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.