Today we moved into our new classroom – I shot some video footage of the different stages of turning the Library into Room 10. Enjoy

I’m not really sure who they are but I suspect they are sort of right.

I guess it depends on what we do with the change or even how we approach it but if we do it right it’s great.

The change for me is moving into a new classroom (ex-library) and up a level – from teaching Year 3&4 (Grade 2&3) to Year 5 (Grade 4). Our “middle” part of the school will have 3 vertical teams each with 4 classes and each class teaching a separate year level – Year 3, Year 4, Year 5 & Year 6. It’s the first time we’ve done something like this at our school but I think it’s exciting.

Because we are a full primary school (Y0-Y8) our Year 6 students are in a bit of a limbo – other primary schools that only go to Year 6 have leadership roles which the Year 5&6 students take up – but in our school those roles are given to the Year 7&8 students. By having vertical teams we should (theoretically) be able to see some of our Year 5/6 students being given opportunities to show leadership within our teams.

I was initially apprehensive of moving up to Year 5 – my previous experience teaching in that level wasn’t so great – but it was in our old format and I was job-sharing and once I realised that it was going to be different then I began to be quite excited by the prospect. Although I will only have 3 students moving with me (the rest being shared out among the other Year 4 & 5 classes) I will still have a core who’ve been through our fantastic year and who’ve done much of the eLearning experimenting/experiencing with me (including my fantastic student who featured in my Ulearn09 presentation). These 3 students will be my ‘experts’ for the first term.

My new classroom is going to be fantastic – we move in on Monday and when we visited the empty library today the kids started planning out where desks and “learning space” (not my term!) could be. We’ll have a week and a half in there before we break for our summer holidays. I shot a short video of the library before the books were packed; after they were packed and the shelves moved; I’ll shoot one on the weekend when my son and I move some of the gear over and then another short one with the desks and kids in there. Then I’ll merge them all and post here.

I’m looking forward to next year – it’s going to be another exciting, fast moving, thrilling eLearning journey for me and my class.

And my motto for next year?

I have two (which I am going to turn into posters for the classroom):

Both inspired by an old book (late 70’s publication) I have called “Skies Call 2″ full of skydiving photos taken by Andy Keech that has some truly spectacular photo shots. (The one below features on the cover of the book.)

My class will be the Room Nine High Divers. We’re going to dive into learning, take risks, enjoy new challenges and soar to new heights.

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.

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”).

Recipe for an Island Holiday

• a suitcase full of clothes
• 5 large bags of food
• hooray it’s payday, a wallet full of money
• a tank full of water
• a tube full of toothpaste
• a sleeping bag

We then published the final work to the class blog. A huge amount of work for a simple result.

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.

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.

Clive’s article is here.

Thanks to @zemote for the heads up on this one.

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.

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.

I know that sounds a bit daunting but it isn’t really. This program is very good news if your school is running on Moodle – a bit like a car running on gas really!

Background
I’ve signed up for an online workshop at wikieducator. I’m at home today recovering from a stinker of a headache and decided to do some more work on my profile and browse through some of the workshop and mastery pages ahead of time.

I came across a link to a tutorial about pedagogical templates where there was mention of eXe. Being a link clicker I followed that link and discovered some new software to play with.

How does this fit in with my use of google docs?
As I’ve posted before I’ve been using google docs – the docs I publish as a webpage and I use the forms tool to create online question forms.

Here’s an example of some homework questions about communication and you will see that #2 and #3 have links to wikipedia articles and to online forms in order to answer the questions. (Semaphore questions; Smoke signal questions)

In these examples you can see that students had to go to the first web page, open a second page to get to the wiki article and a third page to answer the questions. Clumsy. At least clumsy in light of what I discovered eXe can do for me.

Here is the eXe created equivalent document. It took me about 15 minutes to put together (mostly spent figuring out how to embed the google form) and save.

My school doesn’t have Moodle but I do have a dropbox account where I can host pages for others to access. So I exported the eXe file/bundle/package to a web folder and then renamed and moved the web folder to my public/shared folder in my dropbox. It automatically syncs to the cloud. I found the index.html file and got the public link to it and there we go.

For further reading you can check out these links:

• eXe -the eLearning XHTML editor (core-ed)
• eXe wiki
• Dropbox
• WikiEducator

I’m out of my classroom this morning for a literacy workshop. I’m not sure who the relief teacher will be but that’s ok – all my work is already online waiting for my students.

When my students arrive they turn the computers on and open up their assigned browser (long story!). Their home page is the class work blog. They read through the schedule for the day and then usually go on to play one of their favourite maths activities.

Today they will do the same but I won’t be there to see them through the first 1-1/2 hours. They can still do their work though and the relief teacher won’t have to do anything except manage the class.

I use google docs to plan my week. Then I publish it as a web page – this puts it into a format that is easily shared with my class (and others).

I hyperlink other work so that as I am demonstrating things for the class it’s easy to find them. The lessons are done the same way – I type up instructions – format them – and then publish as webpages – this makes it easy to hyperlink them in the class blog as well.

This is a shot from today’s maths:

I also set up maths activities (aka games) for the week and have them linked from one page:

When I come back into the class later in the morning the work is ready to go – I have this week’s spelling words linked as well as our reading activity for the day:

I’ve become a fan of google docs and find it frustrating when I have to use Word or even Open Office. One of the great things is I can still edit as I go – these are all living documents. Sometimes when several students ask me a question I then go back and write the answer up as part of the instructions. I do this quite openly in front of the students – it’s part of their teaching and learning as well as mine.

I’m happy to share the actual links with people so please let me know if you want to see the working documents.