Saturday 28 February 2009

Attacking words and guiding reading

This week I was lucky enough to have one of my guided reading lessons observed by Kathryn Birch an experienced teacher and a professional development mentor for teachers across New Zealand. Although initially nervous, her warm manner quickly put me at ease and her feedback was insightful and very helpful. I will be getting further PD from her in the next month. Some of my development points are to include more success criteria by discussing with my students what makes them better readers, really talking about the reading strategies and I believe to get them talking about them and recognising them in themselves. I also need to to focus on more student engagement and discussion, less teacher directed discussions!

After school she treated all the staff to a PD on word attack, based on her her own masters thesis; Chunk, Check and Cheer. It really is brilliantly simple to implement and a method I aim to teach my students which gives them a strategy to work out words they don't know. They first look for letter 'chunks' or patterns they already know to help say the word. Then they Check the sentence to see if the word makes sense. Lastly they give themselves a Cheer if it is right or 'cheer up' and try again. Thanks Kathryn for sharing your knowledge and experience.

Image by Môsieur J.

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Celebrating School Success

Our school has recently been featured on the Techlink website which showcases examples of teaching and learning in technology and provides support for teachers in their planning of classroom technology programmes.

Our awesome Technology teacher guided last a group of Year 7/8's through a technology programme designing wooden Jigsaw Puzzles. I particularly liked the fact that they designed them for younger students through consultation and taking into account their diverse cultural backgrounds and interests. Well done Vanita!

Image by by wokka

Sunday 22 February 2009

Good Morning in 250 Languages

I have a very multi-cultural class and we greet each other in a different language each day. While looking for a morning greeting in Hindi, I discovered a wonderful site that has "good morning" in 250 languages! It also has translations for: hello, good afternoon, good evening, thank you, please, yes, no, how are you, what is your name, my name is, I don't understand, do you speak English.

Pretty impressive and an excellent resource for all teachers to make that personal connection with your students. It does have some omissions and some errors but considering the task, I'm still impressed. It didn't have 'good morning' in New Zealand Māori (mōrena), although it did have it in Cook Island Māori, but you can help out by sending an email to the owner if you find any errors.

Saturday 21 February 2009

Copyright Black and Blues

New Zealand's 1984 Copyright Act amendment section 92A says "An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer". ISPs agree that this is ridiculously vague, yet they must implement it and shut down any websites that do not comply. Reported across the news, a blackout protest has been organsied Monday 23rd.

Stop and have a look at the work your children are doing in school and on the internet. I bet that most schools may as well pull the plug on their computers right now. Is this fair or even reasonable? Is it beneficial to our children and their learning?

Copyright has always been a sensitive issue especially for teachers who expected to provide resources to teach and develop children but not infringe any copyrights, yet still teach children to be responsible users of copyright materials in this digital age. Fair enough, I wouldn't want my work stolen either but what about "Fair Use"? What about 21st Century learning?

We need to be teaching children about rights and responsibilities, and promoting sensible solutions like Creative Commons. Yet we still need LOTS of leniency and learning space in schools to develop these values in our children without the whip of an authoritarian government over our heads. It seems our New Zealand government is more interested in restricting our 21st century learning by implementing 20th century thinking when it comes to copyright laws.

Perhaps we need to send some teachers to the Beehive to teach some Key Competencies like thinking about the consequences of their actions. I have to wonder if they have even read them. If we had to go inspect the computers in the homes and schools of the children of our NZ government officials, what would we find?

Image by jamesotron a creative commons image, New Zealand Internet blackout protest against insane copyright law.

Sunday 15 February 2009

Reflection on my first computer suite chaos

Last week I took my class of Year 6's for their first computer time 'slot' in our wonderful computer suite, which has enough computers so each student can work on their own computer even with 'broken' computers. I had decided to do the Multiple Intelligence (MI) test that Jamin of Education Investigation guided me towards. I wanted to start with this to focus my students on being learners at school and that each one of them have strengths in different areas which make them unique.

Feeling quite pleased with myself we had a discussion about MI's and then I proceeded to write the VERY VERY long URL on the whiteboard, while my students copied it into their address field. Here everything started to go VERY wrong. Being such a long URL [http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm] with the various underscores and backslashes it took about half an hour of fixing spelling and other errors before I had everyone on board. We had a fairly successful session of what time we had left and they were very excited to learn about their learning strengths.

At the end of the day we all reflected on the process. I admitted my error and explained how I would do it better next time by providing a shorter URL using Tiny URL which is now here: [http://tinyurl.com/32nx7v] What a difference!

My students after some discussion realised the importance of spelling when typing URLs and some also admitted they did not use the continuum correctly, choosing either one extreme or the other. Although I did discuss it, I feel I should have modelled this further.

So what next? I have decided to repeat the exercise this week incorporating our reflections and then compare their results of the previous week. I believe we will all see how we have learnt from the process.

Saturday 14 February 2009

Mac-ing about with Māori macrons

In New Zealand Māori language plays a large part of our curriculum being one of our official languages and part of our cultural identity as New Zealanders regardless of race. Māori however uses macrons to indicate long vowels which are essential for correct pronunciation. Up until today I have been typeing without them and just adding the macrons in later (when I remembered) with a pen. As a beginning teacher I was lucky enough to get my first Apple Mac and have discovered that Mac's are all set up for easy use of macrons. The University of Otago site provides an excellent and easy to follow guide to setting up the use of macrons on your computer. Click here to go to their site. This site also provides instructions for setting up macrons on a PC.

What I found interesting is that the language icon that appears on the top right hand of your screen is the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, the first flag of New Zealand adopted on 9 March 1834 and was a symbol of the independence declared by the Māori chiefs. This is from Wikipedia, but I have found the same reference from other sources.

Another useful Māori resource is the online Ngata Māori / English dictionary. This can be used by teachers and students to work on dictionary and Māori knowledge at the same time.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Great sharing with beginning teachers

Today was my first PRT day at the local Education Center where I met other beginning teachers (BT) as part of our guidance programme. We covered a variety of expected topics such as classroom management and teaching styles, etc. What I found most valuable however was the opportunity to discuss issues outside the school environment, that we all face. Sometimes we feel restricted about complaining to loudly or raising concerns within our schools. I believe this will become a valuable PLN and support system, already some of the guys have shared ideas to common concerns, and some great ideas.

Some of the ideas that really made an impression on me are:
1. Refer to your class treaty every day relateing it to positive things that happen, NOT just when behaviour or negative things happen.
2. Focus on teaching routines, transitions etc above the curriculum teaching (keep it simple) for the first 3 weeks or so. The reason is that without these in place you won't get much teaching done for the rest of the year.
3. Ensure that groups really understand their activity tasks, just because they seem busy does not mean they are clear on the task.
4. Use a rotational buddy system for peer discussions, lines and mat work.
5. Use clothes pegs on a line with students names on for computer time (15 min each) when a student is finished they move their peg to the bottom.

Friday 6 February 2009

Language Slivers: Dying to do dyeing

Do you know those moments when you are convinced that a word is spelt a particular way and only seeing it in a dictionary will convince you otherwise? I had one of those yesterday at our syndicate meeting. We were discussing fabrics and I was convinced that dying was that fabric colouring, after all one dyes cloth but one dies when your life ends. Of course it was one of those situations where I had considered the word so long I lost it's meaning. Thanks to my fellow BT teacher (thanks K) I finally snapped out of it.

During the process I also discovered the 'World Book Dictionary' on my mac laptop (still finding my way around it). Fantastic app! I am thinking about how to use it with my class.

Picasso in me

The day before school started the staff at my school did a PD course called Picasso where we were taught (a revisit and refresher for me) a variety of painting techniques in one abstract painting, and with considerable success as well. Being a art fan I thought I wouldn't be learning anything new, was I wrong. The best thing I learnt was that for the most impressive displays, use black paper. Colours are more vivid and errors or smudges are easily erased by rubbing some black acrylic over with your finger, it really it forgiving. I have already used this advice for our class treaty which looks amazing. We never used water except for the splatter effect which I could be a bad one to teach to 9 year olds :-)

The final product is a fantastic model to teach from and my class loved mine (that's why I love being a teacher). It also is a great way to inspire them. I will be using my painting to teach my class this term.

I also learnt how talented my colleagues are, and I found the process of painting alongside them a very bonding experience.