Authentic Audience

Our CIO, Dan Maas, presented our students with an opportunity that was not to be missed. We were asked to consider allowing our students to comment on a post located on the NSBA blog. The post is titled, "Keyboard vs Pen?" This post is especially relavant to our 5th grade students, since they have unlimited access to keyboards as well as pens. Each student in our fifth grade classrooms uses a eee wireless netbook throughout their day. Their ideas were thoughtful, and we managed to get a few comments posted in a relatively short period of time.

Here's an example of one of the comments.


We were working on this activity for about the third day when we received an email from the NSBA regarding one of our student's comments. We've removed the name for safety purposes.

Dear (Student's Name),

Thank you so much for responding to our blog. We here at NSBA find your comments very interesting and enjoyed reading your response. It sounds like you enjoy using your laptop and it helps you with your school work, keep up the good work.

Please contact us anytime, we enjoy hearing from students around the country,

Crissy O'Donnell

NSBA

Comment:

Dear NSBA,

From my point of view I think the keyboards are better. For example a kindergarten student can use a EEE to get a head start on life because they will learn about the internet and how it works. Yes, I still know that the kindergarten students still have to write on paper but what I'm saying is they don't need to write every day they can write and have fun on the EEEs. High school and college students use laptops all day long. As a kid (I'm in 5th grade) I don't like to write and/or use a pen to do any thing with pen on paper. I was introduced to laptops back in 4th grade and I thought they were not all that - but look at me now I use them every day and I am now talking to the NSBA! Just think about how many people work and play on computers. Us kids have parents that work on computers every time they go to work.

For pen and pencil I think we the people should write sometimes but not everyday. I know it helps the mind and arm and so on but some people get hurt by using the pens and pencils by getting arm and hand cramps. I went home the other day and I asked my sister about the keyboard and pen. She chose pen I asked her the question I'm going to ask you. I asked her why do you think that people should use pens instead of keyboards? She still has not answered me yet. What do you think?

I would go for keyboards because they are faster than pens at everything and you can't have spell check on a pen and/or pencil. I should say which do you think? Pen or keyboards?

Sincerely,

(Student's Name)

5th Grade Student

We were fortunate to have a newspaper reporter in the room when we shared the email with the student who had written the comment. Here's the reporter interviewing the student.



We work very hard to ensure that our students have an authentic audience for their work; especially their writing. This opportunity presented itself and things could not have worked out any better.

However, this is not the first time that having a real, live, authentic audience has improved our students' writing. Last year, Mr. Maas asked us to comment on his own blog. Our students were definitely up to the challenge. The post was titled, "Writing with laptops." The comments of our students speak volumes about the value of an authentic audience.

We can't wait for the next chance to let our students shine for an authentic, global audience. We'd love to connect with you or your students. Come take a look at some of the other things we're working on at www.eastdragonden.blogspot.com

You can also find our students working at www.eastdragondentake2.pbworks.com

Hopefully, you can see that this idea of audience and purpose is important to us. In fact, we've submitted an ISTE proposal geared toward helping others work toward this goal.