My thoughts on #100daysoflearning as a means of motivating students!

Part of my inquiry goal this year is to engage students in writing by using ICT and blogging as a means of communication. In particular my target group is a small group of boys who are not enthusiastic about furthering their learning and have started to plateau with their writing because they no longer enjoy writing. Along with implementing lots of other initiatives in my writing programme, I am really encouraging #100daysoflearning with them. This gets them thinking about things that they are passionate about and can use as inspiration in their independent writing.  

#100daysoflearning has really started to take off on our class blog http://kidblog.org/Room4-NPS2014/

The children are encouraged to post something that they are passionate about and I am finding the posts really interesting to gain insight into my students interests and strengths.  It is amazing how many of them are choosing to post information about things that we seldom cover in school for example history, geography, zoology, art history etc.  

The next step for me as a teacher is to promote their #100daysoflearning posts to others so that they get more feedback and people reading and responding to their posts.  I would like to do this via a quadblogging initiative but I am still learning how to get started on this process.

I asked my students what their thoughts about #100daysoflearning were so far and two things became apparent.

1 - they love having the freedom and opportunity to post about things that they are personally interested in.  The ownership is on them and they are engaged in mini personal inquiries that promote thinking, questioning, exploring and problem solving.

2 - they all said that it was fun being a teacher and writing questions about the video or picture so that their friends could learn from what they had shared.  This is so powerful and for Year 4 and 5 children to have this depth of thought from a simple task which has very little teacher input is amazing.

Final thoughts for tonight from me... I am excited to see those children who do not usually engage in homework getting involved in this project.  It is having a peer pressure effect on the class and each week we are getting new children posting something with the hashtag #100daysoflearning.  This is extra to their syndicate homework but yet it is the first thing that many of them read on the blog.  

You know you are onto a good thing when you as a teacher are learning about King Charles the Second from a Year 5 student!