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……………