What are we learning here?

Blogging with Pictures

I should be gone by now - Friday afternoon after all but just about cracked how to put photos up - cool - try some more :-)

Team Work 

I have been so slack i haven't posted anything for ages! Been flat out this week with yr 3 & 4s at SPS learning to make movies - one for every letter of the alphabet - Phew! Lots of learning about how to work in teams and sometimes how not to work in teams :-) It is awesome to see them so engaged & tuned in to what they're doing - you have to put the lid down on the laptops & kick them out the door for lunch. The dreaded lurgy with any work i have done in classes is file management - saving stuff to who knows where, not saving stuff, using floppies & mixing them up not knowing which has got pictures on - aaah! But we get there in the end & everyone is really proud of their work. Great reflection taking place in these classes too - Why are we Making Movies? What are we going to learn? & What have we learnt? Student directed questions that demand answers.

Eltham Primary

Whole day with Graham – Yahoo. First time  Lots of discussion, preparing for TOD when the staff will pull in all the ‘nuts & bolts’ of thinking skill, curriculum integration, values & attitudes, HoMs, ICT integration etc into a coherent structure & plan of action. Sort of figured on a way to facilitate this on the day but will also depend on Chris Harwood’s curriculum integration workshop next week and what is thrown into the mix from there. Had a bit of fun with children role playing some of the school rules for Graham’s PowerPoint presentation for next week’s assembly – helped him put it all together – though as Graham says ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ so if you are not doing this stuff on a regular basis – you forget. I will put together a tutorial of our days work so he wouldn’t forget next time. Had a visit from Ronald McDonald – exciting. Eltham has recently been donated a pod of 6 recycled computers and another 15 for school families. The 6 computers will all be put into Kim’s room and shared with Megan’s class next door. They are meant to be already set up on their own little network but they will need to be linked to the school network in order to access the Internet – good job for a ComTech. Great to see computers getting into classrooms.

Matau School

As always – great to be out at Matau! Lots of things to go over today from discussing NavCon, trying to find out more details about next year’s Infolink course, learning how to create an Autoplay feature on a CD so it starts running in the right place. Richard has started sending some work home on disk with home sample books & needs parents to be able to access it easily. Updating & uploading the website. We tried to change the hit counter but it still isn’t working properly??? – still need to problem solve this one. Blogging is big at Matau School & all the kids have gone one – great writing & communication tool. They are all on blogger.com too – discussed the open internet environment as being unmoderated – Richard is monitoring things closely to keep track of what is happening with the kids blogs. Talked about kids blogging places as an alternative to blogger.com. Had a look around but not really much out there that we can find. Docking time at Matau so all the school were out to help – the kids took some photos & we made a little movie (as Richard say - hyped up slideshow) entitled Baaaa! The senior students are involved in a research project ‘The Road to Matau’ and were looking at ideas of how to present and share their work. I showed them the work I had done on ‘Jeffares War Archives’ and how it had been put together in webpages. Whether they make movies, powerpoints, or webpages – they can all be hyperlinked together so they can have a presentation that runs off a disc. There next challenge is to organise their work (categorise) and plan a structure & decide on presentation.
Called in to visit Huiakama & new Principal Claire Jordan on the way back to town. Claire is keen to be involved in what the cluster has to offer – has done an Infolink course earlier this year & is definitely on the right wave length. Looking forward to going back out there later in the term. Marilyn is taking WITTs computing courses once a week in town on a Friday and playing around on her home computer upskilling herself – good stuff Marilyn. Couldn’t go past Toko without dropping in to say Gidday Richard back into it after a week catching up from the holidays. Check out the 6 Stars http://www.toko.school.nz/

Stratford

Building blocks of webpages with Marlene’s extension kids. Marlene has worked with them in the planning & preparation of content & I have joined in to teach them the basics. Focused on writing html code using Notepad & creating webpages from scratch – mainly to give them the theory behind how pages work so they can look at any page or use any web editor with an understanding of how they are constructed. Made a little ‘How To’ file will post to Interact & to ShareIT. Another session introduced them to FrontPage. Reviewed appropriate content in particular the sharing of games & music. Discussed copyright & piracy. Best to review games & music with links to other sites rather than download stuff (illegally) for sharing through their own site. This common issue has come up before with kids making webpages. This little group now have to build on what they’ve learnt so far with the resources given http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/kids/ & http://www.lissaexplains.com/basics.shtml great sites for finding out more. Email me if they get stuck. They should be the experts for their wider group and Marlene to learn from.
Working again with Lynn as she begins to make backup copies of important school CDs. Accessing resources through the Intranet in particular the digital story books – the CD copies of these are now accessioned to the library and have proved popular with the students.
Sherrilyn needed advice on how to get parts of a song for the production. Showed her Audacity software for simple sound editing & made this and other Music software available through the Intranet – Acid Express & Music Maker. The difficult part will probably be managing file formats as they are imported & exported from the music editing programme???
Ross’s class asked for help on getting the dataprojector to work – the trick is with any dataprojector is starting up the projector b4 you start the laptop & using the Fn F5 buttons to toggle between the screens. Also need to check that the data projector is set to computer & not video.
Assisted with the SchoolZone application – liasing with Computerland technician and Tim Harper SZ technician. The site discovery form has been completed & sent in, joined up with the VEN (SZ education management side of things) & Telecom reckon its 15 days till delivery!