There’s a lot of talk happening about National Standards – probably more people are talking about them than about anything else introduced over the last few years. We’ve been working with Murray Gadd and he likened the National Standards to signposts and tied them in with Literacy Learning Progressions and the new National Curriculum.
I’ve had a busy holiday period – week 1 was NZEI Annual Meeting and week 2 was ULearn09 in Christchurch. I arrived home last night and am now trying to sort out all the new ’stuff’ I’ve come away from ULearn09 with.
Tuesday
We (my colleague Mariee and I) flew from Wgtn to Chch in the evening. As we were waiting at the airport someone said to me “Aren’t you KiwiJoe?” And so ULearn09 began even before we’d left Wgtn. On the same flight in (and out) as us were some teachers from another local school.
We landed and took a taxi to our hotel room where we checked in, dumped our bags and went back out straight away to catch up with those who were still at the twitter dinner. Some were still there but most had left still it was great to finally meet Chris, Kirsten, Myles, Dorothy & Jenny and to see some old faces – Barbs, Allanah, Rachel (and I’ve probably forgotten someone!).
Wednesday
First up was the opening keynote (preceded by an address by Anne Tolley) – Gary Stager who talked about 10 things you can do with a laptop – he also had some pointed things to say about National Standards!. We sat with Kirsten and Kelly and took collaborative notes and tweeted during the keynote.
Then it was time for Breakout 1. I went to “Juniors can do IT” with Rachel. (I took notes using etherpad until my battery died.) Although geared for younger children than I teach I came away with some ideas that I will use this coming term as part of our topic work.
Breakout 2 was “Software for learning” facilitated by Fiona and Rocky. This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be BUT it was very helpful in thinking about mindshifts and how ICT is used in classrooms and how it connects to the NZC. We looked at the 5 stages of embedding ICT into the classroom and we talked about how to support teachers in all the various stages. The thing I’ve come away with is a reminder that even when you’re the school ‘expert’ you haven’t finished learning!
Mariee and I relaxed during Breakout 3 – we wandered around the exhibition hall and chatted to various people at the Bloggers’ Cafe (including Simon who had me sold on a new piece of technology – actually I bought 2 new things to use in my classroom! – A new Creative video similar to the Flip called Vado & an Easi-speak microphone).
Wednesday evening we had a reception at the venue then “The Randoms” (some of us) went out for dinner at the Dux de Lux with some of us going on to The Base afterwards.
(We called ourselves the randoms because we’re all here in ones or twos and are all on twitter so planned to spend time together around meals.)
Thursday
An early start for me with a 7am Twitter breakfast. Great to relax over an excellent breakfast with the others!
I missed Thursday’s keynote as I was a little ‘keyed up’ before my two taster breakouts. I presented a taster session on Twitter followed by one on eLearning & using blogs/wikis in the classroom. Both sessions went well and there were 15-20 people in both sessions (some there for both).
Breakout 5 was “Why wait? Start using wikis and blogs now!” by Kelly. I really went along to support her as it was at Christ’s College which is a mac environment but I found myself being challenged with new ways of using my wiki. Thanks Kelly!
We had an early finish on Thursday as we all had to get ready for The Dinner. We were bussed out to Westpac Arena and what a spectacular night.
Friday
First breakout of the day was “How Moodle can work in the classroom” presented by Mel and Richard. While they both work in the secondary field, and we DON”T have moodle at school both Mariee and I came away with some ideas to work on over the next term.
And our final breakout was with Maria from Watchdog talking about Google Apps. Mariee and I are keen to do some collaborative work between our classes using Google Doc.
One of the very best things about ULearn09 was the networking – I was able to meet a lot of people f2f for the first time, even though I’ve been talking with them for many weeks/months/years. These are the people who help me do my “stuff” – they’re my PLN and I’m a better teacher because of them. Thanks to: Kellie, Fiona, Paula, Jamin, Allanah, Michael, Dave, Simon, Helen, Erin, Justine, Jane, Clair, Lenva, … just to mention a few. There are new people – who I met at ULearn09 – who will be part of my ongoing PLN as well.
And I suppose I should mention the other thing I brought home with me – my presenters cup!
And my final word – for now (LOL) – I was interviewed by the media team and finally figured out that the video is on Blip.tv.
I’m a tweeter – I love checking out to see what my PLN is up to. Today I noticed a comment from one person (@jshe) to another (@teachernz) referring to yet another person (@digitallearnin) and when I checked out the last person’s twitter feed I noticed a comment to yet another person (@Kelliemcrobert) who had posted a tweet some six hours previously.
I followed the link in that tweet and ended up at http://nps-ict-pd.wikispaces.com and followed the Web2.0 link. From there I scrolled down the page and saw this:
I clicked on the Trading Cards link and arrived at a blog link at Big Huge Labs.
And straight-away had an idea for my topic next term when we are going to be looking at a “Celebration of Inventors”. There’s no way I’d have come up with THAT idea all by myself.
To quote an old deodorant advertisement … “I can’t live with out my Twitter PLN!”
Giftedness:
-noun
1. the quality or state of being gifted
A conversation with a colleague several weeks ago has had me pondering giftedness and what it really entails.
In school we have GATE programs for gifted and talented students – but that usually means those gifted in arts or music or maths or sports etc. But what about students who are gifted in other ways? Are there other types of giftedness?
My colleague, Julie, and I are running a buddy class program – we split our classes and each work with 1/2 of the others class on Friday afternoons – that means I get 14 of my Year 3&4 students and 13 of her Y1 students (5-1/2 year olds).
Julie is a talented/gifted artist – she’s had several exhibitions to show case her art over the years. I, on the other hand, struggle to draw stick figures!
I have some talent in the area of music and singing – but am not what you’d call gifted in those areas. My area of gifting is to do with technology which is an area that Julie struggles in.
Colleagues say to me “but how did you do that?” all the time – my response is that computers talk to me. And as strange as that may sound I believe that it is a type of giftedness – one that perhaps is overlooked – “he’s just a geek” or “she’s just a geek” being a common reaction to those of us who sit down at our computers to produce our masterpieces – whether they be webpages or wikis or whatever.
I know that when I’m talking to other teachers about a program and we’re tossing ideas around as to what we can do, I come up with the techo stuff in the same way that the arty people, and the literary people come up with their ideas.
I also don’t think it strange to be on my computer for hours on end – I get a lot of enjoyment tinkering away at different things – my wiki page; working on my wikieducator stuff; blogging; tweeting; chatting online etc. My computer is an extension of me – as I explained it to someone last week – some people take handbags with them whereever they go – I take some sort of computing device – I’m never far from being online – even if it’s only via my cell phone.
What do you think? Is an affinity with computers, web2.0, cloud computing, technology to the extent that the machines are talking to us a form of giftedness?
And … if it is – what are we doing for the students in our class who are gifted in this way?
Our writing this week was quite simple – sort of. We started out by looking at a story/poem from a school journal: Recipe for a Saturday Morning. Then each group started off by brainstorming all the things they thought they should take with them on an island holiday (I had a stunning picture of sunset in the Faroe Islands as the starter). These were saved as a group to the wiki.
The next day I put the brainstorm up for them to see – all the groups at once – and asked them to write the top 5 things they would take (as individuals) in their draft books. These top 5 things were then saved to their group writing wiki.
I put the starter picture in a voicethread and asked them to publish their top 5 to the VT (embedded below).
I also got each child to dictate their words to me for a whole class wordle. I used the wordle to whittle down our list of 135 words to 6 words – wordle made that quite an easy task.
Original wordle
Final wordle
Then today we looked at the 6 words and each group drafted a phrase for each word. Then we looked at what each group had come up with and chose the best – mostly the groups all agreed that one was better than the rest (except the last so I just wrote up “a sleeping bag”).
Classroom management is always interesting especially if you have kids doing lots of different things at the same time. Added to the complication of marking is the problem of how do you assess when the work is being done in groups or online? And when do you do this assessment?
This week my class is writing a “Recipe for an Island Holiday”. I’m documenting the work done on my own wiki – not just for my reference but also for evidence of work for assessment. The class is working in a variety of ways: publishing to wiki; brainstorming on wiki; publishing/writing to voicethread; writing on the whiteboard using the magnetic words and whole class writing to a wordle (with me as the scribe for that task). There’s a lot of management making sure the kids are on task while I work with small groups on editing their work in their draft writing books. Phew!
Maths is another case. We’re just beginning division work and doing it in groups and hands on. Each group had a whiteboard and pen and blocks and as they worked their way through the work I took photos of their work.
Some are struggling with cooperative work!
At the end of the day I can look back and say we worked hard – there’s not a lot of book work as evidence BUT there is online evidence of it.
Earlier this week my daughter asked me if my students were too young to play Maths Rescue and Word Rescue – a couple of old DOS games that my own kids grew up playing.
It seems that some bright spark has written an emulator that allows you to play these old DOS games on almost any computer.
Here are some photos of my students playing the games in the classroom.
On a windows machine create a folder under c:/ called DOS or DOSGAMES. On a Mac create a folder in your base user directory. (~/user/yourlogin/)
Put all the zipped files into that folder and unzip them – let them unzip into the folder they specify. By default Maths Rescue will unzip into 1Math and Word Rescue into 1Rescue.
Then run the dosbox command. Once you’re in dosbox you will have to mount the drive. [Actions are inside bold square brackets]
Windows screenshot: mount c c:/dos [Enter] (or whatever you’ve called your folder – I’m assuming DOS here)
MAC screenshot: mount c ~/dos
Once you’ve mounted the C drive the commands are identical. Actions are in [square brackets!]
[1] Change to the C drive: C: [enter]
Then you have to install the games.
Change to the install directory:
1rescue for word rescue: cd 1rescue [enter]
1math for maths rescue: cd 1math [enter]
Then you type in the install command: install [enter]
You will go through a series of screens and each time you have an [enter] option – don’t worry about the other options just hit the enter key for each screen.
Screen 1
Screen 2
Screen 3
Screen 4
To get back to the C:/ prompt you type in cd.. [enter] and then go through the same process to install the second game.
Game Play
[1] Change to either maths or word rescue directories
Math: cd math [enter]
Word: cd word [enter]
[3] Type the command to activate the games
Maths Rescue: mr1 [enter]
Word Rescue: wr1 [enter]
[4] Take note of the keyboard commands – for most DOS games the Q button is your quit key. Both these games have automatic save.
[5] Once you’ve quit the game you have one final command: exit [enter] and then you’ll be back into your normal computing environment.
And that’s about it – hope you enjoy a chance to relive those games and your students enjoy them too. After two days about 1/2 my students are no longer asking me what they need to type up in order to mount the drive and play the game. I expect by the end of next week no one will be asking – but parents will be asking how to get these games. <G>
Here’s a link to an article by Clive Thompson about literacy – it seems a professor from Stanford has done a study over 6 years where she analysed student writing – from formal essays to emails, blog posts and chats.
The amazing thing she discovered is that today’s youth write more than in my day (think about it – those blog posts, tweets, emails etc you write today – we didn’t write like that when I was a kid – the only writing I did as a kid was an occasional letter (usually thank you one) or school work) and that they are adept at writing for an audience – because they know who their audience is.
I’ve been doing a bit of editing in both wikis over the last few days and while they are both wikis there are many differences.
WikiSpaces has a number of shortcuts for changing different sections – cosmetic changes if you like. The coding is also different which made my initial foray into WikiEducator a puzzle as the formatting I was used to using didn’t work.
My Classroom Wiki Portal
My WikiEducator homepage
WikiEducator has a different purpose overall I think. As already mentioned there are differences in the coding but it has a very neat function where you can edit parts of pages rather than having to edit the whole page at once.
indicates sections of editable code.”]
WikiSpaces allows you to embed objects (such as forms and pages) but I’ve yet to find that feature in WikiEducator. (And since they’re embedded they change as you continue to edit them.)
Embedded Google docs
I’m beginning to use WikiSpaces as part of my classroom curriculum delivery mechanism because it allows me to do the embedding (as mentioned above).
Part of Weekly Plan
WikiEducator allows me to do other types of formatting too such as the box shown here.
Other formatting available
I’m at the start of a 10-day wikieducator workshop – by the end I may well change how I use the two wikis. Time will tell.
![The [Edit] indicates sections of editable code.](http://dragonsinger57.com/files/2009/08/wikied2_220809-300x141.png "wikied2_220809")
