Matau

Updating web pages using FTP, narrating Power Point (I learnt that you can use head phones as a microphone if you plug them into the microphone slot and talk into them!), talking about our NetSafe training, NavCon, sharing resources, & Software – what else did we do Richard – I can’t remember but it was a busy & productive day.

Mahoe

Web Challenge – High Flyers and Sharon – the kids have done some great work on their web pages. They are so good at working things out for themselves – some students had created a Quiz using forms in FrontPage but couldn’t quite get it to work. One group were trying to get their Hyperstudio presentations to run off their webpages but to do this you need a plug-in that we were unable to download because of file size and bandwidth – we also decided that their webpage would not be very user friendly if everyone had to download a hyperstudio plug in so they decided to use screen shots of their work instead. With this group we focused on file management – where they saved their files and how they named them (eg index.html for the first page) and then we made sure they had a good navigation structure. They were a bit unorganised with how they were putting it all together – got there in the end. The Busy Bees (Juniors) have created a cool little site about what is happening on the farm – it was good to see all the planning and preparation that went into it - storyboarding & writing, taking good photos – seeing the process behind the product is where all the real learning is.

Stratford Primary

Stratford will be having a poster session at NavCon on Digital Story books. Caught up with the students involved and had them design covers for their CDs and check through and fix up any minor errors in their work. The junior school was in the Info Centre as we were working so this was a good opportunity for them to share their work. Have asked the students to evaluate their learning by thinking about what they thought the benefits were of working in a digital format were as opposed to creating the hard copies of illustrated story books. This has been an interesting project but largely led by me with little participation from the senior team. I did spend some time one on one with Wendy looking at technical aspects such as putting work on the Intranet, creating links to it and copying the kids work to CD and making them AutoPlay. Future IT projects in the senior school need to be led by them and supported by me – instead of the other way around – maybe next term.

Stratford Primary

Stratford will be having a poster session at NavCon on Digital Story books. Caught up with the students involved and had them design covers for their CDs and check through and fix up any minor errors in their work. The junior school was in the Info Centre as we were working so this was a good opportunity for them to share their work. Have asked the students to evaluate their learning by thinking about what they thought the benefits were of working in a digital format were as opposed to creating the hard copies of illustrated story books. This has been an interesting project but largely led by me with little participation from the senior team. I did spend some time one on one with Wendy looking at technical aspects such as putting work on the Intranet, creating links to it and copying the kids work to CD and making them AutoPlay. Future IT projects in the senior school need to be led by them and supported by me – instead of the other way around – maybe next term.

Stratford Primary

Stratford will be having a poster session at NavCon on Digital Story books. Caught up with the students involved and had them design covers for their CDs and check through and fix up any minor errors in their work. The junior school was in the Info Centre as we were working so this was a good opportunity for them to share their work. Have asked the students to evaluate their learning by thinking about what they thought the benefits were of working in a digital format were as opposed to creating the hard copies of illustrated story books. This has been an interesting project but largely led by me with little participation from the senior team. I did spend some time one on one with Wendy looking at technical aspects such as putting work on the Intranet, creating links to it and copying the kids work to CD and making them AutoPlay. Future IT projects in the senior school need to be led by them and supported by me – instead of the other way around – maybe next term.

Stratford Primary

Stratford will be having a poster session at NavCon on Digital Story books. Caught up with the students involved and had them design covers for their CDs and check through and fix up any minor errors in their work. The junior school was in the Info Centre as we were working so this was a good opportunity for them to share their work. Have asked the students to evaluate their learning by thinking about what they thought the benefits were of working in a digital format were as opposed to creating the hard copies of illustrated story books. This has been an interesting project but largely led by me with little participation from the senior team. I did spend some time one on one with Wendy looking at technical aspects such as putting work on the Intranet, creating links to it and copying the kids work to CD and making them AutoPlay. Future IT projects in the senior school need to be led by them and supported by me – instead of the other way around – maybe next term.

Eltham Primary

Team teaching with Bob in the ‘Learning Centre’ (Computer Suite). Bob’s objectives were to have his children & himself familiar with using the computers – routines & rules about appropriate use of the computer room and basic skills like logging on, finding & opening programmes, and saving work. They used Claris Works – Paint & Wordprocessing to create a presentation about themselves. The children also learnt how to use the camera and took photos of each other. Management of the children was a big focus – having them work effectively in teams, monitoring & assisting them in different activities, having alternative activities available as children waited for resources to become available (there were not enough working computers for the children to use even in groups of 3). Part of this management was spending some time to develop some ‘experts’ who were responsible for teaching others – taking photos, inserting images, saving work to the right place, downloading photos to the network etc. Technical considerations – individual class logons so that work can be saved to a separate area & so stuff doesn’t just get saved all over the network. Childrens’ folders set up before hand – there was no system of file management – this is important not just for the security of the childrens work but also so that the network doesn’t get clogged up with junk all over the place. The application programmes are not easily accessible and it was quite a mission to hunt through the Finder utility to find Claris Works – this should be on the desktop or the docking bar down the bottom. Phew - a network still in progress - but getting there.

Stratford Primary

Thanks to Wendy & Elise from Mahoe who worked with teachers in the Middle Syndicate today & with Alison from Stanley School – sharing their knowledge of Movie Making. We went through a brief presentation about the rationale behind Movie Making in the classroom & looked at some examples of the process of movie making & some of their students work. Then armed with a digital camera & a laptop we broke up into small groups & created our own works of art. MovieMaker2 is so easy to use but has its limitations such as only having one track for audio so you can’t have narration and a soundtrack together. Some of the technical concerns were that we had to commandeer other teachers laptops as we needed machines that were running XP – then we found that it was difficult to transfer the photos onto these machines because we were using Mavica’s that used floppy disks and of course our new laptops don’t have floppy disk drives. Stratford accessed contestable funding to cover release time for this PD and plan to pass their new expertise on to other members of the staff.

St. Joseph's School

The first of a three day block here. Server still not up and running but we are able to access the local computers. Hard for the kids who are half way through their websites and can’t access their work. Gave them a brief tutorial on creating animations with Paint & PowerPoint – PowerPoint can be saved as an html file and linked to their web pages when they are able to access them again. Some are doing some great original work – creating virtual classrooms in Paint, though some could not get motivated into creating any original as they couldn’t get past not finding it in ClipArt!
Worked with Carol & the room 3 students who have just started a topic study on plants – had met with Carol to prepare last week and looked at what teacher resources were available online. Used a ICT Learning Experience – animation with Paint & PowerPoint for the students to illustrate the life cycle of a plant. Plenty of discussion and storyboarded first.
Continued working with Room 3 to produce their animation in “Flower Point” as one student called it. There was plenty of discussion as we made it as to the learning objectives – what a plant needs to grow, and the stages of growth – every time they added a new feature they would want to watch it again & so they talked their way through it. Perhaps an ambitious project for students of this age to tackle without supervision because of the number of steps involved and because each step built on the one before. Without my support it would have been necessary to have a senior buddy or computer mentor to assist and keep them on track. Lots of other theme activities happening at the same time so fitted in really well with the class programme.
Cybersense and Nonsense with the middle school – Michael’s class doing Action Learning & finding out about gathering information. Shared some tips and advise about finding information online and how to find good websites. We practiced by evaluating and comparing websites about different sports associated with the Olympic Games.
Spent some time with Bernadette who wants to work with her music resources so she can access and use them easily with a laptop and data projector. Thought that catalogued web pages would be the best way to organise and display her song sheets and PowerPoint would not hold a longer continuous page of music without having to click between and back again. Created a pathfinder of the steps we need to go through to digitalise and organise her music collection which will need some more help along the way. First step is scanning her work and saving as Word files. Need some OCR software loaded and to have the scanner attached to a faster networked computer otherwise it will take a lifetime to do! Once this has been done then I will be able to work with Bernadette again to set up her Music pages using FrontPage. An enjoyable few days at St. Josephs and nice to spend some continuous time in one school.

Stratford Primary School

Working with the junior school teachers – exploring school network resources, internet resources – TKI (subscribed to the newsletter), TKI search facility, exemplars, ARB, refining Internet searches to find relevant classroom material and how to use the Ctrl+F to find what you’re looking for in a page (sure beats scanning & skimming if you’re trying to get quickly to the point). Encouraging teachers to use the Internet more often in planning and preparation – it does take time but so does scrummaging through the Room 8 resource room. As they become more familiar with what’s available they begin to become more confident and to build a routine of where to go and how to find things and how to best adapt resources to suit their needs. Shared planning and resources on the Tech buddy system and an ICT activity – Class Scrapbook. This is a good starting point to build confidence not so much in the technology itself but in the planning to use it and classroom routines, management and basic skills. Did a short session with Room 9 on learning how to take digital photos, and taught Julie how to download them to the computer and how to format disks.

Makahu School

A pleasure to visit Makahu with a roaring fire in the classroom when its sooo cold outside! Still some issues with uploading the webpages and finally managed to contact their web hosting service (was a bit worried they might have done a runner). Have got Makahu’s web pages on my computer now so I can try and problem solve this further in town (with better Internet access).
Explored the use of Excel to create graphs that BOTs can understand. We made a few different practise ones and saved these to add to later.
Troubleshooting with Emily how to burn CDs on the laptop. It does not have the drag and drop utility that some of the newer laptops have so we used the Roxio burning software installed. It was reasonably easy to burn files from the laptop but quite a process to make a backup copy of a CD and very slow! But we got there in the end. Tried out some webwacker software (Educational Edition Blue Squirrel) but it wasn’t very effective. Have since found that you can download files for offline viewing just by using the Favourites tool bar in Internet Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/learnmore/offlineviewing.mspx
We also played around with their nice new camera/video/mp3 player. Wondered how to convert music files so they could be used in different applications? Further reading here http://mp3.about.com/cs/tipstricks/a/convertfiles.htm Installed MovieMaker2 and downloaded Flash Extract Pilot for capturing and saving Flash files from the Internet. This would be useful to avoid the bandwidth problems of repeatedly loading online Flash interactives. (The problem is you have to download them in the first place and that takes forever – we tried to load the Clifford online storybooks but we just couldn’t get them). Emily is trying to track down some software for their old digital video so she can download video (suggested she said a request to the cluster schools) but I think they really need a fire wire card – will look at this next time if they’re interested.

Eltham Primary School

Megan was joined by Deana from St.Joseph’s to look at how other schools use their networks to share teaching and admin resources. Looked at Stratford’s network and talked about their journey towards a ‘paperless’ school. How the use of email in communication is key, how resources can be stored in shared network areas and linked to so that teachers can be guided towards finding them more easily. We talked about how digital learning media – information cds, journal cds etc are now more commonly used and how, copyright allowing, they can be copied to and shared across a network and accessed throughout the school. We also visited Toko and thanks Richard for spending the time showing us how your network works for you. Looked at the work the MOE have been doing with Student Management System (SMS) accreditation and Infrastructure audits. Encouraged Megan to contact the appropriate people for more information before going too far down the road of adopting a SMS.

Stanley & Toko Schools

Stanley school are creating a community resource to commemorate the closing on their school. It will be in the form of hyperlinked pages including relevant historical information, photographs, digital interviews & cut to a cd for distribution. Worked with Alison to learn how to use Microsoft Frontpage for navigation of the information being collected. Planned and created the structure and navigation of the pages – Stanley students will gather and publish the resources in FrontPage.
Toko again in the afternoon – Cybersense and Nonsense with yr5 & 6. Again some interesting discussion everyone had stories they wanted to share. Need to be aware that students need to understand the language and vocabulary of ‘cyberspace’ – that it is here and now (not in the future and not out in outer space).

Toko School

Cybersense and Nonsense – staying safe online and critically evaluating websites with the yr7s. The aim was to make sure they know the basic rules of safe internet use – don’t give out any personal information, simple netiquette – being respectful to others online, and staying away from pop-ups and registration forms. Get your facts right by checking out a range of information sources and comparing them, looking at who wrote the web sites and why, and if you’re not sure about it ask your parents and teachers. The Cyberpigs interactive animation is a great tool to engage the students and get them thinking about the issues.
The yr 8s were a lot more Internet savvy – and had a few more ideas about the issues of Internet use. They applied their critical thinking skills to an online interactive Joe Cool or Joe Fool which looks at a range of different web sites and outlines scenarios associated with them. There was some good discussion throughout – students made good choices during the activity but does that lead to good choices in a real situation? I don’t know?
It was good to be able to work from a big screen using the data projector – live to an Internet site. It really enabled more discussion & interaction than if students had been sent to computers to work through the activity.
Observed & assisted the students in the afternoon as they registered for Maths Week and participated in the Olympics Online game.

St Josephs

Had a play with MUSAC trying to work out how to extract data to present graphical information – either as a function of MUSAC or from Excel. Found there is a feature called Adapt Analysis that can show graphical comparisons – though this is an add-on and costs another $100 to buy into. Another possibility is using the DataCube – I think you use this to select the areas you want to look at by applying filters – you can then export this data to Excel. I have very limited experience with MUSAC so it may be something they can pursue on their next MUSAC training session. Spent some time with Vicky learning how to make tables in Word & sorting them and caught up with the NetGuide Web Challenge kids to see how they were getting on & to help them out with their questions. Made sure I brought them altogether to talk about their new learning and encouraging them to help each other out by sharing what they had learnt. For example adding sound to a page or using code like marquee to make your words scroll across the page. Directed them to Webmonkey for Kids to find more cool code to play around with. It would be a good idea to register soon so that you get weekly newsletters and webmaking tips.

Eltham

Online resources for teachers. The Internet is not only a great place for exciting interactives for students but there is so much available for teachers that we don’t have to be reinventing the wheel all the time. Spent some time with Heather familiarising with the TKI resources – WickEd interactives (though not really suitable level for all her students), exemplar banks were of interest, Assessment Resource Bank. Subscribed Heather to the TKI newsletter so we can be more aware of what’s available and follow up what’s relevant. Having a fast Internet connection makes all the difference! We learned how to make meaningful searches and bookmark sites for finding again later. We trialled the Dr. Seuss Story Maker – a little interactive that allows children to create their own stories. The kids loved it though we found that when the story played back it ran a bit quickly for them to read and they weren’t able to save what they had made. Sound for very young children is helpful on the reading sites and we found a Clifford site that catered for this very well. The children particularly liked using these sites as they had read these books at school and at home before. Management of whole classes in the computer room was discussed and we talked about the room being a Learning Area where there are resources available for other activities to be happening while the teacher worked with smaller groups of children on the computer. Great idea Heather! Just like a real classroom. Managing the network is a bit problematic with Gavin being offsite – Bernadette can access the network but needs more training on the day to day troubleshooting tasks. We went on to the network administration and learnt how to change passwords for users – we also found the home directory for the school website which is set up to be hosted on the Eltham server but we couldn’t find an easy way to transfer the files from the office computer to the network.

ConnectED

A lot of time in the office this week after rescheduling at Toko & Stanley – got to be flexible. A lot of work coordinating with TaraNet, WITT & the MOE for the ConnectEd workshop on Thursday. A Virtual Fieldtrip with the Rotorua Bathhouse Museum was great. We showcased this at the ConnectEd workshop. Students viewed the museum’s collection & were taught about the Tarawera eruption & the geology of the Rotorua area. The opportunities offered by VC are very exciting & we should look to tap into these & create them for ourselves. On behalf of the cluster I spoke about what some of our students and teachers had done with Video conferencing this year.

Stratford

Room 10 are completely new! It’s great to see all these new 5 year olds – bright as buttons and keen to learn. Some work to do to enable access to the network & spent a good time working with the logistics of having a very old (32MB) computer and no network access. Working our way around this by having the Junior laptop up & running in this class and a very long network cable running into Room 9 – we will have to drill a hole in the wall so we can access the network port without jamming the cable in the door. After all of that we still couldn’t get on the network because we need to find out what the passwords are. In the meantime we set up a Reading folder with some story books downloaded from the Internet and the Digital stories that the senior students had made. Will spend some more time with Angela next week getting onto the school network and finding our way around the resources there.