2009 Student Led Conferences

Student-led Conferences have been a staple of Manitoba Education for over a decade. It is a valuable experience for parents. Student-led conferences put the student in the drivers seat. They show their parents a portfolio of their work that shows how they have grown as a learner. I love student-led conferences. Students and parents interacting about learning. Think of these conferences as intensive dinner conversation answering the question, "What did you do in school today?"

Dinner Table
http://www.flickr.com/photos/niinac/2873854975/

Participation in Student-led conferences are higher than in traditional parent-teacher interviews. Students enjoy showing their learning to their parents. Parents enjoy seeing what their students have done. Many more parents are able to attend Student-led conferences because of the flexible timetable. We provide access to the school and the parent and child pick the 30 to 60 minute slots that they need. Often we will see up to 90% of the parents on these nights.

For the Grade 8 students they have created Electronic Portfolios to showcase their work and learning. This provides flexibility for parents. Those who cannot come into the school have access to the portfolio at home. Now these conferences are available to all students. Having access available to parents at home is important because many of the parents at our school work shift work or multiple jobs and freeing themselves up for up to three hours if they have more than one student is hard. Believe me I know with three children of my own.

The conferences are over and 24 of the 35 students attended from my home room. Overall we had over 110 students attend out of 145. The remaining students will receive a letter home explaining the student led process to parents. Students will participate at home and bring back confirmation to us that the conference took place.

Now to finish the year and prepare for next year. A job well done.

Digital Portfolios Version 1

At my school the grade 8's have digital portfolios. These portfolios are used to share with parents for student led conferences. Our conferences are next week. My students this year did what they always do. Create a 5 question quiz for their parents. They will teach their parents the math and then have them do the questions.

In the past this has all be done in powerpoint. Yeah that was cool for a while but.................after learning how to wiki I sent the students to create a space at wikispaces. They will create the quiz on one page and have the answers on another. Their parents will have to do the quiz and type it into the wiki.

My students wanted to embed some bubbleshare files into their wiki. Wikispaces was not allowing it to be done through thier embeded tool on the tool bar. I emailed them and they quickly told me a simple fix.

The first needs to changed to a

when you cut and paste the code into the embeded tool. the last /span> needs to be changed to /div>.

So far everything has been going great. The wiki has been a success and my old computer lab in the back of my room has been able to chug a lug it out. The best part of using wiki's is that I am not tied into finding computer time in the library lab. The students can do it from home and I am finding the quality of the top end beyond expectations.
At the end of the conference I will show the kids how to take their powerpoint presentation and post it to the web using slideshare or another tool found at studentblogwikitools.