Cluster Share

Today was our cluster share afternoon of what we were going to do this year.  As always it is nervewracking to stand infront of many to share but it sort of gets easier.  It is hard to explain as I know that is contradictory.  Somehow you cope. 
I enjoyed the explanation from Shelley Park School of their school goals for the year.  It was clear and to the point and the viewing onscreen was generally easy to see. 
Elizabeth, my AP gave a comprehension recount of her breakouts from Learning@School.It is good to see to see others sharing.

Integration of ICT

On Monday, Marie and I worked on our plan for integraing ICT in our classroom programmes so we can present at Ulearn with Belinda.  Part of this will  include some action research with our reluctant writer students who will be identified from our writing sample. Our general focus for integration will be literacy.  We talked about maths but it can be difficult to get students from being consumers to creators.  I found I liked this phrase, and I guess it is at the stage of my learning that I actually now understand what this means.  Over this past two years, my students have mostly been consuming, ie accessing learning websites like digistore, NZ maths, WickED etc, with the occasional creating during inquiry topics.
I have started with a conscious effort to use my mimio as my whiteboard as the modelling book for whole class, one of my reading groups made a poster to save the environment from a guided reading story, we made group posters of our class treaty in publisher, and more recently, making postcards to publish our postcard from the planets stories from our Where are we in Space? inquiry topic.  Next term, I need to ensure in my weekly plans that I have students creating during guided reading, and having my reluctant writers working on the 3 computers in class, taking turns at a variety of ways of writing to inspire them.
This will take time and effort but I think quite exciting to move me and mys students to a different level with ICT in classroom.

Blinging My Class Blog

Recently I have been working on setting up my class blog by myself, and I have managed.  I'm not much of a bling person in anything that I do, so to decide to do that is quite out of my comfort zone.  I have recognised that my students do enjoy bling.  It took me a while to find a wallpaper that I thought suited the age range of of 9-11 with my composite class.  I had to refine search engines, and I looked at blogs like "Bling your blog" and the "cutest blog on the block"which I had used before.  Finding widgets was also interesting.
These websites I found useful:
infoserv.media.com
widgia.com
Anyway, room21bds2010.blogspot.com is my class blog. I now need to get parents commenting so that it is purposeful for my students.

Lead Teacher Day 9 March 2010

Today has been a good day.  We heard from those who had been at Learning@School.  This was followed by looking at Action Research - research to improve our teaching.  Belinda would like each school to have an Action Research project at each school in the cluster.  We tried to come up with ideas so that we could do this.  Belinda had purchased for each school Action Research a developmental approach  by Carol Cardno.  On a quick glance this seems very readable.  As I want to present at Ulearn I tried hard to add an action research portion to  what I want to do but that was extremely hard.  I am not sure if it is possible at this stage, so WATCH THIS SPACE.

I had a good look at the website of an Action Research project http://helenrennie-younger.wikispaces.com/elearning+fellowship.  It was particularly great to see her work with junior students on inquiry and oral language.  There is still some reluctance at my school expecially with inquiry and ICT in general, and to be able to show this website at a staff meeting will be fantastic - ie seeing what they can do.  Some of the ideas will fit nicely with our inquiry topic we are just starting on "Where are we in Space?"  I also thought I might be able to adapt them for my Year 5/6 class to use also so I can do some PD with the staff on the thinkers keys as that came up at the last staff meeting to fit in with our space inquiry. 

Movie Maker

Recently, I have made a very long movie (23Minutes) in Moviemaker.  It has been a huge learning curve.  I learnt how to insert photos, screenshot internet shots of our school blogs, and insert videos, add music, trim the music and heaps of other things.  And then it all fell over when I went to finish it by converting it to a movie.  I discovered that all the images had to be in one file in the programme.  However, the programme makes new files every time you import in the new image.  BLAH!!.  Because what I was doing was for a presentation it was all very frustrating.  I then tried to load the movie to UTube and or TeacherTub and ran afoul of their 10 minutes time limits.  In the end I had to split the movie by reimporting back in and remaking in 10 minutes slots because movie maker does not allow you or I could not find our to make the times shorter even though I had deleted frames. Anyway, I now know, I have to make things in 10 minute slots or less, or use another programme.  In case you were wondering, Movie Maker only allows you to put on the internet with 3 choices for sites, none of which are named above, nor does it give embed codes.  Of course, there are possibilities, that I have missed something.  The learning curve is still ongoing.

In the process of all this I found a really good programme called Screenshot Studio which I have used constantly since to crop avatars and things for my class school magazine page.  It allows you to save as a jpeg or copy to the clipboard straight away.  No pasting into paint etc. Here is an example of a scren shot from a friend's blog.

The Hook and its Flow On Effects.

A couple of weeks back, we had a week of making things as our Hook activities for inquiry learning.  Each staff member had an activity of making to give the students ideas and to "hook" them into our inquiry.  Todate I think this has been the most successful beginning to our inquiry learning project this year.  The students made pop up cards, lemonade, tablemats, theremotropes and boxes.  Our students were very excited each day.  I supervised the lemonade making and was pleased to heae some had gone home and made it for friends and family.  A pity we don't have the facilities to make and store lemonade for the fair which is in November.  I notice too, that as a syndicate team we are making mor of an effort to state which part of the linquiry earning journey we are on, and to keep reminding our students of our learning outcome of making a profit of $100 per class. I have also realised that as teachers we are talking about how students are getting a good understanding of the process of how to choose an item, and understanding how to make it for the target audience.

In my attempts to integrate across the curriculum, my students have been learning to write instructions.  This was a flow on from having to use instructions in our make week.  We also in most reading groups, read stories about making things, and then the students wrote our their instructions for these.  I found a lovely story in a school journal about making 3 differenct sets of puppets which went down well with the reading group I gave it to.  Last week for homework, they founds adverts and analysed them for target audience, persuasive language, impact colours etc.  They are then able to bring this information to their reading this week to create an advert for something from their guided story.  Again the school journals have been great with a story about 2 girls making candle holders for the Saturday market, and another about making mosaic tiles.  I even used a play about recyling junk.

Whilst the idea of making something for the fair is still somewhat daunting, it is good to see the students understanding our inquiry topic and being enthusiastic.

Making Surveys

Today I taught 2 classes how to make surveys in google docs.  I began last week with 2 other classes and then, with my class on Monday.  A week before that I taught my fellow syndicate teachers.  The good thing about practise is you get better and better and refine as you go.  Having the students see what I did via the data projector, and then go to computers and do themselves it great to see.  It also shows how easily they learn from viewing.  One student who I had taught last year, and who is generally classed as a slow learner, was able to tell the student who was controlling the computer what to click on next.  It was great to see this student demonstrate learning easily and quickly.  A moment to treasure. 

I have learnt much about making surveys in google docs but there is still more to learn.  I had only done it a couple of times before and had found how to change the background, though did not mention this to the students.  It is interesting to see one group did make a background change under their own initiiative.

Making surveys has been part of our inquiry learning process about making something for the school fair that will help raise money for our school.