Wednesday 31 August 2011

Post-it War


I just finished reading a news article that oozes fun, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. Reported by the New Zealand Herald, the 'Post-it wars' are a corporate collage contest held in Paris, where they create Post-it creations in their windows, challenging each other to do better.


I had to give it a go! I used http://linoit.com because it allowed different note colours, but perhaps my desktop stickies would do a better job. Lastly I took a screenshot, what do you think? Is it war?

Wednesday 24 August 2011

Daffodil Day

Friday 26th August 2011
Daffodil
Photo blju photo
Daffodil Day


Daffodil Day is the Cancer Society's annual spring fundraising and awareness campaigns in the country. The daffodil is one of the first flowers of spring, even now they are popping out in my lawn! Their blazing yellow flowers remind me of warmth and sunshine, light and hope. Hope, care, and help for the 1 in 3 New Zealanders affected by cancer and their families; this is what you help to deliver with each donation, buying a flow on Friday 26th August, or education. Teaching and educating about other about Daffoldil Day is a way you can help. The Cancer Society provide a range of school activities for low to mid primary students from colouring-in pages to maths problems on their web page.


New Zealand School Journals for guided reading (web site):
The Flower The daffodil JJ No. 22 2000 Pg 19 - <8 Article
Cancer - adultsAunty's raw fish - Pt 04 No. 1 2010 - Story - 9.5-10.5 years
Change of Life - YP No. 1 2003 - Story
Jack's auntie and her long brown hair  - Poem Pt 04 No. 1 2006 - 12-14 years 
Remembering Taua - YP No. 1 2004 - Story

Cancer - child
Spaceships and aliens Pt 03 No. 1 2011 - Story - 9-10 years

How could you give some hope?

Friday 19 August 2011

A Week of E-learning Learning

Last week David our school e-learning PD trainer introduced Glogster to two of our e-learning teachers. I had not used it in the last year but decided it would be great for presenting an inquiry project. I set up my class but forgot how to make a few changes so asked one of these teachers for help, she was so excited to be teaching me something and I was pleased to see her confidence grow. It goes to show teaching someone else is the best way to grow and learn.

I try to provide many opportunities for my students to write collaboratively, and today they proved that they are become more proficient at it. In the past I found that too many people editing a Google Document causes more sharing problems, so this time they worked in smaller groups (around 5 student each) to and wrote about their previous day. This worked really well and we copy and pasted them into our blogs. See them here http://brs-year8.blogspot.com.

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Diigo became my favourite bookmarking site when Delicious had it's troubles many months back, and soon after I discovered Diigo Education which allows you to create student accounts. However it is not the bookmark feature which makes it such an awesome programme but the Highlight and Sticky Note features. One example of how I use it is below. We have been learning to skim and scan for information so as one stormy cold day activity I sent my student 'group' to the Metservice website where I had left a sticky note with questions for them to practice. I will be talking about this further in our e-learning 'Smackdown'.

Lastly this Friday we had a community Rugby 'World Cup' afternoon with students playing students and parents/teachers playing students. As I usually do I took our class camera and handed it over to my students to take photos, events like this provide great photography training. Students from other classes took notice and also wanted to take photos so I convinced one of my team teacher's to get their class camera and the student got snapping, I noticed she seemed slightly nervous about having the camera out of her control and after 15 minutes it was back in it's case and returned to the classroom. This made me realise that as teachers it is important that we learn to let go, give control and trust to our students so they can learn and experience technology for themselves. Learning is doing!

Monday 15 August 2011

Literacy and Maths through Music

Although I may look like a rock star ripping through the chords, I am neither and unfortunately don't have a musical bone in my body. However if you were standing next to me you would hear me counting out beats 8xE, 8xG, then the chorus 2xD, 2xG etc. that I was reading from the whiteboard. I really wanted to read the lyrics and sing along too but could not focus on both. My point being that even as a adult I was using maths and literacy skills while having lots of fun.

We were lucky enough to have the "Rock Van" at our school for a week. This group of musicians taught the students instruments and the whole class become a rock band after short daily practice. Aside from whole class participation and engagement, I noticed plenty of counting and discussions about the number of beats and students talking about 'reading' the music.

This experience has certainly opened my eyes to how subjects like music can be used to teach literacy and numeracy, however to make that really effective teachers need to be doing more collaborative planning and integrated teaching.

What experiences have you had with music adding to learning?

Saturday 6 August 2011

Take responsibility for your own learning


EduCampAKL 2011
Today I attended the EduCampAKL 2011, a user-generated unconference. The focus was on sharing e-learning and education ideas and knowledge. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with my online PLN, some of whom I had not met face-to-face before.


I think the slogan really captures the spirit of the event "go with the flow ~ follow your passion ~ take responsibility for your own learning." We are all self directed learners taking our own weekend to develop ourselves professionally and share our learning. Most importantly we are taking responsibility for our own learning, not waiting for school mass PD to choose our learning journey. 


Claire Amos began the unconference talking about how Epson Girls (our host) use ICT for teaching and learning. We then had "Smackdown" where each speaker had 2 minutes to share tools and ideas with the group. We used a shared Google Doc to recorded everything and it will be a resource I will be revisiting many times this year. There was so many exciting ideas and information that it is hard to absorb it all in one go. You can view the document at  http://goo.gl/m9T9M 

I participated in the following workshops / discussions / sharing:
iPad Ideas, lead by Stuart Hale
- use QR code with built in ipad camera
- Redlazer for scanning QR codes as well as other bar code types that are not generally readable by the standard code readers.
- use QR codes on library book spines that link to student book reviews (video) on a school website.
- Augmented Reality using AcrossAir to view panorama’s.
- Anywhere links an image (instead of a QR code) to web site.

Teacher Dashboard, lead by Dorothy Burt
- If you use Google Apps for your students then this is a must have software which allows the teacher to manage and view all student Docs, Blogs and even Picasa.
- Links to and shows Blogger plus comments.
- Point England School are paper free and do not allow printing, kids take screenshots, saved in Picassa.
- Also shows student Gmail (inbox – sent – trash – sharing) *security
- Automatic computer generated student emails, simple password reset.
- Work within G Apps can be transferred to other cluster schools.
- $4 student per year.
- Can set up templates for Shared Folders and Blogger for all students – set up widgets / looks /links etc. – in Edit HTML, download XML and make as a template.
- the same idea can be used for e-portfolio’s using Sites.

NIE – Newspapers in Education, lead by Becky Hare
- A fantastic online newspaper with a daily dairy (Nikki Newsgirl)
- e-links to topic – questions and students can submit their writing (3 published weekly)

Digital Storytelling, lead by @HeyMilly
- Five Photo Storytelling with a focus on photography (visual language)
A wonderful day of learning, sharing, and connecting with my New Zealand PLN>