Like / Dislike Poll Widget

Poll's are fantastic tools in the classroom, although there are many types of varying complexities to choose from. In a recent Mashable blog I read about Quipol, what caught my attention was the simplicity and similarity to FaceBook - Like / Dislike. It is easy to embed in websites, like this blog, you can close voting and see a pie graph of results but voters do not seem to be able to see the results. It looks like you can only vote once from each device, however images cannot be loaded from an iPad (Flash issue I presume), but you can add video from YouTube. I would like to be able to adjust the poll box size, but can imagine many useful ways I could use this for learning and assessment.


Please test out my poll and leave a comment if you have any ideas for using it for education.

5 Things I Want My Teacher to Know About Me

If I was a student... Claire has passed on Allanah's challenge to reflect on five things I would want my teacher should know about me.


Just this week I was planning activities for my students to get to know each other and me. My co-teachers and I were planning something along the lines of a personal mihi as a starting point. However in taking part in this meme it seems the way I learn is just as important to me and is a question I obviously need to ask my students as well.


5 Things I want my teacher to know about me:
1. To know to real me, not just the mask I show the world but the emotional me below the surface.
2. To know about the things that I care about and show they they care too.
3. To understand my learning styles and provide opportunities to engage me.
4. To know my passions and help me explore them.
5. To challenge my thinking but give me the space and freedom to discover my own answers.

In keeping with the meme I invite: @sharpjacqui, @Moodlegirl, @Komos72, @siavogel, @judykmck
to join the meme and reflect on your five things. (Please link back to Allanah's blog)

365 iPad

In 2009 I discovered the 365 Photo Challenge, which was run by a group of educators who aimed to take a photo every day of the year. A a visual person I found it an excellent alternative to a daily dairy, a way to capture a moment of my day, express a moment of my day. Looking back I can recall the day of almost photo, the people and the events. My photography skills grew and I began to see the perfect shot in every day life. In 2011 I took a break from the 365 challenge and at the end of last year I got an iPad and decided to take up the challenge again using only my iPad camera. The quality is not quite as good as my digital camera and the iPad shape add to the challenge, but the idea of capturing memories and moments in time has not changed, and the excitement of the perfect photo still remains.


If you have never given the 365 challenge a go, I challenge you to try it out, see how you grow in the process. You can just create your own collection using an online photo album like Picasa or Flickr, or join a 365 group to share photos and comments on sites like Flickr or Tumblr. Happy photography.


2012 - 365 iPad Photo Challenge

2011
I took a break from the challenge.


2010 - 365 Photo Challenge



2009 - 365 Photo Challenge

e-Learning Planning Framework

At Ulearn11 I participated in a workshop on the draft "e-Learning Planning Framework" (eLPF) led by Ross Alexander. The eLPF has been designed as a tool to enable schools assess what level of e-learning they are currently using to support there next steps for development and training.

It has been designed as a self review tool for schools and individuals to gather evidence, evaluate e-learning programmes and provide a road map for future development. Although it can be a valuable tool to provide evidence to the Ministry or ERO, Ross said it was not intended to evaluate school performance for external purposes.

http://www.vln.school.nz/pg/groups/19837/elearning-planning-frameworks/

While planning the 2012 e-learning for the school this week with colleuges, we decided to use the eLPF to set a baseline for where we are on our e-learning journey and to help us plan our next steps and any professional development required. It was easy to understand and decide on our level, and provided scaffolding for our next steps. 


As you can see below I used a printout, highlighter and just jotted down next step notes. Then later I got smarter and uploaded the Word version to Google Docs and used the highlight feature and just typed my notes directly onto the Doc. An added benefit is now our staff can do this collaboratively and we can revisit it later next year to track our progress, in a new colour.

The eLPF can also be used to evaluate teams and individuals, although the wording leans towards whole school use. I found the eLPF simple to understand and use. I recommend you try doing an assessment of your school, see if it helps you with your e-learning planning for 2012.

Teachers do not need to be experts

This week my students got to play with and learn a new website (for me too) for making animations called Doink.com. I created a class account and gave each maths group a problem to solve (linked to our learning) but they had to show their strategy. Although most animations are still to fast, most students have begun to become proficient with the site, more so than me. Next week I'll make the problems more difficult, varied and again differentiated according to their levels. The students are engaged while having to really think about the strategy they are showing, and this could be used as a resource to teach other students. The students embedded them on our wiki here but below is an example. Although even in Term 4 not all my students have mastered embedding, they know not to ask me but to find a peer tutor to assist them. This is not because I am mean, but they know that they have experts among them and are expected to use them; they have grown to appreciate their own abilities and each others skills.


The lesson here is that teachers do not need to be experts with every bit of technology, give that power to your students and focus on being the guide of the real learning.


Macane's_place Value by BRSroom13, made at DoInk.com

Do as I say, not as I do?

To often we ask our students to do what we are not doing ourselves, and I am thinking particularly about e-portfolios and reflective blogging. As life-long learners and inquiring teachers, I believe all teachers should be modeling these themselves.


This week I asked my students to do a reflection on their first week back at school, so I decided it would be interesting to do so myself.


We started the week discussing our treaty and values, our self management strategies and responsibilities, and very importantly, the Key Competencies which is the center of all our learning. This was finished off with an activity for mixed groups to practice what we spoke about. Each group had 15 minutes to create their most imaginative outfit out of newspaper and dress one of their members, then do a final self-assessment which they shared (see left). I believe it was a huge success but then you judge from the photos and comments on our class blog.







Thursday morning was a a ray of sunshine, so remembering something from Ulearn11 about using outside spaces and changing the environment, I took the class outside to do maths on the hall steps. I taught the groups to one side while the others work individually or pairs in the sun. It was actually going very well until some sports training began on the field, we eventually had to move back inside because I had lost their attention, but I will certainly do it again.

After last term's inquiry, I realised that my students really needed a lot more learning around researching, particularly finding the key ideas in text and then summarising it in their own words. We have been pioneering Diigo for Education (see my blog post here) and so we used the highlight function to find unknown words in one colour and then key ideas in another colour on an article on the  NZHerald website. 

Our science inquiry this term is magnetism, so we had our introductory lesson this week. We started with a brainstorm which produce an amazing amount of questions, considering I had only asked what they thought they knew. I had to bite my lip as I had decided not to give any answers or explanations, but just be a sponge. 


After that still without explaining or answering anything we moved onto the 3 station activities. This was an amazing and fun session that created even more questions, we are certainly set up for our inquiry.
Station 1 was a range of online games based on magnetism using laptops.
Station 2 was a table of magnets and objects to experiment with. A challenge to make something hover in mid air focussed the exploration. 
Station 3, I created a race car game with magnets and paperclips, but their challenge was to create their own game, and some exciting ideas develop from that. I hope to take that idea further as a unit challenge.
Again, I never gave any answers but just asked them, "why do you think that is happening?" "I wonder why . . .?"

I am not ashamed to say that I personally hate homework, but that is another argument. However it is school policy and what the parents want, so I do it. I have been using "homework worksheets" and decided to ask my students what they wanted this term. Their answer was a choice of activities and projects, which would also cater to different intelligences and learning styles. I created next weeks homework and have it on our wiki already so they can give me some feedback by Monday. 


I have not forgotten about creative commons and giving credit on the document, but I won't put them on until the end of the week, as they also contain many of the answers.  To the left is my "Friday" t-shirt that I wore today, just to prove my viewpoint.


When I asked who had a fun first week of learning, I got a resounding YES, me included.

Testing Google Presentation Updates

It is wonderful to see Google improving Presentations and I couldn't help but have a play to see what the possibilities are. It it getting closer to having all the great features of PowerPoint (for digital storytelling) without the huge files and difficulty of getting it online without losing all the effects.


Below is my test presentation embedded and here is the link.
Do you have anything to add or have I missed out anything? 
How would you use it in the classroom?