Friday June 25th
Working with Sue. Downloaded photos into i-photo & then i-movie to create a slideshow. Sue has been inspired by Mike Whiteman at a recent PRT day to use video for assessment & has been doing this for their recent Communication unit. Check out www.freefoto.com used this with a student to collect images (of cars) to create slideshow (book) using AppleWorks. Apples are great for working with images – you don’t need to copy & paste or even save pictures & insert into documents – you can drag them straight off the web page & onto your work – so easy! Introduced Sue to Interact – downloaded PowerPoint workshop resources, looked at Maths resources & found IDP & survey forms. Sue (after listening to Jill at the Mini-conference) has rearranged the computers in her classroom so they are more accessible & easy to see to support sharing of their work. Need to load Microsoft Office programmes so there are more tools for the students to work with. Eltham has not completed their Microsoft relicensing – reviewed & discussed the documents with Jocelyn – these will be signed & sent in on Monday.
Professional reflections on education in NZ - Dancing on the shifting carpet
Monday, 28 June 2004
Stratford Primary School
Wednesday June 23rd
Senior Team Digital Story Telling
Completing Power Point – digital stories. Recorded narrations – resource rooms make a good sound room! Some students away but with the help of others we located all the Power Point files from the network – saved them to my laptop to be narrated next week when students are there. I had previously worked with a group of ‘experts’ who in turn were to support others in their class – this didn’t happen due to time pressure in the classroom. This highlights the need to have IT activities integrated as opposed to added-on. This project may have been more successful if it had been built in at the planning stages so that teachers would be taking the activities on board & structuring time and resources to support that. Next week we will hopefully be able to set up time for students to share their stories with their buddy classes – load them to the Intranet & burn them to cd so they can be part of the school library resources.
Also worked with Lyn the librarian to load learning media stories (Swimming with Sharks, Punk Junk Mailer etc) to the Intranet so that teachers can access them & load to the classroom computers. These cds can be run over the network but they are slow and unreliable so they do need to be set up on each classroom computer. Have shown Lyn how to copy cds so that extra copies can be placed in the resource room. Need to create opportunities for teachers to preview these resources – just as they preview print materials – usually in the staffroom during interval & lunch. Load them to a laptop & share them around or some time during staff meetings. Lyn is creating a newsletter with hyperlinks to the resources we have copied to the Intranet.
Senior Team Digital Story Telling
Completing Power Point – digital stories. Recorded narrations – resource rooms make a good sound room! Some students away but with the help of others we located all the Power Point files from the network – saved them to my laptop to be narrated next week when students are there. I had previously worked with a group of ‘experts’ who in turn were to support others in their class – this didn’t happen due to time pressure in the classroom. This highlights the need to have IT activities integrated as opposed to added-on. This project may have been more successful if it had been built in at the planning stages so that teachers would be taking the activities on board & structuring time and resources to support that. Next week we will hopefully be able to set up time for students to share their stories with their buddy classes – load them to the Intranet & burn them to cd so they can be part of the school library resources.
Also worked with Lyn the librarian to load learning media stories (Swimming with Sharks, Punk Junk Mailer etc) to the Intranet so that teachers can access them & load to the classroom computers. These cds can be run over the network but they are slow and unreliable so they do need to be set up on each classroom computer. Have shown Lyn how to copy cds so that extra copies can be placed in the resource room. Need to create opportunities for teachers to preview these resources – just as they preview print materials – usually in the staffroom during interval & lunch. Load them to a laptop & share them around or some time during staff meetings. Lyn is creating a newsletter with hyperlinks to the resources we have copied to the Intranet.
Thursday, 17 June 2004
Thinking to Learn: Learning to Think
Tuesday 16 June
Thinking to Learn: Learning to Think - Michael Pohl workshop in Wanganui. 7 from our cluster (Eltham, Stratford, Mahoe) – good to talk about what is happening in our schools, what we can take back & work on in our schools with other teachers. Thinking skills I want to be doing more of this in school visits!!! As Wendy@Mahoe says this is the foundation of everything we do.There are great opportunities for me to introduce & work with teachers with these strategies & ideas in classrooms. This day really made sense for what before for me was a hotchpotch of different ideas about teaching thinking skills that till now I have been pretty confused about – so many models to work with – what should we use when? Michael helped with ideas about creating structures for the explicit teaching of thinking skills & what strategies are useful for different situations. Also how important it is to have a whole school culture of thinking – shared understandings – and some good tools here to implement this into schools. Bought a CD of Michael’s presentation – will be the major focus of our next PD facilitation team meeting.
Thinking to Learn: Learning to Think - Michael Pohl workshop in Wanganui. 7 from our cluster (Eltham, Stratford, Mahoe) – good to talk about what is happening in our schools, what we can take back & work on in our schools with other teachers. Thinking skills I want to be doing more of this in school visits!!! As Wendy@Mahoe says this is the foundation of everything we do.There are great opportunities for me to introduce & work with teachers with these strategies & ideas in classrooms. This day really made sense for what before for me was a hotchpotch of different ideas about teaching thinking skills that till now I have been pretty confused about – so many models to work with – what should we use when? Michael helped with ideas about creating structures for the explicit teaching of thinking skills & what strategies are useful for different situations. Also how important it is to have a whole school culture of thinking – shared understandings – and some good tools here to implement this into schools. Bought a CD of Michael’s presentation – will be the major focus of our next PD facilitation team meeting.
St Josephs
Monday 15 June
Good session with Vicky’s class introducing Tech Buddy model to Vicky & the students. Class was beginning a study on NZ birds so our learning activity was based around what they knew about NZ birds. Modelled the 3 seat tech buddy coaching system to the whole class & Vicky & went through a few rotations of the students being involved in their activity. Small, simple steps - create a new slide, identify the picture of the bird they are writing about & insert the picture, think about what they know about the bird & key in text, save. Students can repeat this activity at the end of the unit to record what they have learnt during the topic study. Reinforce the learning team rules about the roles of helper, doer, watcher. This should be a manageable system for ICT based activities in the classroom – revisit to see if they are keeping the momentum for all the students to be involved.
Need to look for ways to be working in similar ways in other classes so teachers can be involved in the learning process as well. Time in the computer bay with students alone does not contribute to teacher development. Ideas?? – creating shared presentations; visual images – discussion starters for lessons, topics; digital story telling; movie making (role play); graphic organisers – mind mapping; micro-quests, web quests; internet safety, searching, evaluation; epals; data gathering & manipulation; involvement in online collaborative games, activities – writers window, TKI interactives……………
Good session with Vicky’s class introducing Tech Buddy model to Vicky & the students. Class was beginning a study on NZ birds so our learning activity was based around what they knew about NZ birds. Modelled the 3 seat tech buddy coaching system to the whole class & Vicky & went through a few rotations of the students being involved in their activity. Small, simple steps - create a new slide, identify the picture of the bird they are writing about & insert the picture, think about what they know about the bird & key in text, save. Students can repeat this activity at the end of the unit to record what they have learnt during the topic study. Reinforce the learning team rules about the roles of helper, doer, watcher. This should be a manageable system for ICT based activities in the classroom – revisit to see if they are keeping the momentum for all the students to be involved.
Need to look for ways to be working in similar ways in other classes so teachers can be involved in the learning process as well. Time in the computer bay with students alone does not contribute to teacher development. Ideas?? – creating shared presentations; visual images – discussion starters for lessons, topics; digital story telling; movie making (role play); graphic organisers – mind mapping; micro-quests, web quests; internet safety, searching, evaluation; epals; data gathering & manipulation; involvement in online collaborative games, activities – writers window, TKI interactives……………
Eltham Primary School
Friday 11 June
At the Tech Centre with Peter, Gavin & Brenda. Looked at Sound & Music software – Audacity, Music Maker & Super Dooper Music Looper. Super Dooper Music Looper is aimed at very young children & really easy to use. Good starting point for learning about recording sounds & making compositions. Costs around $50 NZD. Peter investigating buying this for the Tech Centre. Demonstrated using the head set microphone to capture sound in Audacity. Also investigated Extranets – KnowledgeNet, Interact (logged Peter on as a new user) & Think.com. We really liked Think.com – free, online software, not available to us at the moment as being piloted in other NZ schools. I will contact Doug Harre about being able to access this software. This ties in really well with the needs of the whole cluster & the Tech Centre wanting an online area for students from all their schools to share and display their work. Talked about upgrading and networking the Tech Centre computers. They are currently networked through peer to peer shared files. Need to install network operating software if you want students and classes to have separate logons & folders. Windows NT, 2000 or 2003 available through the Microsoft agreement. This only needs to be installed on the server computer & desktops configured. Checked out the new cameras with Brenda. Loaded software to main computer and practised downloading pictures. Created an album "On Holiday at the Tech Centre" :-)
At the Tech Centre with Peter, Gavin & Brenda. Looked at Sound & Music software – Audacity, Music Maker & Super Dooper Music Looper. Super Dooper Music Looper is aimed at very young children & really easy to use. Good starting point for learning about recording sounds & making compositions. Costs around $50 NZD. Peter investigating buying this for the Tech Centre. Demonstrated using the head set microphone to capture sound in Audacity. Also investigated Extranets – KnowledgeNet, Interact (logged Peter on as a new user) & Think.com. We really liked Think.com – free, online software, not available to us at the moment as being piloted in other NZ schools. I will contact Doug Harre about being able to access this software. This ties in really well with the needs of the whole cluster & the Tech Centre wanting an online area for students from all their schools to share and display their work. Talked about upgrading and networking the Tech Centre computers. They are currently networked through peer to peer shared files. Need to install network operating software if you want students and classes to have separate logons & folders. Windows NT, 2000 or 2003 available through the Microsoft agreement. This only needs to be installed on the server computer & desktops configured. Checked out the new cameras with Brenda. Loaded software to main computer and practised downloading pictures. Created an album "On Holiday at the Tech Centre" :-)
Thursday, 10 June 2004
Stratford Primary
A day in the office split with 'school visit'.
Building houses with R20 - animated ppoints using shapes to construct houses.
Kerry - burning to cd with autoplay feature - make a 'How To' file on that one.
Library - problem solved loading school journals to intranet - Lyn will be sending newsletter out to staff with the link to the exe. files so that the school journal cds can be loaded direct from the intranet to the classroom computers. Also made teachers notes available on the Intranet with links to them in the newsletter.
Talked about making backup copies of cds & practise on a couple with Toshiba Dragn'Drop. Goal to do a stocktake on digital media & software - load where appropriate to the Intranet & make backup copies of everything.
Building houses with R20 - animated ppoints using shapes to construct houses.
Kerry - burning to cd with autoplay feature - make a 'How To' file on that one.
Library - problem solved loading school journals to intranet - Lyn will be sending newsletter out to staff with the link to the exe. files so that the school journal cds can be loaded direct from the intranet to the classroom computers. Also made teachers notes available on the Intranet with links to them in the newsletter.
Talked about making backup copies of cds & practise on a couple with Toshiba Dragn'Drop. Goal to do a stocktake on digital media & software - load where appropriate to the Intranet & make backup copies of everything.
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