those, I do other units of study that cross genres. I want my readers to know there are so many ways to study and grow as a writer and although there are specifics for particular genres, there are also skills writers have that cross genres. Learning from Other Writers, Revising, Expanding Important Ideas in a Text, and Word Choice to Improve Writing are all units we've done across the year.

With this new online/pandemic teaching, it's been a challenge to stay grounded in what we believe about writing and writers.

I thought long and hard about what this time means for writers and I realized that this stay-at-home time is a perfect time for writers to do authentic work, to commit to a project with lots of time to work, to play around and to grow, to build a stronger identity as a writer.  So I decided that choice would be the most important thing over the next few weeks.

After talking with Julie Johnson on how she was providing her 3rd graders choice, I created this board for students.  Last week, students spent time thinking about the possibilities for their writing over the next several weeks and they committed to one of the ideas on this Choice Board.

Link to Writing Choice Board for 5th Graders

Having a writing workshop with very little live time together has been tricky so I built this board with this in mind. I knew I wanted students to have choice in genre, but I also knew that my focus for teaching as they were working on their writing would span genre. I knew I wanted them to find mentor texts and I knew revision would be important.  So I built some mentor texts into the slides so that as students explored options, they could see writers who they might learn from in each project.

This week, we will have small groups meeting to share and discuss their writing. And I am thinking about how to incorporate this brilliant idea from Clare Landrigan from Tuesday's blog.  My main goal is to support writers in lots of ways, to invite those writers who have lots of time to give to this, some options to dig  (working hours each day if they'd like) in in a way that isn't possible when school is in session.  I want them to know what that feels like they have a project they love and are committed to. I also want to give writers who don't have as much time or space for this the option to create and learn something--something they want to learn. It seems like an easy time during the year to do this as routines are set, students have goals as writers, they have learned from mentors all year and they have lots of writing ideas. 

I am already amazed at the ideas kids have shared and the work they are doing.  I am hoping this choice board meets the needs of all of my writers during this challenging time.

From Mary Lee

In our first full week of online learning, we had a very successful Flipgrid Science Symposium on Friday, where students shared their learning about food chains, food webs, energy pyramids, and the biome of their choice in a short video on Flipgrid. They loved having a project to work towards, and seeing how all of their work in reading, writing, and science could come together. In our "more of this/less of that" conversation on that first Friday, they definitely wanted more projects, and one student requested work with biographies, so I made a mental note to somehow work that in for our next project.

Last week and this week we have done some activities that are building towards an in-depth opinion piece. I wanted to weave together life science, biographies, and opinion writing. This is what I will present to the students next week. I hope I built in enough choice so that every student can find an entry point.

Link to Choose Your Own Adventure Opinion Writing

Students will be able to choose by person, by the person's area of science, or by the person's action -- what they're famous for. All of the links (except Julia Hill) go to our school's subscription (via Infohio) to WorldBook Student. 

Some of my students will be able to chose a topic and run with the research and the writing, but many will need scaffolding. We will brainstorm ways to make this an opinion piece. It will be very different than a "fuzzy socks are the best" opinion piece. They will need to make a claim about the importance of the person, the area of science, or the work. While they will start in WorldBook Student, they will need to do online searches and find information in unlikely places like BrainPOP.

I am struggling to get my students to keep their commitment to the small group session they signed up for, but in my dreams, those small groups will become writing support groups where we can discuss their progress and they can share their writing for peer feedback.

I envision this project lasting several weeks, and I have my fingers crossed that my students will be up for the stamina of this. Perhaps I'll have to drastically modify my expectations, or even toss the whole thing out as a spectacular failure. Time will tell, but I think it's worth a try!

Change

There's that one thing that you did that one year and it was magical, so you decided you would do that same thing every year in exactly the same way so you could replicate that magic, except you neglected to remember that each year is different and magic does not replicate and so you almost threw the whole thing out.

Yup. That was me and classroom blogging.

Instead of throwing it out, I changed my entire approach. In the magical year, we did a 15-minute free-write, then spent some time reading and commenting. That year (and only that year), it worked not to have rules and boundaries.

This year, we've been talking about our passions -- the things in life we care most about. My students had a week-long homework assignment to write a handwritten page about their passion(s) before they ever knew that that writing would/could be their introductory blog post. This year, the students' blogs have a theme, or topic, the way most blogs do in real life. They will be (mostly) exploring their topic/passion in a new way each time they write a blog post.

The biggest change for this year is in the settings. Every blog post and every comment must be approved by me before they go live. I've realized that in order for students to understand and learn to use good online etiquette, their practice needs to be closely monitored and controlled. Comments will be thoughtfully written complete sentences, and blog posts will be on topic and carefully edited.

So far, so good. It looks like perhaps the magic hadn't gone completely away, it was just hanging around waiting for me to be responsive and flexible about the way it would show its face.

Making Comics with Bitstrips

Near the end of the school year, I introduced my students to Bitstrips. "Introduced" means I showed them where to find all the tools, gave them the login code and got out of the way.

After spending a ton of time creating their avatars, they got down to the (funny) business of making comics. You can imagine that with an available background of a bathroom, there were plenty of cartoons that would appeal mostly to a 10 year-old sense of humor. What surprised me the most were the comics that captured a moment in our classroom

or a moment in their lives

or something completely random that shows they were playing with the tools and wound up making something that made some kind of sense!

Every year, I have students who read graphic novels and want to make their own in writing workshop. I've never had success supporting these students because of the limitations of students to draw their own stories, the limitations of the digital tools I had tried in the past, and the lack of an accessible mentor text for beginning graphic novelists.

I think this coming year might be the year of the student-created graphic novel. Instead of renewing the three subscriptions to magazines no students in my classroom have read for the past two years, I am going to pay for a subscription to Bitstrips (digital tool -- √).

And I'm going to share this book (mentor text -- √) with my writers as a graphic novel/comic strip mentor text:

G-Man: Learning to Fly

by Chris Giarrusso

Image Comics, 2012

The book starts with a longer story, but the ones I really want to share with/study with my students are the 1-2 page "Comic Bits" and the two-panel "Mean Brother/Idiot Bother" strips. Every budding Kazu Kibuishi has to start somewhere, right?

Digital Writing: The First Six Weeks of School

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a few days of the Ohio Innovative Learning Environments Conference.  Every time I attend this conference, I feel so so lucky to have this opportunity so close to home. It is such an amazing week of brilliant speakers and lots of learning.

During the first day of the conference, I had the opportunity to hear Will Richardson. I've read his work and learned from his blog, articles, videos, etc. for years. I was so excited to finally get the chance to hear him in person. I ended up going to every one of his sessions so I pretty much spent the full day listening to him.  He helped me connect some things about digital writing workshop.   I have been thinking for years about what it means to be a writer today. And I struggle with how to make things work for elementary students. I believe strongly that any digital writing experiences need to be embedded in the things I believe about writing workshop in general.

Will Richardson helped me think through the whole connected piece of digital writing. He said several things that stuck with me about the networking that is so much a part of the digital writing experience. He helped me see that so much of life as a digital writer is in the behaviors and stances we have as writers, the expectation for participation, for changing our thinking, for conversation.  I know this about myself as a writer but I have struggled with making this work for kids.

One of the struggles of elementary age students is the safety and policy issues around social networking and young children. After hearing Will Richardson speak, I revisited the NCTE definition of 21st Century Literacies as well as the framework. He referred to this document in all of his sessions and listening to his thoughts around the document helped me solidify my own thoughts:

I thought about what had been missing in my thinking about digital writing in the classroom and I realized it was these connected behaviors of writers because of the tools available.  I realized that just as in any writing workshop, living your life as a writer is key. Building in routines to support children as they grow as writers and learn behaviors of writers is key. I believe our children are already digital writers in their lives outside of school and I want to authentically give them opportunities to bring that digital writing life to school too.

So, I thought through the routines outside of the possible genre or format studies we will do. I asked myself to think about the ways in which we as a class would build our digital footprint, how we would think about purpose and audience, and which routines I could put into place during the first six weeks of school to make that happen. I came up with a four-part plan that would give kids opportunities for many kinds of writing.  Below is the visual of the four types of writing that will hopefully become routine in our classroom:

And below is my thinking about the role of each of the four components:  

4 Components of Digital Literacy in 4th Grade Classroom

Public Relations--District Website/Teacher Webpage

This site will be the “face” of the classroom.  It will house weekly to biweekly posts with general news. Links to newsletters, information, other sites that we are using as a class will be part of this District Page. This will be the formal piece that I, as the teacher, create on my own, just updating community on what is happening.

Individual Opportunities--Social Networking/Connected Learning in Protected Environment

District ELGG

ELGG will give the 4th graders the opportunity to write in a networked environment that is safe and secure.  We will utilize individual blogs as a way to communicate information. Blog focus will be on personal interests with a focus on writer’s craft and audience. We will also utilize the Social Bookmarking tools, as readers/researchers, and the “wire” as a way to understand the difference between quick messages and actual posts. Use of ELGG will help 4th graders learn what it is to be networked, how to make sure they are creating quality work, and to think about purpose and audience.

Collaborative Communication--Dublin Wikispaces (internal district users)

As a way to create collaboratively, we will use the Dublin Wikispaces to share our story as learners.  This wikispaces wlll be focused on classroom learning and will grow as the year goes on. It will serve as parent/family communication as well as a way to review and reflect on learning.  We will build the site in a shared way during the first few weeks of school and then will move forward to everyone in the classroom adding content about our learning.  Because this is an internal site, we will make the pages “members only” so that we can be honest about learning, include photos and student work.  

Global Audience--Shared Experience/Teacher-Only (Moderated) Account

To help the students understand the importance of a more global audience, a class blog will be created to share our classroom with the world.  I will create a Blogspot blog in my name and set it up to be moderated by me. As the only person able to publish, I will oversee the blog, moderate comments, etc.  As a class, we will be able to learn about what is okay to be “out in the world” by having this as an option for sharing.   I will also create a class account for a Google Reader, Google Doc (For survey creation, etc.), a Twitter account (for news to families), and a Skype account (for expert visits when needed).  As the teacher, I will be the sole moderator of all of these accounts.  These tools will allow us to connect to other classrooms, authors, blogs, etc. in a safe way.

By having this variety of tools, students will not only grow as readers and writers, but they will learn technology skills as well as important online safety behaviors. Audience, purpose, and safety will be part of many discussions as we learn to be readers and writers who connect with others.

**The first 4-6 weeks will be dedicated to learning to use these tools and type of writing required for each of these tools well. Much of the experience early in the year will be modeled and shared so that students understand the purpose and role of each tool.  

I am hopeful that these routines will help me to teach the qualities of good writing with traditional and digital tools.  Below are the slides I created to share with some teachers at a district  conference this week.  It was a good time for me to think through how I can think through the first six weeks of school in a way that builds behaviors that will carry us through the year.  You can see Will Richardson's quotes that stuck with me spread throughout the slides. I would love feedback or thoughts on the plan and I'd love to hear other people's routines for launching a year of digital writing.

Digital Writing: First 6 Weeks from Franki22