Saturday 26 September 2009

Word Cloud Reflections

Wordle is a well know and site for creating word or tag clouds from text or a websites URL. I like many people use this as a reflection tool as one of it's great qualities is that the more a word is used, the bigger that word appears in the word cloud. That allows a great visual means of reflecting on your writing. My students have just started using this for their blogs but are still developing their reflections of the visuals.

As you can imagine there are many different ways this can be used in literacy. I have used it to help students reflect on their own writing. It is a great way to show them how often they use AND! It is also a nice way to introduce a text, like a short story or poetry. Mark Warner has provided provided many Ideas to Inspire the use of Wordle in the classroom, I aim to expand the ways I use Wordle thanks to this awesome resource.

What I like about Wordle is that you do not need to sign up and it has a very easy control interface that most students manage very easily. The things I don't like are the main page can have inappropriate word clouds for children, although I have very seldom seen them and I link directly to the Wordle Create page which avoids that area. The other difficulty is that it does not provide code for embedding the final word cloud, but it is a good skill to teach students to take a screenshot of the image and upload it to their blogs.

Tagul shown below is another more sophisticated word cloud program that allows you to maniplulate the clouds shape, fonts colours, and adds a interactive rotational and zoom factor to the cloud. It also provides the code for embedding the word cloud into your blog. Although I like the effect it creates, it requires that you sign up with an email and the controls are a lot more complicated.











So what do these word clouds say about my blog?
I am please with my word clouds, as I read them as saying I value my students learning with a strong focus on reflection and inquiry processes. It also shows I value assessment and digital mediums for literacy teaching and learning.

Friday 25 September 2009

NetGuide Challenge 2009

This year was the first time my school has entered the ninth annual TVNZ6 NetGuide Schools Multimedia Challenge, which I promoted and guided students during lunch times.

Out of the many initial students interested in spending one of their lunch times in the computer suite, only two teams perservered and made it to the end with a final product. Interestingly both were primarily driven by a single student.

Three Year 4 girls created a website on the 3R's, Reduce, Re-use and Recycle. I got them using Webnode for as a free server, but on reflection Google Sites may have been an easier choice as they kept getting mixed up with the controls and editing text was a challenge. There website is called Recyclereducereuse.

The second team to complete an entry were some intermediate students who created a video to investigate the career of teaching. They had been studying careers and found teaching of personal interest, I wonder how they felt after this video? I was really impressed with the range of ICT skills these students learnt on their own during this process. So much so that I am going to get the student who did most of the editing to give me a lesson on iMovie next term. Below is their video, cut from 25 minutes to 5 minutes and completed just in time. I wish them luck in the judging but we will certainly recognise their efforts at our school.


What would I do different next year?
Yes, despite the missed lunches, I would love doing this again next year but I would like to try it as a whole class project to reflect the learning we have done and consolidate it while building new ICT skills. I imagine it would be good for team work and spirit and an opportunity to work on roles and responsibilities. I would be interested in hearing how other classroom teachers shared and managed the process of a whole class NetGuide entry.

I may also run more website building teach/model sessions to develop the skills and confidence of more students, perhaps that is why so many dropped out. What experiences have you had as a teacher facilitating this or similar competitions with students?

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Reflection on an Inquiry Learning PD

At our staff meeting today we were lucky enough to have Jill Lunn guide us through some thinking about how we use the inquiry process in our school and classrooms. We began by brainstorming in groups what inquiry learning meant to us as teachers at Bailey Road School. My group as with most others discussed our own tailored approach 'TEACH' and our personal ideas about what we expected from using this approach. Although our group said that the inquiry journey was just as important as the end result, Jill pointed out that the end result was still very important, as it is a product the students produce that shows their learning journey.

Next we brainstormed the challenges that we felt we faced when teaching the inquiry process. My group came up with many ideas but the top priority ones were:
1. Questioning; students asking good open questions, relevant to the topic
2. Engagement; inspiring and motivating students
3. Providing appropriate age level resources
4. Students summarising and making the information their own

They best idea I got from this PD was at this point Jill ask if if was better to teach a child to question or to create or inspire their curiosity to ask the questions. Well no doubt for me is that I do want my students asking great questions, which means I need to develop the way I engage and inspire my students that awakens their curiosity to do so.

This is when Jill introduced the concept of 'Front Loading'. I love the image, just like my old washing machine, load it up! Front loading is about providing inspiration, vocabulary and engagement through a series of interesting activities that generate curiosity and questions from the students. A great one to start with is giving the kids each a number of sticky notes with topic related words on them and getting the kids to stick them in a pattern / grouping of their own devising, without telling them what the topic is, This is a great excerise to develop the topic vocabulary. This could be followed by WWWWH discussions. Having a large related picture covered in sticky notes slowly being reveled, creates lots of excitement and questions. Another activity in that lesson could be to give groups of students 'answers' and let them make up the questions, I really like that one! This could be followed by a game of Jeopardy and then drawing out questions that the children are now beginning to wonder about.

Overall an inspiring PD and has made me quite excited to start my next Inquiry Process with my class. Do you have an inquiry activities that you could share with me that work for you?
This slide show shows a range of thinking strategies we could be teaching and using.