Room 9 are doing some great things with their travel buddies – tracking their travels around the world, sending and receiving email & the odd postcard – lots of good questions to ask about what life is like on the other side of the world! We learned about using the digital camera today and this fitted in really well with the transactional writing focus – writing and following instructions. We had a play with KidPix & the photos we took. Again using the 3 seat model to help each other out. It was a bit tricky to draw over the photos when mistakes were made & you can only undo one action so we switched to the easier option of using stamps & stickers. The children dressed up the photos of themselves in interesting ways – giving themselves hats, sunglasses, bowties & other interesting decorations! It would be good to create your own stickers in KidPix but couldn’t work out how to do this though you can adapt the stamps.
Professional reflections on education in NZ - Dancing on the shifting carpet
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
Tuesday, 27 July 2004
Huiakama
Creating a school web site with the students & Vicky. They have their new Microsoft software so we have been using FrontPage 2003. This is a huge improvement on past versions – so easy to set up your pages with table layouts already set up, navigation is easier also with ready made buttons all set to go – just add the text & the links. The photo gallery options are really great & easy to use too. The hard work is tracking down all the photos & finding and writing content. Web hosting is the next thing to organise – Matau, Makahu & Mahoe have been down this track recently so we will follow suit. (www.cheapwebhosting.co.nz) Went online to check prices & found that webhosting is even cheaper than it was so will have to reinvestigate to look for the best deal. Internet access speeds are too slow out at here so there is another job when I get back into town. When the website is ready to go then we will upload it from Stratford Primary (as you can walk faster than the Internet!)
Spent some time with Marilyn working with tables in Word to create planning documents. Suggested she join the free computing course out at Toko on a Wednesday – these courses are also available through WITT in Stratford. Look at creating tutorials that will help – focussing on making documents that can be used for school.
Spent some time with Marilyn working with tables in Word to create planning documents. Suggested she join the free computing course out at Toko on a Wednesday – these courses are also available through WITT in Stratford. Look at creating tutorials that will help – focussing on making documents that can be used for school.
Wednesday, 21 July 2004
Eltham Primary School
Surfing safe & smart
With Kimberley & Megan’s classes in the computer suite – led a session on using the Internet to be safe, smart surfers – look for lesson plan to be posted to Interact. Focus on information skills & critical thinking – White Hat – What are the facts? Cyberpigs – Cyber Sense & Nonsense an excellent resource for this. These lessons need to developed further so teachers can use them confidently with their own classes – workshop it? Fits in well with a focus many schools have at the moment of developing their Internet Appropriate Use policy. I am currently investigating training modules from MultiServe for IT administrators & school leaders. PD team will organise for the cluster.
With Kimberley & Megan’s classes in the computer suite – led a session on using the Internet to be safe, smart surfers – look for lesson plan to be posted to Interact. Focus on information skills & critical thinking – White Hat – What are the facts? Cyberpigs – Cyber Sense & Nonsense an excellent resource for this. These lessons need to developed further so teachers can use them confidently with their own classes – workshop it? Fits in well with a focus many schools have at the moment of developing their Internet Appropriate Use policy. I am currently investigating training modules from MultiServe for IT administrators & school leaders. PD team will organise for the cluster.
Tuesday, 20 July 2004
Stratford Primary School
Working with Room 13. Years 1 - 2. Taking each others photos for their class scrapbook. They learnt all the steps from taking the lense cover off to turning the power on - & they worked it all out themselves! As long as they keep the strap around their neck - give them a camera & let them go for it. They can't do much harm and will only learn. Though we did have to talk also about 'framing' our shots, not cutting people's heads off, keeping our fingers away from the front of the lense etc!
Created a lesson plan with LOs from the English curriculum - writing, reading, & presenting; for the ScrapBook activity we did today. Make this available for sharing on Interact - useful for the teachers to include in their planning & to adapt for other activities too.
Would like to gather some resources of online material & work children have created themselves (like the Digital Picture Books) so that their can be a 'Reading Box' on the desktop of each classroom computer so it is included in the Reading Rotation tasks.
Will be working with the Junior School for the next four weeks - next week we will look at KidPix as a learning tool & give some feedback to the Management team to see if we will get more licences for this.
Created a lesson plan with LOs from the English curriculum - writing, reading, & presenting; for the ScrapBook activity we did today. Make this available for sharing on Interact - useful for the teachers to include in their planning & to adapt for other activities too.
Would like to gather some resources of online material & work children have created themselves (like the Digital Picture Books) so that their can be a 'Reading Box' on the desktop of each classroom computer so it is included in the Reading Rotation tasks.
Will be working with the Junior School for the next four weeks - next week we will look at KidPix as a learning tool & give some feedback to the Management team to see if we will get more licences for this.
Friday, 2 July 2004
Eltham Primary
Thursday 1st July
Miriam was learning how to use features of Spreadsheets to sort & graph data. Introduced her to some basic formula & how you can sort your data to compare student achievement & to track progress of individuals. We also looked at formatting spreadsheets so they would fit on one page & be easy to read. We set up Miriam’s & Megan’s new laptops so they could access the Internet & Email. We looked at different ways of burning to CD. I suggested using Drag & Drop if you want to copy one CD to another. If you want to copy files, folders & programmes from your laptop then it is just as easy to open the CD drive as you would any other folder on your computer & drop your work in – Windows CD Wizard takes over from there.
Recommended that the school looks at tracking down it’s digital learning media – some can be made accessible through the network, & backup copies of CDs should be made of resources that are important. Ascent Technologies http://www.ascent.co.nz/index.asp are just one place of many online that you can purchase CDs in bulk (amongst other things)
I-Photo & I-Movie with Megan – I need more practise with this – Gavin please get your laptops configured so I can take one home!
Miriam was learning how to use features of Spreadsheets to sort & graph data. Introduced her to some basic formula & how you can sort your data to compare student achievement & to track progress of individuals. We also looked at formatting spreadsheets so they would fit on one page & be easy to read. We set up Miriam’s & Megan’s new laptops so they could access the Internet & Email. We looked at different ways of burning to CD. I suggested using Drag & Drop if you want to copy one CD to another. If you want to copy files, folders & programmes from your laptop then it is just as easy to open the CD drive as you would any other folder on your computer & drop your work in – Windows CD Wizard takes over from there.
Recommended that the school looks at tracking down it’s digital learning media – some can be made accessible through the network, & backup copies of CDs should be made of resources that are important. Ascent Technologies http://www.ascent.co.nz/index.asp are just one place of many online that you can purchase CDs in bulk (amongst other things)
I-Photo & I-Movie with Megan – I need more practise with this – Gavin please get your laptops configured so I can take one home!
Stratford Primary
30th June
Digital Story Telling – worked with Wendy to load the completed stories to the Intranet & to create links to them with a webpage that will also be stored on the Intranet. Teachers will be sent a newsletter with a link that directs them there & be given instructions on how to put a shortcut on the desktop. We also burnt the stories to individual CDs – we went through the process of saving as a Power Point Show so they would run automatically. We also used an auto run program on the cd so that it would start running without having to click on any files.
Spent some time problem solving the firewire connection & downloading video to the laptop – don’t know what I did but seems to be going OK now. The trick might be (as Penny suggested) that the firewire card needs to be in place before the laptop is started up so that the device is recognised.
Prepared with Vicky for next term’s in-school days with the Junior School – looking at IT literacies as outlined in the school documents – how they can be incorporated into planning & assessment. Sharing of Digital Stories with Sherrilyn’s class. Hannah & Kate – Y8 authors shared the stories with the younger children.
Digital Story Telling – worked with Wendy to load the completed stories to the Intranet & to create links to them with a webpage that will also be stored on the Intranet. Teachers will be sent a newsletter with a link that directs them there & be given instructions on how to put a shortcut on the desktop. We also burnt the stories to individual CDs – we went through the process of saving as a Power Point Show so they would run automatically. We also used an auto run program on the cd so that it would start running without having to click on any files.
Spent some time problem solving the firewire connection & downloading video to the laptop – don’t know what I did but seems to be going OK now. The trick might be (as Penny suggested) that the firewire card needs to be in place before the laptop is started up so that the device is recognised.
Prepared with Vicky for next term’s in-school days with the Junior School – looking at IT literacies as outlined in the school documents – how they can be incorporated into planning & assessment. Sharing of Digital Stories with Sherrilyn’s class. Hannah & Kate – Y8 authors shared the stories with the younger children.
Huiakama
29th June
We were going to work with using the scanner to scan drawings & artwork. Could not get the old scanner working with the new xp computers – looking for a compatible driver online was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Introduced next term’s email game to Vicky & a group of older students. We checked out Toko’s website & the two Official Olympic games sites & bookmarked them. Bandwidth restrictions will make research difficult but enthusiasm will make up for that! Practised spreadsheet & graphing skills with a mock tally sheet & briefly looked at formula (because that is why spreadsheets are so cool). Photographed line drawings (instead of scanning) & worked on them in Paint. With these big files either scanned or photographed they need to be resized in a Photo Editor so they are manageable to work with. To be able to use fill tool we had to make the outline transparent.
We were going to work with using the scanner to scan drawings & artwork. Could not get the old scanner working with the new xp computers – looking for a compatible driver online was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Introduced next term’s email game to Vicky & a group of older students. We checked out Toko’s website & the two Official Olympic games sites & bookmarked them. Bandwidth restrictions will make research difficult but enthusiasm will make up for that! Practised spreadsheet & graphing skills with a mock tally sheet & briefly looked at formula (because that is why spreadsheets are so cool). Photographed line drawings (instead of scanning) & worked on them in Paint. With these big files either scanned or photographed they need to be resized in a Photo Editor so they are manageable to work with. To be able to use fill tool we had to make the outline transparent.
St Josephs
Monday 28th June
Looked at features of Paint with Dee – copy & paste to repeat shapes – resize, rotate, flip etc to create building blocks that again can be repeated. See Koru unit on Interact. Magnification tool for finer detail, opaque toggle button to get rid of the white background around an object, curved line tool. Writing text freehand – better to use the brush tool than the pen – thicker with more control. Talked about gathering digital media – making available through the network, with hyperlinks to find them & also copying backup cds. (similar to Stratford)
Scanning line drawings to work with Paint – Michael’s class has been problem solving through, file sizes, access to the scanner through the network. Downloaded scanner driver & canoscan toolbox to the shared network drive (Install T:) but need an administrator password to load new software on classroom computers. Worked with students to find optimum scan settings that the programmes would allow us to work with (Photo Editor & Paint).
Room 5 has done some awesome work on their power point since last week – they have worked out how to put in backgrounds, and do animations. I worked with a small group to create the transitions. When looking for bird pictures online we discovered bird calls. Children downloaded these and I worked with them to insert them into their work. They were able to show Vicky how to save pictures and sound from the Internet. Vicky would like some help in creating tables in Word for admin things like assessment checklists etc.
Discussed data collection and analysis with Rae will look at taking some time next term to work with MUSAC & Excel. There is lots of data generated by MUSAC but how to manipulate it to answer the questions we want to ask eg improvement in comprehension levels, what groups (girls, boys, Maori, non-Maori) are achieving etc & to create graphs to represent those questions.
Interest in WebChallenge from the senior school – support in this area next term.
Looked at features of Paint with Dee – copy & paste to repeat shapes – resize, rotate, flip etc to create building blocks that again can be repeated. See Koru unit on Interact. Magnification tool for finer detail, opaque toggle button to get rid of the white background around an object, curved line tool. Writing text freehand – better to use the brush tool than the pen – thicker with more control. Talked about gathering digital media – making available through the network, with hyperlinks to find them & also copying backup cds. (similar to Stratford)
Scanning line drawings to work with Paint – Michael’s class has been problem solving through, file sizes, access to the scanner through the network. Downloaded scanner driver & canoscan toolbox to the shared network drive (Install T:) but need an administrator password to load new software on classroom computers. Worked with students to find optimum scan settings that the programmes would allow us to work with (Photo Editor & Paint).
Room 5 has done some awesome work on their power point since last week – they have worked out how to put in backgrounds, and do animations. I worked with a small group to create the transitions. When looking for bird pictures online we discovered bird calls. Children downloaded these and I worked with them to insert them into their work. They were able to show Vicky how to save pictures and sound from the Internet. Vicky would like some help in creating tables in Word for admin things like assessment checklists etc.
Discussed data collection and analysis with Rae will look at taking some time next term to work with MUSAC & Excel. There is lots of data generated by MUSAC but how to manipulate it to answer the questions we want to ask eg improvement in comprehension levels, what groups (girls, boys, Maori, non-Maori) are achieving etc & to create graphs to represent those questions.
Interest in WebChallenge from the senior school – support in this area next term.
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