Since I’m home sick I’m catching up on blog reading.

This post from Wes made me stop and think about how many worksheets my students get in a week – and on reflection there are some weeks they get NONE!

The Thursday Folder and Worksheet Measured Learning

At the February 2009 Oklahoma Technology Association’s conference, keynote speaker Will Richardson told a story about the worksheets his own students bring home from their public school each week which resonated with me. Will said he’d contemplated keeping all the papers for an entire school year in a big stack, and then photographing them to document the school-communicated learning they’d experienced all year. I then thought about doing the same thing, since our two oldest children (who are in elementary school) bring home a “Thursday folder” each week filled with the worksheets they’ve completed.

Here is a refreshing video about blurring the curriculum lines in schools.

Found on another website – a link to this:

You pull the spin lever and it spins all the different wheels to give you a fun writing idea – noise effects and all. I’m going to try this week for some creative writing.

This book was mentioned during one of the keynotes at #LATS09 – I’m going to try and get it as it seems to be an important book for this year. Here is a short video of Ken talking about passion.

I don’t think I will post every day but will probably post things as I’m learning about the Mimio. My one disadvantage (or several) is that (1) the mac software is lagging behind the windows software and some of the things that we saw at #lats09 in the breakout I can’t do with the mac software – yet; (2) I don’t have a wireless kit – so my computer has to be close to the board/projector; (3) the projector is on a trolley which means it gets knocked about as kids move around the classroom – meaning I have to recalibrate more often than if it was ceiling mounted – the positive to that is that calibration is quick.

Yesterday I created my visual roll. I fired it up this morning and showed it to the first student into the classroom and then had to leave the room. When I got back (30 mins later) about 15 students had successfully pulled their faces over their names but someone had missed with the Mimio mouse and pulled the grid out of alignment. (There were also about 5 parents watching with fascination at what the kids were doing – hardly any room for me to move!)

At lunch time I had a bit of a search (thanks google) and finally figured out how to get the grid as a background object (most of the available documentation was for the windows version 6 software and not applicable for me) and therefore unmoveable.

I will see how it goes tomorrow morning.

One of the very cool things you can do is duplicate a page which is ideal for something you do daily or even weekly.

Today the activities we did were (not in the order we did them):

Handwriting

WAD – Word A Day

SODA – Start Of Day Activity

Maths – fact families

Word chunking

Busy Teacher’s Cafe — Classroom Management Page….ideas and tips to help manage and organize your classroom

In my classroom I begin my day with SODA – it’s based around Tony Ryan’s thinkers keys – apparently I’ve started a revolution because quite a number of parents (of kids in other classes) who attended a seminar run by one of my parents (on how children learn) and other teachers in my school have come up to me and talked about SODA or asked about it …

this website has a page of free journal activities – downloadable by the month with a journal writing topic for each day – i’m going to adapt what is on these pages and use a monthly planner like this for my SODA – at the moment i have it typed into my term planner (i’m using a self-created electronic planning book rather than a print one) but if i had a monthly planner just for SODA i can then share it with others as well as having it ready for use

photos today … actually these are from yesterday

first photo is what i had in my classroom

second is what has been added

as it’s a software/system trial i will have to keep a log of problems as well as what we do on the computer – how much we are using it (so we can sell to BOT when the time comes to advocate for more than one computer in a classroom)

a tough day today – back in class after 5 days off – my autistic boy very difficult – tantrums all day … so a nice surprise to get some extra computing power put into my classroom – i forgot to take pix but will do tomorrow …

basically i’m trialling a ‘thin client’ system called softxpand and have one computer and 4 workstations set up (lovely, shiny new flat screens and all!)

our technician has set it up for me to trial and i will be keeping a log of PMIs and activity – both for the vendor and for our board (cos if it’s good i’m gonna want to keep it and will need to show how i’ve been using it)

my kids all wrote letters to the boss today asking for us to be the ones to get the computers – we weren’t expecting it to happen so fast!

DLC #3 – literacy – this time about nouns, verbs, adjectives, and simple grammar conventions

[slideshare id=320120&doc=iamliterate-120640967915135-3&w=425]

i think i’ll trial as a whole class activity in the computer lab – working in pairs

DLC #2 Simple circuits

[slideshare id=320121&doc=circuits-1206409682367629-2&w=425]

i’ll trial this with a small group