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Idea Hive – 5 Tips for Leading a Community

by Clarence Fisher

Community management and community leadership is a growing, changing field. I first got into this kind of work when I led communities for PLP. At that time, it was almost a completely new concept. It was interesting and sometimes difficult to work in an entirely new sector as we were almost inventing frameworks as we went along.

Community management / leadership, combining kids with academic material, their passions, and their learning is like that. There are all kinds of online communities that kids take part in, but few of them are led by teachers or schools as hybrid spaces that combine their passions and the needs of curriculum. Now that our school year is finished, the first full year of the Idea Hive operating in its present form, there are a few lessons learned along the way that I think are worth sharing.

1.) The Idea Hive forums are partially closed. While our blogs are open to the world for commenting and interaction, the decision was made to keep our forums partially closed off. While these spaces can be read by anyone, they can only added to by the community of Idea Hive students. While I feel strongly that spaces should be kept as wide open as possible, the decision was made to keep these forums closed both for content and spam control reasons. Forums are easy to fill with spam, but we also wanted these forums to be places where kids were free to argue and post things that were close to their hearts. These are spaces where kids can post about their passions. We wanted them to feel safe and to know the people who were learning with them.

2.) As with leading any other community, leading a community of young learners is a process that involves nurturing their interests, building their passions, allowing them the freedom to they need to choose topics, write and grow. While much guidance in the early days provides the shape, structure and standards of the community, a good community leader also needs to know when to back off from topics and let students solve their own issues. This is a tricky one since discussions can sometimes become contentious, but you need to be willing to let students have these discussions. They certainly need to learn to disagree with each other within certain boundaries and doing so respectfully; but overall, it is OK if the members of your community have different opinions on issues (it can actually even help to push debate on certain things ahead!). Don’t be afraid to let the students in your community argue and disagree with each other. These are pretty essential online skills that they will need in more open communities.

3.) Track the stats of your community. The stats posted above are the real stats from the Idea Hive over this school year. While stats aren’t everything, we certainly were happy to see that students were engaged, posting new content and coming back to the site. As the school year ramped up and kids posted more content to the site, they saw more reason to return and keep posting; a virtuous cycle. We looked at what kind of content they were interested in and what drew them back to the site.

4.) As the year went by things changed on the site. We added the ability for kids to share in as many different ways as possible. They had blog and forum spaces. We made sure they could post photos and videos. We added achievements. We added mood icons. The idea was to find as many roads in to the site as possible for different kids. Some of them are readers and want text and want to share text. Others want photos, other video. Kids are motivated by many different things and need to communicate in many different ways. Having a community space like this lets them work in a variety of modalities – take advantage of it.

5.) Be a learner in your space. Although we find it hard to get out of our “teacher voice” sometimes, in an online community, we need to do that more. Share your passions and your goals. Write more. Share who you are with your community of students. This will give you and them an opportunity to get to know each other in new and different ways. While you still always need to be a leader and mentor and set an example of community standards and what is expected, this is also a place to connect with students who you may not have that strong of a connection with in the physical classroom. Quiet and shy or creative students sometimes flourish in online spaces, make use of these places.

Every community is different, just as every classroom is different. Being an online community leader / manager is a challenging and interesting role in your classroom, but one that lets you have another space to support the learning that happens in your classroom.

Idea Hive – the Tech Set Up

by Clarence Fisher

The technical set up behind the Idea Hive community has grown and changed into its present form over a few years. I have been blogging with students since 2005 and each year, something gets changed, tweaked, and hopefully improved.

When I first started, I worked with Blogmeister, David Warlick’s excellent service. It was comfortable for me at the time as I could edit and approve everything that my students were placing online. After this article from Cnet hit the internet and gained us a lot of publicity though, we started working with other classes from around the world; most notably, Jo McLeay’s class from Australia. One morning one of my students came to me quite upset and questioned me about why I hadn’t approved and published his post from the evening before. I told him that I hadn’t seen the post and questioned him about when he had written it. His reply: “about 10:30 last night.” He then proceeded to tell me that he wasn’t very pleased with me and that he had an audience who he needed to talk to. “You know,” he told me, “that time of the night here is morning in Australia. My friends were waiting to read that post.”

At this point I realized that I was standing in the way of my students and that I needed to move.

My next move in the educational blogging world was to James Farmer’s edublogs. Another well run service we stayed there for one school year before moving on to wordpress.com. From here, I finally took the jump and registered the ideahive.org domain and started looking after my own website. What is important for me always to remember is the length of time this took. There was (I think) 5 years where I worked with a model where myself and all of the students in my class had blogs hosted by other servers and services. It was a slow, gradual evolution as I learned more and worked towards having my own site.

All along, between all of these jumps, I had a similar set up. I would set up a central blog for me to write at, and then each of my students would have their own spaces. I would post a link on my blog to each of my student’s blogs and they could link to each other (or whatever other school appropriate sites they cared to link to). Between blogs and accounts at various other places such as Youtube, flickr, etc, we were small pieces scattered across the internet.

Taking all of this into account, I eventually felt the need to bring some of these pieces together into one space. This got me to the Idea Hive community as it presently stands. The teach set up behind this community in its present form is:

- I began by registering the ideahive.org website and installing wordpress on it. There are great instructions for doing this on the wordpress site. I’ve been asked before about hosting services. There are many out there and they are worth comparing and looking in to. I use Bluehost and have been very happy with them and their live online chat based tech support. It’s been great the few times I’ve used it.

- The new versions of wordpress have the ability to be cracked open and turned in to wordpress multiuser (or a wordpress network) with only a little bit of coding and some cut and pasting. The instructions to do this can be found here. By doing this, you can have all of the kids in your class have a blog of their own on your domain.

- The next step is to install buddypress. Buddypress is a wordpress plugin that lets you turn your site in to a social network. It gives you the ability to have groups and forums on your site. There are also other plugins that extend buddypress, giving it additional functionality. Here are all of the plugins that are currently running on our network:

Something like akismet for spam protection is essential. Installing and running an achievements plugin and program on the site has been interesting and a worthwhile experiment. Having a wiki available for groups if they need it is a valuable function.

I have also worked through the year to update and increase the number of themes that are available for the students to use on their own blogs. I look for themes that are free to use, that are simple to install and are simple for the students to use as well as affording them some level of customization if they want. I uploaded new ones when I find them and let the kids know. Currently there are 32 different themes available for the students to choose from.

All through the year we’ve worked to improve the site and make it valuable for the kids to use. We added a weather widget for each of our communities. There are links to each of the kids’ own sites. There is a display of the flickr photos from the account that the classrooms share. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a mymood plugin to see if the kids would use it or find it worthwhile. This is one of the greatest assets with wordpress being the software behind the site. There is a huge international community that is standing behind the software so there is a constant release of new pieces to the puzzle. They are easy to install and try out. If they don’t work or don’t meet your needs, they can simply be deleted.

There are things that have not positive about hosting your own full network:

- the response time on the site has sometimes been very slow. We have occasionally found at times that the site has been unreasonably slow to log in to and I can’t figure out why that is. I am sure a plugin or a piece of code is acting up somewhere, but I can’t track it down.

- running this type of site requires a pretty steady set of updates. The core pieces of wordpress and buddypress are being constantly worked on and improved. This means both for security and functionality reasons you need to keep the network updated. Updates sometimes have unexpected effects that need to be sorted out.

Overall, the technology behind the community is a constant work in motion. New ideas and functionality get added, while things no one is using get deleted. This is simply part of running a network like this. I believe that the time involved has been worthwhile and has allowed us to be responsive to the needs of the students in our classrooms.

Idea Hive – the Stats

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

My teaching partner Heather Durnin and I run a community for our two classrooms that we call the Idea Hive. This site is a WordPress Multiuser setup combined with Buddypress and additional plugins and functionality. This setup allows us to have a central blog for ourselves, blogs for the kids in our classes, and allows them to have discussion groups and forums along with other functionality that can come in to play when needed.

Overall, one of our main goals has been to build a community, a hybrid space where kids feel just as comfortable writing an academically focussed blog post as they do talking about the hottest Youtube videos or the latest NHL hockey games. Over the two years Heather and I have worked together our community has grown and changed. As we have watched our kids engage in these digital spaces, we have learned a lot about what draws them in, what helps them to write and be present for each other even though they live 2 700 kms apart.

We have approximately six weeks of school to go until we head into final exams. As our community in its present form has been an active space over this school year, I plan on looking back and reflecting on some of the things we’ve learned leading this community of learners.

Here are the visitors stats for the Idea Hive blog for this school year:

(Note that it is only May third as I write this so the stats for this month are just beginning to be collected.)

Whether you use “visits” or “hits” as your benchmark, we’ve had quite a successful year. It is easy to see that our students use the site. With approximately 60 students in the Idea Hive total, most of them are coming here to check in here regularly over the time they spend in our classrooms. What else I think is significant over the year looking at these stats is that the visits to the site have increased, month over month, over the school year. There was no loss of engagement or interest across the year.

Here are the stats on a daily basis for April, the month that has just been completed:

What I always find interesting about these day by day stats is that they show the weekends are almost as busy as the weekdays (weekends highlighted in blue).

While hit counts don’t necessarily equate with learning, they do show a significant level of engagement and that is an important point of what we are trying to do in our space.

Our students have blogs that are tied to this community. There are also 42 different groups, the overwhelming majority of which have been made by the students, that have been posted on the site. These groups range from photography to facebook to minecraft to movies and everything in between. While some of the groups are definitely more active and have more members than others, there are hundreds of posts in these spaces. Engagement, collaboration and community building are the overriding goals of including the functionality of groups in this community.

While the stats don’t tell the whole story of the community, I believe they do show that this type of space is valuable in a classroom and that students absolutely will use it when given the opportunity.

Achievements in the Hive

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

I’ve never been much for rewards in classrooms. When I taught younger grades I might occasionally drop a sticker on a completed assignment, but I’ve never had a reward box or a reward economy or anything of the type in my classroom. I’ve always thought that learning is its own reward and as long as the content is interesting and personalized to the individual student, the majority of them would find it that way as well.

Which is why I’m wary of a move that we’ve made in the Idea Hive. – adding achievements to our community. This year Heather and I have a wordpress multi user set up combined with buddypress. The reason for this is that we wanted the kids to have access to things like groups and forums and built in wikis all in a single space. Heather and I spent long hours and many emails talking over this move and finally were convinced that this was a move we needed to make. Which is why I was disappointed when the students in our class weren’t taking advantage of all of the pieces. They blogged. We blogged. They left comments for each other. We left comments. But the message boards and forums remained largely quiet at the beginning of the school year. We wanted the Idea Hive to be a space that was a hybrid place, where kids felt comfortable working on academic topcis as well as less formal topics such as posting about their favourite sports teams and their hobbies outside of school. To us, this is what part of being a community is – accepting our kids as whole people who have lives and interests outside of our classrooms. We also wanted them to be free to talk about these things in a safe space, supervised by adults since research shows that the majority of parents have no idea what their children are up to when they are online. We felt giving our students spaces of all kinds was important.

So to generate some activity in these boards we focused on them in class. We talked about them with our students. We gave them class time to post their ideas and come up with new topics – and we added a wordpress plugin to the site that added achievements.

The plugin was simple to use and added a new tab simply called achievements to our community set up. It allowed us to add both awards (something that has to be granted to people by a site administrator) and unlockable achievements (something that is granted to people automatically after completing a certain amount of activity). We started with unlockable achievements. Awards were granted to students who posted X number of comments (the conversation award for 5 comments, the comment guru for 10), others for posting regularly in the forums and still others for posting updates.

Since then we’ve moved ahead, but this time with adding awards that students can nominate others for. We’ve added badges for people who are community builders, another for peer mentors, good communicators, code geeks and problem solvers. Students need to nominate others for these things. We thought it was another good way to build community and would promote the students paying attention to what was happening in our learning community.

The results? So far, the results have been very favourable. We’ve seen an increased amount of activity in the Hive. More people are posting, our hit numbers are up and kids are taking part – even on the weekends. Over the weekend of December 3rd and 4th for example, over 1000 people visited the Idea Hive site. While there is no way to tell how many of these are students compared to outside visitors, the activity on the site all comes from students.

But all of this makes me nervous. I’ve read my Alfie Kohn. I’m well aware of the dangers of motivating people using rewards as Seth Godin says. But on the other hand, I’m also aware of initiatives such as the Mozilla Badges program which is working to try to recognize experiences and skills gained in online courses and communities. I believe this ties into initiatives such as the Google Ninja Training Centre Jeff Utecht has running at the International School of Bangkok that is helping students there to gain a set of great skills. Kids taking part in our community are learning real skills that will serve them well as they move through life. Of that, I’m completely convinced.

So I’m interested to see if the numbers and activity remains high, or if they taper off. My hope is that the badges program is a way to motivate people to begin the habit of posting and taking part in the community and that once this habit is established, the need for the reward or badge won’t matter. So far it has been an interesting and worthwhile experiment. Some of our reluctant readers and writers are taking part more. Our participation by males is up quite substantially.

So for right now, we’ll watch and see what happens. That’s what teaching and learning are about. Trying out new things and seeing what we can do as teachers to help kids be their best.

Rewarding Community Members

by Clarence Fisher 2 Comments

As someone who leads an (fairly quiet at the moment I will freely admit) educational community made up of students from two different classrooms, the idea of rewards is something that I’ve spent some time considering.

Kids are often rewarded for a variety of things in the classroom and I fully believe that most of those reward systems do more harm than good. They go a long ways to producing drones and not independent thinking, critical citizens. But that’s another whole post (or book).

But I do admit that I have spent some time looking at, and thinking about reward systems in online communities. As these spaces are often new for the students who take part in them, I have thought about different ways to encourage students to take part in them and to develop good online habits. I know the idea of gamification is a hot buzzword in a number of ed tech spaces right now, but I have yet to see a system that moves beyond being a simple reward system.

But once again, the FeverBee blog has come to my rescue. One of my favourite places for online community management knowledge and tips, a recent post there has me thinking along the lines of rewards again. More than outlining a “here’s how you do it” scheme, FeverBee has offered some questions that we need to think about:

1) Who do you reward? You have to segment your community members by activity, contributions, status, duration in the community and identify those whose behaviour you would most like to change.

2) Why do you reward them? Your most active members are often those you don’t need to reward. They’re already doing exactly what you want them to do. By offering a reward you can create expectations of rewards and upset others. You have to answer why you would reward this group. What would be different in the community if their behaviour changes?

3) How do you reward them? What are their motivations? Efficacy? Fame? Money? Power? Achievement? How do you translate these motivations into a reward you can offer?

4) How do you measure the effectiveness of that reward? When you issue the reward, how will you measure what level of influence it has on the individual’s behaviour? What are the benchmarks you’re following? You need to benchmark the group you’re rewarding with those outside of the scheme. You also need to track this over a period of time to see if the reward delivers changed behaviour or just a temporary change in behaviour.

The entire post is well worth a read and goes on to lead readers through a few different scenarios that are valuable to take some time to consider.

For online spaces that are focused on education and learning, we need to be very careful when we think about and create a reward system as our goals are much deeper than simply being about the number of posts produced, time spent online or comments left. While these might be indicators we want to consider and take into account, a student who occasionally leaves behind a spectacular post or spends their time greeting others and helping them along need to be considered extremely valuable members of a community.

Overall, the topics of motivation, encouragement and learning are deeply intertwined and need to be considered together.

Major BuddyPress Update

by Clarence Fisher

The tech behind the Idea Hive community that Heather Durnin and I manage for our students is a wordpress multi user set up with BuddyPress installed on top of it.

If you’re not familiar with it, BuddyPress is definitely worth your time to investigate. I moved over to it when Ning changed to a “for pay” model of use. Basically a social network in a box, Buddypress is a wordpress plugin that allows you to set up forums and groups fairly easily. As well, with other plugins, it isn’t difficult to add functionality like built in wikis and space for group document uploads.

The students that Heather and I have in our grade 8 classes (we both teach combined classes with grades 7 and 8 students in the same room) began their school blogging life last year at wordpress.com. To ensure that these students would have all of their content from last year, we decided to leave these students at this site. Our grade 7′s however, we decided to host directly out of the ideahive.org site. This way these students only need a single login and they can post in the forums and groups as well as easily move over to their personal blogging space to work in.

After a lengthy wait, BuddyPress has had a major upgrade to it’s entire system moving from version 1.0 to 1.5 in a single leap. From kernel code to its theme, hundreds of bugs have been looked after and the system is now ready for live use. I performed the upgrade on the Idea Hive site, and with one small exception, everything moved cleanly and easily over to the new version.

A few thoughts for people who have this same thing to do:

1.) Make sure when you upgrade, you shut off all of the plugins that have any contact with BuddyPress before you upgrade Buddypress itself. In my system for example, I have plugins to do with group formation, wikis for each group and group document uploads. I made sure to shut these plugins off before I updated Buddypress itself.

2.) Not all plugins are updated yet to meet the requirement of 1.5. Make sure to check the compatibility list before you do your upgrades. Activating a plugin that has not been updated might throw a wrench into your system.

3.) There is an entirely new BuddyPress administration section that you need to go through in order to make certain that settings on things like private messaging, forum creation and account deletion are placed where you want them to be for your community.

4.) The new Buddypress theme is one that people might actually want to work. Fully customizable with new spaces for widgets and menu, a background image and a custom header, be prepared to spend some time making it your own.

The entire network seems a little quicker and smoother since the upgrade. I have found in the past that Buddypress could be slow sometimes, but at first glance 1.5 seems a more nimble and I’m interested to see it under full steam.

Buddypress Courseware

by Clarence Fisher

As the summer continues, I find myself digging deeper and deeper into wordpress, wordpress multi user and buddypress. The options and opportunities continue to seem endless.

Adding buddypress onto wordpress is a simple install. If you have a wordpress blog, you can install buddypress as a plugin with only a few clicks – the same as any other plugin. With buddypress you can set up forums, groups and all sorts of other goodies. Social networking in a box. The install I am playing with this summer is here if you want to take a look. If you want in to play, just send me an email glassbeedatgmaildotcom and I can set you up a dummy account for the summer before school starts.

This morning I’ve found the buddypress courseware plug in. Once you have buddypress installed, you can install this plugin on top of it. This gives you a ful featured, absolutely free learning management system. Courses, discussions, assignments, tests, document uploads, and all the other goodies you’d expect, only with buddypress courseware you pay zero dollars. The designer of this plugin did it as part of the Google Summer of Code and is looking for advice, feedback and other ideas you might have for him.

Post from WPMU.org here, the actual plugin from the Wordrpess repository is here, handbook with all sorts of screenshots, installation and setup advice is here.

Oh, and of course, there is this video as well.

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware from Stas on Vimeo.

I hope systems like Blackboard are listening.

Building A Community – Again

by Clarence Fisher 2 Comments

Building a learning community is one of the most basic, most important things that teachers do each year. While we are institutions of learning, that learning doesn’t happen within a vacuum. The context of the community needs to be carefully built and structured. That happens in the classroom, but also happens online.

A vital component of my classroom is the digital footprint it has. The space that kids work within and the tools that we use are as important of a component of it as the physical classroom space. This is why I am always careful to think through how we are going to work online and what our needs are. I’m not overly interested in tools. I think our focus needs to be firmly placed on changing our pedagogy to meet the changing needs of our students and of society. But I believe that tools give our learning spaces structure and ability. What we build allows certain things to happen.

This year I am putting the concept of online community front and centre in what I do and I have built that in to the site I am putting together for next year. I have put together classroom blogs in a variety of places over the years: edublogs, classroom blogmeisters, and wordpress.com being a few. But for the past several years, I’ve hosted my own classroom blog at ideahive.org. A simple wordpress install (instructions here) has allowed me a lot of freedom about what this looks like. After an experiment last year, I have decided to take this several steps further for the next school year.

Teacher Blog

My main classroom blog will continue to be hosted at the Idea Hive site. When kids go to that site, they will see posts that Heather and I have written, pictures, videos, and other things that we want them to see. This will be our space to communicate with our community of learners.

Buddypress Groups and Forums

On top of this wordpress site I have installed buddypress, a worpdress plugin that lets you create a social network. Just as with wordpress, there is great documentation of all that buddypress is, does and how to set it up, all online, and all for free. I experimented with buddypress last year and found parts of it clunky and hard to work with, but the newer version is slick and easy to use. While it does take some playing with to get all of the settings where you want them, I’ve now got set up a full set of groups and forums for use in my classroom next year.

Just as a word of warning to teachers, when you install buddypress as a plugin on your wordpress blog, there are a number of options you are going to want to look at. There are settings for users to be able to make private groups, friend each other online and send private messages between users. These things are very easy to turn on and off, but you need to take the five minutes to set them up in ways that will make you comfortable. Here’s a screen shot of my settings:

Wikis and Documents

With buddypress there are other things that you can install to work alongside of it. One of those things is a wiki. While not a superpowered option, the wiki plugin allows you (or whoever has the power to do so) to make a group (ex. The Book Thief novel) and then create a wiki for the people in this group to use. You can make as many pages as you need for this group to use. A great addition.

A second thing I’ve installed is another plugin that will allow me to upload documents to each group. For example, if a group is studying a topic and they have an assignment that they need to complete, I can upload the assignment to their group so they can have access to it at home. As well, it can work the other way, allowing students to complete their work by turning it in by uploading it.

Student Blogs

I’ve always had students host their blogs elsewhere. I simply didn’t want to be bothered with the tech work of looking after them, thinking they were safer somewhere else. But thinking about putting community front and centre, I’m changing my thinking about this. While we still need to go elsewhere for things like photos (we keep a flickr site for example) or youtube for video, I’d like the Idea Hive site to grow into a one stop portal for my classes. This is why I am moving up to a wordpress multi user set up.

While still requiring a bit of coding and behind the scenes work, the newer versions of wordpress make this much easier than it used to be and of course being wordpress, the online instructions and documentation are easy to follow.

Overall, I’m excited by all of this. I’m looking forward to the challenge of running all of this and I’m excited for the students to have the opportunity to have access to all of these tools. They will change what we can do in our classroom. I’ve still got some work to do. I need to do the multi user programming, the blogs are not ready to be set up yet. I need a better theme and I might have to pay for a premium one so that we can showcase all of the content on the site. This one I’m not sure about and willing to listen anyone with advice.

Community. It’s where learning begins.

Credit for the picture at the top of this post goes to Hugh MacLeod: http://www.gapingvoid.com/stay%20ahead%20of%20the%20culture.jpg

The End of Classroom Blogging?

by Clarence Fisher 9 Comments

I’ve had blogs in my classroom with my students for six full years. When we first started, we could only find a few others around the world who were doing this same kind of work. We ended up in the New York Times, on CBCand on Cnet as well. I saw blogging as transformative, giving students a voice to the world. I was proud to proclaim that I would never again have a classroom without blogs as they changed the possibilities.

I spoke too soon.

Last year and this year I have seen a change in my students. Whereas blogging in the past had pulled in many students, engaging and motivating most of them, in the last two years, I have seen more of a drift from the platform of long blogging. It required more work as a teacher to motivate students to write and fewer students were writing simply for the joy of writing. It seemed like a classic case of diminishing returns.

Yet I was confused as students stayed motivated by using technology. Skype calls with others classes and with outside experts brought excitement and interest. Time spent in chatrooms, taking photos and producing videos all brought students together and motivated them to work for sometimes hours on end. This was not a case of the “flash” wearing off.

Taking the time to consider this deeply, I’ve reached the conclusion that the killer app in classroom blogging isn’t the platform. Kids aren’t motivated by blogging because they have a cool space to write. The killer app in blogging isn’t blogging after all – it’s connecting and communicating with others. It’s about the community that develops around your platform.

While I’ve always talked about networks and communities in the past, these connections were always visited as one benefit among many. Now, in my understanding of technology based pedagogy, the aspect of community has moved front and centre. Kids are motivated by technology for the connections it helps them to establish. Whether those connections are based on blogs, on flickr, youtube, a wiki or in a chatroom – the aspect of communicating with other real people around the globe is what motivates and inspires learners. The connections inspire accelerating returns and positive feedback loops. The connections gives students a window into other’s lives and spaces.

This is why I am thinking of making a change next year. For years I’ve worked within a standalone blogging community. I have had a mother blog for my classroom and the students have each had their own spaces. Next year, I am thinking of building around a structure that makes the community aspect front and centre. I am wondering about centring my classroom community around a buddypress site with wordpress multi user activated. A site like this would allow students spaces for long form blogging, as well as spaces for shorter work such as groups. It would also allow students to share other things such as photos and videos in a single place.

Time for another reconsideration of technology based pedagogy….

Hive Thinking

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

Our thinwalled classroom is moving onto another project. November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada. Since Canadian soldiers have been serving in Afghanistan, this day has taken on a much deeper meaning for many across the country. A country gaining a new generation of veterans has that effect.

Between Wingham and Snow Lake, we have decided to look at war from a variety of perspectives. We are working on a multiple step project.

1.) We are using the buddypress site that was set up this summer for our initial research on World War 2 . When Ning changed to a pay for use model, I thought it was time to move on. Doing some research I found buddypress which is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to set up a set of forums and groups. While students have only entered this space and posted a few things, they have quickly taken to it. Students have chosen the forums they are interested in and are moving in to research mode. Communities are developing in each forum as students from Snow Lake and Wingham get to know each other and their research interests in a new way.

2.) After this initial research piece is finished, we are going to begin reading The Book Thief. This is a fantastic book. If you haven’t read it, please do. Heather and I plan on doing this as a read aloud to our classes. One day she will read over Skype to both classes and I will moderate a backchannel that the kids from both classes will be operating inside. The next day Heather and I will switch roles. This book can be dark and heavy in some places so we wanted to ensure that the kids have lots of people to discuss it with.

3.) The information picked up will move back and forth from the buddypress site and skype, through backchannels and onto blogs where students will post their own ideas and understanding of events from this time period. The students will move from community research spaces and brainstorming spaces to those that are more personal.

Bringing our students together in these multiple spaces over time, doing different things from research to posting personal reflections is a way to get these students into a variety of tools and thinking in new and different directions.

This is where we’re off to next. See places for improvement? Let us know in the comments.

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