Mentorship the Possibilities

Victor getting some much-needed mentoring from Dr. Chris
Originally uploaded by anders r.
I was lucky enough to present a Numeracy workshop at our local Special Area Groups professional development day in Winnipeg today. It went well. We gave the audience some good foldables ways to change a piece of paper to maximize the amount of knowledge you can write on it. If you want more information about this you can skype me or leave a comment.

In part two of the workshop Darren became part of the audience as I pepper sprayed the audience with a whirlwind of 2.0. I gave them all I had about blogging and using wiki's. The take home notes can be found in this take home wiki. Sometimes hindsight might of been useful. I think I game too much information in a short period of time. Ah well give them more and maybe they will use some!

During lunch Darren and I were talking and the creative juices started to flow. Mentors. Last year I invited one of Darren's students to be a mentor to my kids who were blogging for the first time. He left great advice behind for them. Students need an audience. One way that mentors can be used is to have them leave comments behind on posts encouraging students to edit their posts and make them even better.

To this post

ummm RIGHT!!!!

I need to know how to do the things on the test i've already written it but i do not under stand and think i failed


Richard said...

Well if you need to know how then post an example of a question on the test and someone will show you how to do it by solving it for you.

He also pointed this out to another student who was having problems with a link

Here's a tip. Go to blogger and go to EDIT HTML in your post and change the link name cause it's really... really... long and you can make it to whatever you want. Just look for the code: a href=" " This is where you can change the name)/a Ok. Bye.

So how do we use this power of mentorship to help students this year. Simple. Ask for volunteers. I have student in my own classes that are "excellent" bloggers. They will form the base of my mentorship team.

Darren will ask his students who wants to be part of a mentorship team and they will be available to help student who need help blogging. But what will the responsibilities be for these students? One aspect of their role is to create screencasts that show how to do tasks in blogger and in a wiki. Inserting a picture, logging in for the first time etc. Another part will be leaving comments behind on blogs that ask for help. I would love to see more comments from visitors. This audience is why students try to do good work. The post they create is not only for them but for the world.

bomm web 2.0
Originally uploaded by Txemavk.

Darren and I will create a wiki where students can request help. Mentor volunteers will be available to give advice or give comments. What a great way to use these tools. Tools..... if new tools are invented we have the "super staff" now to try them out and rate them for ease of use and blogability.

I am looking forward to this project and will want to see how it progresses over the year. It is already December (almost) and I am just getting warmed up as the weather cools down. This is going to be fun.