Thursday 29 July 2010

AnswerGarden - Plant a Question, Grow Answers

Today during our computer suite time we were exploring past winners of the  TVNZ6 NETGUIDE SCHOOLS MULTIMEDIA CHALLENGE As we are planning to enter we wanted to see what made them great websites. Then we got to use the very cool new tool AnswerGarden to share ideas about what we needed to build our our websites. AnswerGarden was enthusiastically embraced my my students who loved seeing their ideas bloom. 

As you can see below it is a great tool for brainstorming and sharing information. I am sure there must be many more creative ways to use this tool. I would love to here some of your ideas.

Thanks to Fiona who introduced this at the EducampNZ 2010.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Students ICT Skills Survey

In the past this ICT survey had been been in a printed format. The ICT Skills Survey had a check list of skills expected at each Year level. I am not sure if it was ever successfully used.

Our ICT team put some work into rewording it to better suit our students. I then converted twoYear levels into my beloved Google Forms and convinced the team to assist me to create an online survey for every Year level. The aim is for each teacher to walk their students through the survey.

On the left is a snapshot of part of the survey. The questions are not perfect and I would love to see more questions about collaboration, multimodal  storytelling, maths game scores, etc. but it is a start.

My students had little difficulty and the result were worthy of reflection. Future teaching needs became clearer, although whether I can cover all gaps in two terms is another matter.

Being a visual person I love graphed information (see my students blog on class culture) and find it easier to interpret them. That is another reason I love Google Forms.


Below are the results of just my class. For me this is a valuable student self-assessment that can help inform me of my classes ICT strengths and needs. I won't interpret it for you as I think the whole idea is that visuals allow you to make your own quick evaluation. When all the classes have done this it will provide a decent set of results for reporting to the school board.

Have you done anything similar or can offer some ways I could improve this next time?








Saturday 24 July 2010

Virtually at EducampNZ 2010

One of my less useful super powers is getting lost anywhere, which I did remarkably well today. I was planning to attend the unconference EducampNZ 2010. I went to last years one and it was a great place to meet PLN's and share our learning. However, I first managed to get onto the wrong highway then eventually to the right area, but after an hour and a half I couln't take any more traffic and decided to go home.

Dispite my frustration I could not help but do as many others were doing today and attend virtually. These were the options:
- Follow and join individual conversations on Twitter hashtag #educampnz
- Read their wiki page
- Share ideas on the wallwisher
- Or say how you felt about it using AnswerGarden

Nothing can substitute for being physically at a conference but here are my thoughts on what it was like as a virtual participant. I got some great ideas from the sharing on the wallwisher, particularly AnswerGarden which I thought has lots of potential in the classroom as a brainstorming tool. The wiki page was an essential gateway and reference point although was not an active virtual environment.

The main virtual involvement was via the Twitter hashtag #educampnz which you can still search and follow the conversations of the day. However the online conversations were few, mere tantalizing glimpses into the subjects being explored. It left me wondering how we could plan for and ensure a more active virtual presence at conferences like this, so people who cannot physically attend can take a bigger part in the sharing and learning. Any ideas?




What did you think of Educampnz 2010... at AnswerGarden.ch.