Maria Knee — 2008 Kay L Bitter Award
Maria Knee teaches kindergarten at Deerfield Community School in Deerfield, New Hampshire. Maria’s kindergarten students, the KinderKids, learn in a classroom where use of technology is the norm. The KinderKids’ blog (http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=51141) and individual student blogs provide authentic purposes for their writing, reading and math. Writing for the blog, as individuals or as a class, is highly motivational for the children. Their work is viewed by a wide audience of parents, families, community, and the world who read and respond to student work and classroom projects. This is an interactive, 24/7, 21st–century bulletin board where class work is shared locally and globally.
Maria’s students are also involved withonline, collaborative, andlocal/global projects. The projects integrate critical literacy and math concepts that allow students to use the collaborative communication skills they will need in the future. These projects involve contributing content to wikis, VoiceThread slideshows, global card exchanges as well asreading/commenting on other classroom blogs.
The learning environment that Maria Knee creates for her students emulates the expectations of the employers in our country when they speak of the 21st-century skills they want to see in future workforce. Maria and her students are not only living in the digital age, they are creating it.
Maria Knee's kindergarten blog is an integral part of the classroom. Each day the class meets together to check the blog. They check the weather data. They look to find new dots on theClustr Map to indicate new visitors. They read new comments to recent posts, compare the number of visitors to each post. Shared reading and shared writing, techniques used with emergent readers and writers, are ways the class works together on the blog. They brainstorm ideas for new entries and then compose the entry while viewing it on a projected image. When readingnew comments or other classroom blogs, the students support each other as they read along with their teacher.During other parts of the school day, the students work directly on the 2 classroom computers or with the 6 Alphasmarts to write entries for the own blog. They create pictures withKidPix or Pixie to illustrate their writing or use photographs of original work. Children also use a digital camera to photograph work they want to share on their blog. When necessary, Maria brings the class to the school computer lab and works with the students. There, they have 1 to 1 computer access and can work on a project together. The lab time is often used to visit and read other classroom blogs, comment on classmates work, and create content for their own blogs.
Maria shares her knowledge about the power that technology has in helping children grow as learners with colleagues and other educators locally and globally. Maria energetically shares her own experiences and protocols she developed, with colleagues so they may develop their own plans for classroom work. Maria presents at regional workshops and co-hosts two webcasts,It's Elementary andMaking Connections (broadcast on edtechtalk.com) to instruct teachers about classroom blogging and collaborative online tools.
Maria is not a young, new teacher. She has taught for many years and has discovered that Web 2.0 tools are enriching her teaching, providing her with a new avenue for professional growth. Maria is helping her kindergarten students to build a complex set of literacies. She brings theNETS for Students 2007 to life in her classroom and addresses 21st century literacy as recently adopted by theNational Council of Teachers of English. All of this makes Maria the ideal recipient of Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PK–2 Education.
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