Helping Students Benefit More From KidSpace

We do want our projects and activities to be more than "post and show." I realize that time is an issue and in many cases we only have enough time (in school) for our students to create and post their work in KidSpace. Please take one class period and let your students browse around their project and respond to another participant in a city other than your own. Maybe those who have successful strategies for doing this can share with the rest of us?

Each tiny message posted to another participant is a small step toward peace on earth. Please help your students take those steps. We desperately need peace in our world.

Ellen Miyasato tells:

We started off with whole class responses (lots of discussion and dialog with the students). Then we'd have a couple of students input the responses to the KIDWAI mailing list. The list discussion brought out the similarities, the unique ideas that added value to the question. In the meantime, the individual students would work on their culminating idea which was more personalized that could be posted in KidSpace. ...we did much coordination among the teachers through the list also.

Ginger Long said:

My students and I spend a lot of time discussing the curriculum guided questions provided with both the Kidlink website and through the moderators’ emails. These help my students shape their ideas about their names, for example, and come to realize that not everyone else in the world uses the same ways to choose names. The responses from other Kids and classes from around the world helps them discover this. We share responses in class. We use world maps to find our Kidlink pals to learn geography. We only pick one or two activities to actually do for each 2 week session. We use our writing, social studies, and social skills times to work on this as this crosses so many subject areas.

I decided to post my initial responses on the webpage format (because the visual excites and gives more understanding for my kids unique learning needs than just written) and I am going to use the conferences for much of the rest of our responses (while adding art or other writing to responses as we go along).

My students are very excited about the project and cannot wait to meet more of you through emails and webpages. We plan to use the listserv to answer the questions about “What we want be when we are older”. We used the website to get us started this time, so that you can see who we are along with reading about “ Who-Am-I?”

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