The "H" word

The "H" word - Homework or as we call it at my school, Home Learning has been the source of many moans and groans from parent, child and teacher alike over the years.

What should it look like?
What is it for?
How do you record it?
How do you monitor it?
How do you get kids to do it?

The past few months has seen our school developing and refining the concept of Home Learning with staff, parents and students. Here is a summary of some of the things that we have trialled and developed with our year 4-6 students.

When we talk about Home Learning we are trying to stick to these principles:
- Home Learning extends upon what has been started at school (researching, finishing off work, developing a passion/interest, visiting a tourist attraction, going to the library, talking to experts in families/local community)
- Home Learning is a chance to consolidate skills and facts in a variety of ways (eg: Mathletics, gaming apps on iPad, shopping, cooking etc)
- Home Learning should be planned by the student rather than imposed
- Home Learning needs to be manageable and accessible

How do you do this in a contemporary or 21st Century fashion?
Blog it of course!

As a team of educators, we have set up a home learning blog and linked it to the school website.

We have discovered the convenience of posting to blogs using an email address and have set one up for our home learning blog. The blog has been set up so that there are 3 staff members who are contributors - this way we can play around with the design of the blog as the need arises.

So what about the kids?
Every Monday and Thursday we use our year 4-6 meeting/planning time as a chance for students to email posts to the home learning blog listing their home learning for the next few days.
They also talk about their home learning with a partner and comment on each others previous posts to give each other feedback about home learning.

The advantages:
- Parents can visit the blog to view their child's posts
- Students can email their home learning posts to their parents at the same time they email to the blog
- As educators, Learning Advisors can read through the comments and posts to quickly ascertain who is managing their home learning and who is not
- The students are accountable to each other and can help each other to refine and be realistic about how much learning they can do at home

It will take some time for the children to get into the habit of posting and commenting on the Home Learning blog without being directed to do so. It can take a while for the posts to appear on the blog as well, and the children have learned how important it is to have an appropriate title for their post so that it is easy for others to comment on.

In the long term we hope to see parents starting to follow our blog and making comments when they can. As Learning Advisors we also need to take a few moments to comment on some posts to encourage the children to keep going with it. It would also be great to see photographs of Home Learning starting to appear.

Isn't it amazing what can be done with technology?
What will this evolve to next?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad