October SHAdowsobAHS

SHAdowsobAHS

The 365 Photos Flickr Group is a group of everyday people (mostly educators) committing to do there best to take a photo every day of a year. We all do it for our own reasons but I believe a common interest is learning about photography through immersion. As you look for an interesting shot each day, you start to see the beauty around you as you look for a photo moment.

Every month someone in our group is tagged to come up with a theme for the month. Last month I was excited to be the one tagged. After much anxious deliberation, to do my predecessors proud, I chose "Shadows" as the October 365 Photo Theme. I remember I had chosen the theme and the 1st October arrived, except the sun hadn't. I waited hours for that brief sunny moment.

It turned out to be an exciting month, waiting to see would participate and having learning conversations along the way with other members.

I have learnt so much about photography and the importance of visual images. I regularly share my pictures with my students and hope to try a similar project with a whole class next year. There are hard times that have challenged and taught me responsibility, reliability and perseverance, skills I would love to see from my students. I also serves as a visual diary that I revisit and reflect on more often than I would a written dairy, plus it fits my 'intelligence', I can imagine how this would serve as a discussion and learning tool in the classroom.

This is a slide-share of all my 365 photos to date.

Two Digital Firsts

Today, the second day of term 4 and my first year of teaching, saw me implementing two new digital tools into my classroom arsenal.

The first was EtherPad which is a collaborative writing site. I had six groups at tables, each with a laptop. I was signed in as the teacher and projected the site onto our whiteboard. We were exploring the features of explanation writing through shared writing with a focus on the Key Competency; Relating To Others. The whole class was fully engaged and I was very proud of the sharing and teamwork that happened throughout the class. This was truly 21st century learning taking place. It was great to be able to assign each group a colour while they chose a group name, while having it on the whiteboard allowed a sense of control and management for the few tempted to be too expressive. I did have to teach each group to avoid deleting each others work by finding a new blank line at the bottom of the writing to begin their next written line. Next time I would like to try this same exercise with individuals at seperate laptops writing a collaborative piece.

The second digital first was our use of VoiceThread in maths. VoiceThread is a collaborative multimedia slideshow on which you can upload images, videos and documents. The great part is that students can navigates pages and leave comments in five different ways; recording voice (microphone or telephone), text, audio file or video. Plus they can doodle all over the screen while they comment. Multiple identities can be created for your class and the Voice Thread can even be embedded into blogs or wikis, like below. My students loved it and had very little difficulty picking up the basics. It is a great collaborative tool as well as for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment, the applications are limitless across the curriculum. I would love to even try it to get parent engagement.

I admit I have known about this site for a long time but have always been a bit scared to take the plunge. I eventually got my confidence by viewing and copying what another teacher had done, here. I was initially feeling worried about this, but I think teachers also need modeling and scaffolding to learn and pass that onto their students, especially with all these web 2.0 tools. I am not sure who the teacher is, but a huge thank you for helping get my feet wet with VoiceThread. I encourage all teacher to give this tool a go, you will not regret it.

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.

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?

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.

Thinking Skills Presentation

View more presentations from nathanr07.

Google Forms as a Self-Assessment Tool

We use our classroom blog for sharing our learning experiences. An important part of the learning process involves reflecting on our learning. One way I get my students to reflect is to do self-assessments. It seems to me although many teachers are using web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning, not many are taking the many opportunities to use them for assessment.

Our most recent ICT venture of recording readers theater podcasts was posted on our blog so that we could share our work and get reflective feedback. As my students read blogs and comment on them as a reading task, it seemed a good place to embed a form that would serve as a reflective assessment.


Why I like using Google Forms rather than services like Polldaddy is that it is easy to set up and embed, but more importantly it sends all the poll data to a Google Spreadsheet in Google Docs. From there you can get your data presented in various chart or pie displays with a few button clicks. Of course you do need to sign up for a free Gmail account, but then in my opinion if you are not already using Gmail you should be.
An example of using Google Forms embedded into a blog for self-assessment.
Some other online poll and testing services are Yacapaca, Zoho, and Mystudiyo.
Below is a video on Google Forms.

Adding Audio to your Blog

My class did their first readers theater this week, and after recording the audio story we wanted to add it to our blog in order to share it with the world and receive feedback to improve ourselves.
See our Classroom Blog Podcast.

However most blog servers do not allow you to upload and embed an audio directly from your computer. The file (this is the same process for video) needs to be hosted on a web server and then linked to the blog. There are many sites that cater for audio and podcasts, we however used Podomatic. You do need to check that the school does not block the audio server you choose, if they do you can usually get it unblocked by placing a request through your ICT lead teacher.

Another thing to remember is that your file needs to be a mp3 or mp4 file before uploading to an audio server. This usually involves exporting it from GarageBand / Audacity or other recording software. One thing I learnt was when recording with GarageBand, change the metronome setting to get rid of the clicky sound that we got in the background.

Once you have your audio recording saved on a site like Podomatic you are offer html code to either link to the server site or code to embed the recording into your blog, as we have done here.

For further guidance you should read Bloggers help file "How do I post audio/music to my blog?"

Other podcasting server sites are:
Kid-Cast
Gcast