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.



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!