Friday 26 August 2016

The Holiday Blogging Program




Rachel Williamson is a researcher with the Wolf Fisher research centre, she leads the summer learning journey to engage learners in continuing learning over the holiday period.

The Summer learning journey runs over two year. At this stage two pilots have been run, the summer and winter learning journey programs.

A key part of these programs was that learners received comments from Rachel as well as in the summer learning journey they also received comments from learners in the countries they were studying.  At the end of January there were over 600 post and comments. Learner who engaged in the program saw a much smaller drop in writing scores compared to the a match sample who did not take part.

The Winter learning journey saw more learners from more schools engaging over the holiday period. In this journey the total activity blog posts and comments of 2651.

Rachel shared her excitement and enjoyment in engaging with this program. Learners who join in were celebrated received certificates, badges on their blogs and the top bloggers from each school received prizes.

What next:
Rachel wants to get into every school and class to build relationships with the children.
Giving learners choose in the programs, they have shown that they enjoy rating thing and sharing their option.
Who to we engage more people in commenting and engaging with learners.
How can we make sure there is access and learners who don't have devices at home they can use the library.

Next summer holiday, Summer learning Journey 2.0 is coming. It will have a similar topic of travel and culture. Learners will again be connected with Rachel this time over 4 weeks. Rachel, to University students as well as past summer learning blogs will engage in commenting.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Clarelle, Thanks for sharing your thoughts from the Manaiakalani Hui (in this and other posts) :) I really enjoyed reading and exploring the links further. Its amazing to hear the number of blog posts that resulted from the Summer Holiday program and to see how many more learners jumped on board for the Winter program. Holiday drop off is such an issue for our learners and I certainly hope that even more jump on board this coming Summer so we have even less of a drop! Thanks again for sharing :)

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  2. Hi Karen, Thank you so much for your comment. I really enjoyed the day and learnt a lot. I still have one more post which needs some picture before I publish it. I agree it is great to see so many of our beautiful learners engaging in blogging and I hope this number continues to increase. Rachel is doing such amazing work to stop the summer drop.

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