iPods in classroom View more presentations from russellst.
An interesting look at using iPod’s in the classroom. Very intuitive but couldn’t they find an image of an iPod touch? The picture was of a 4th Generation iPod, which was so 2006!!! Shows how much technology has changed over the past 5 years. Imagine it in the next 10 years….
I have been trying to find some cool ways to track the amount of traffic coming onto your blog. Most people use Clustr Maps . If you don’t know about that, it is a cool widget that you can activate to show a map of the world and when someone visits your blog then a red dot is planted on your map from wherever in the world they are. A good mate of mine Regan has just done a blog entry about so read here if you want to know more.
I wanted to add a simple hit counter to my students ePortfolios as a way to motivate them to get others to look at their blogs. I found Free Hit Counter in my searches and it is such an easy way to add a hit counter to your blog to see the amount of traffic you receive. Check it out. Let me know any other cool widgets that are a must on ePortfolios.
I was very lucky to be given four iPod touches as part of my digital class ICT allocation. I also put my hand up to house safely and keep the other six iPod touches in my room for if another class would like to use them. Seeing as no one has been willing to have a dab at using them, me and my students have been exploring the possibilities of using these in the classroom.
Having 4 is pretty cool, but 10 is unreal as it enables every student in our Literacy groups to have access to their own one. My first introduction and continued implementation is via our Literacy programme. We were reading an article about life in Iran, a country the students knew nothing about and didn’t even know what part of the world it was in. Giving them each an iPod, we used Google Earth to find where it was and how far away from NZ it was, this encouraged a lot of discussion around how long in a plane would it take, what might the time be in Iran right then etc. We found the capital city of Tehran and zoomed in on the street view and saw how different it looked to that of NZ streets and how enormous it looked compared to Palmerston Nth. We then used World Wiki to find out about the language spoken, religion, population etc and then compared it back to NZ. And last we used Free Translator to find out how to say hello in their native tongue of Farsi.
The kids thought this was pretty choice and loved that they were the first group to use the iPod’s in their learning. This attracted a whole lot of attention from the rest of the kids at their tables hearing us ooohing and aaaahing over the fun we were having. Using the iPod’s really got the kids enthused and motivated to learn about a topic I thought that would have been quite dull. And at the end of the day, Don’t we want to create meaningful, authentic and engaging tasks for our students?
If you have an iPod or iPhone, here are the Digi-Ridoo’s top 5 free ‘FUN’ apps: (Still valuable learning but with the element of fun)
1) Tapout Similar to the Rush Hour games from Thinkfun, where you have to move boats in a harbour along a path to free your boat.
2) Toobz You have to put pieces of pipe together in a time limit to form a flow, then the water comes after a minute of making your pipe circuit and the longer the water goes without spilling the more points you get.
3) Docking Donuts Similar to Bejeweled on Facebook, you have to stack donuts like tetris and when you have three in a group they disappear and you get points but your tray moves up each time and makes it harder.
4) Simon Haha, my kids didn’t realise that this game was invented in the late 70′s (YE-AH!!!) but they love it. You gotta love those ‘throwback’ games!!
5) Spray Can Don’t judge me just because I grew up in Sth Auckland!! But a really cool app to produce some pretty mean pieces of wall art. You even have to shake the iPod to prime you contents and it even has the shaker sound-Wicked!
Honorable mention:
Rock Band: Great for reflexes and getting the kids to appreciate the Foo Fighters!
Sunday Lawn: Very cool little game about mowing lawns, if only the kids were as motivated to mow their own lawns.
Write Answer: Sums: Awesome app to help practise basic facts and they have to write it in using their finger.
Extreme World Records: Picture book of the ‘Believe it or Not’ records, a real fan favourite!
Glow Beats: Very cool little music making app, you change the coloured dots to music loops and extend, repeat, shorten etc to make your own little tune.
Tiki Totems: Great for geometry, sort of like Jenga, you have to remove certain blocks to make your ball fall into the goal area.
Check them out and share any cool apps that you have or heard about.
Had a bit of a break from blogging but trying to get back into in this year. (Better late than never) Am loving having a digital class this year. So great to have 15 computers and 10 iPod touches for my kids to dabble with. So including my teacher laptop, I can get 26 out of my 28 children on eLearning tools at any given time -Pretty Choice huh?
And it is even better that we are an Apple platform school!! The learning experiences that you can generate on apples are so much better and easier to use than that of PC (I ain’t hating on PC’s but I just couldn’t touch one after having a sleek apple laptop to bash around on) I had managed to get my kids into the routines of using their ePortfolio’s as a platform to give parents an insight into what they are doing at school. A lot of parents frequent their child’s blogsite and give feedback which is great for the students. It is my goal to continue to get my students to use their blogs to share their high order learning experiences with the rest of the world and produce quality eLearning examples.
I have links to each of my students blogs on the right hand side of the blog under the heading ‘Class’ Please check these out and give me any feedback that you can.
I have just set up blogs for each of my Literacy Groups and I am trialling the use of these in my classroom. Many a time do my children create an awesome slideshow or presentation for Literacy and they share it with the class which is cool, but now they are able to share these at home with their whanau. My students were very receptive to the introduction of blogs and all of them were very keen to get their work visible via web 2.0. I know that the children will go home and share their blog with their family and some have already told me that they have shown it at home. This is only going to strengthen the link between home and school and will give parents a window into what their children are learning about in our class. You are able to check out each of my class blogs on the link in the sidebar. I welcome your feedback and suggestions to improve these.
On Tuesday 4th August, we were very lucky to have Rita Palmer come and take a staff meeting about the new Ministry of Education resource on Oral Language called ‘Learning Through Talk.’ It was great timing for me that the Ministry put out a resource about Oral Language, as that was the focus of my Teacher Inquiry.
I have had a flick through the resource prior to Rita talking us through it. I really liked the anecdotes and ideas from other teachers on how they use Oral Language in their classroom. Lots of the time, these documents can tend to have rather unambiguous and plain ideas that don’t really appeal to teachers who are always looking for ‘outside the box’ ideas to bring to their classroom. But this document was different in that respect and had ideas from teachers who like to incorporate ICT and Higher Order Thinking Skills, something which I like to do also.
Some of the ideas that I would like to investigate further are the possibility of exploring independent podcasting with your students. The document gave plenty of ideas such as poetry recital, book reports etc that you could get a group of students to explore. This inspired me to set up these types of activities to do with my kids and I know they would enjoy doing an activity like this.
The document also gave me some ideas that perhaps I could improve in my own teaching. One in particular which I have already reflected on in my Teacher Inquiry page is that of finishing sentences of my students or translating what they have said so that the rest of the class are able to gain understanding from the idea that they have shared. I think the reason that I do this for my students is to make sure that my students great ideas and thoughts are recognized by the rest of the class.
Also because my children are only Year 4, they sometimes take a while crafting their ideas and I want to encourage their ideas to be heard, but don’t want to lose the attention of the rest of the class. It is tough, but now what I aim to do is to ask others to clarify what someone has said to make them listen to others thoughts and not have me translate and interpret their ideas.
We had a meeting in our podgroup today at RSS and our focus was around Teacher Inquiry and we have to have our Individual Plan about our topic chosen and completed by our next meeting out at Pahiatua in a few weeks time. We have to have it around an element of Oral Language as that is one of the focuses of our EHSAS cluster. I’m quite interested in getting into the ‘Student Speak’ programme that was used out at Coley St School when we visited there as a pod last year. One of my pod members recommended it today as they had used it in their school and talked quite highly of it. The other members of our pod said they had it in their school, but hadn’t used it yet.
Oral Language is an area that has a lot of children worldwide have gaps in and maybe this is a shift in culture, with the availability of email, text messaging, social networking sites etc, where there isn’t the same need for face to face contact anymore. In my day you couldn’t lazily send a text or an instant message to a girl you liked, or a mate to see where the parties were at. You had to go and get the phone (What were cordless phones?) and ring up those people and actually communicate with them, and 9 times out of 10, their parents picked up the phone and you had to be polite and well mannered, otherwise you’d get the rep as being “Oh, that friend….”
Modern technological advances have certainly made communication a lot quicker and easier, but is it moving society away from the need to have good oral communication skills? How many of us go to Pak ‘N Save or McDonalds or the Petrol Stations and have a conversation with the person working behind the till? Wasn’t friendly service, feeling welcomed to a shop what made you want to go back to that shop again? What has happened to goodwill at those shops? Do we just go there because its the cheapest, fastest, nastiest? Nowadays it is almost scary when the person serving you has good communication skills and can hold a conversation with us. Is that wrong?
I think what my ponderings have brought me towards is that if teenagers are ‘LOL’ing ‘Sup’ing or 
’ing now and that is rapidly becoming the norm. What are our current students going to be like when they are teenagers? Will the world be filled with abbreviations, acronyms and characterisations with symbols? Now I’m all for changing with the times, but I want to make sure my students are able to communicate their ideas concisely, thoughfully and emotively and to be able to hold a conversation with a person of any age and not shying away behind technology.
My Teacher Inquiry will be something around improving my students ability to be able to commucate their ideas about a given topic. I welcome your criticism and/or advice as I’m a rookie at this T.I bizzo.
As part of our EHSAS cluster we had a teacher only day at our school around Oral Language & Teacher Inquiry. We had 3 guest speakers from various ‘walks of life’ and 3 teachers from school involved in a similar EHSAS cluster who are from different school who shared their individual teacher inquiry about improving literacy.
I found the first speaker who spoke about emotional intelligence to have a really important message, but his presentation didn’t hit the mark dynamically for me. One important point he brought up was the importance of accepting feedback from people without looking at the negatives.
For example, last week Nick came and sat in my classroom and conversed with my students about what they were focussing on getting better at and they were able to identify the things they had learnt and what they were improving on. But when he asked them how they knew that they had gotten better at something, they couldn’t elaborate further on this. This was probably from my inexperience around using formative practise in the classroom. In particular developing a success criteria that is visible for my students to be able to reflect upon and assess, before their learning comes to me. Nick told me this and said that this is what I needed to do. Rather than taking this feedback as Nick telling me I wasn’t doing my job properly (the negative side, which we tend to take from criticism sometimes) I was able to discuss with him about the ‘where to’ from here and what to do to maximise student learning. (Take it as a postive, that this is what you can now do to make it better)
The second speaker discussed his own experiences with school and how it ‘never really did it for him.’ He also talked about his successes by sticking with something that he was positive about, taking some calculated risks and making a career out of it. I found him to be very inspiring and although his somewhat ‘crass’ persona didn’t sit with some people, I found it to be enlightening, and liked that he added an element of humour and fun to his presentation. A highlight in what he said was that it made me realise that in todays schools, we are only going to get more and more students just like him in our classrooms and we need to cater for these students and not turn them off learning by getting them to do their learning ‘by the book.’
The final speaker was a life coach and she discussed the importance of the childs emotional response to feedback given. We as educators are now coming into a world of education where providing feedback to our students about what they can improve or how they can improve their learning is an extremely powerful tool. Do we stop and think for a minute how the child takes on us saying “Maybe you could add some more detail to your story” or “Could you elaborate further about this key point?” when we as adults (as mentioned above) are quite quick to take personal criticism negatively when it is given to us. How are the students to take our feedback? Do we think how they feel about us saying that about their work? It certainly makes you wonder how people interpret the things you say to them, Especially our students. It makes you wonder….
With our schools upcoming ERO visit in week 9, our senior mangement (Emphasis on the senior, not the management-Haha!) had a pretend visit around our classrooms this afternoon and their main focus was “How do the kids in my classroom know what they are getting better at?”
I feel pretty comfortable that the articulate group of Year 4 students I have would be able to answer this question, and a few would be able to explicitly share a range of things in response to this. That is great that nowadays students have so much input into their own learning and they are able to identify areas that they need to improve, and more importantly WANT to improve on. I distinctly remember when I was at school that we learnt what our teacher told us we had to learn, and you just tried to get better at everything, you didn’t have a choice!!!
So me being able to talk my senior managers through that topic, really solidified the important role of formative practise in my classroom. The more I am getting into sharing our learning intentions with my students and co-constructing success criteria with them, the more input they are having in own learning and knowing for themselves what they want to get better at.
Another thing which really hit home today during this visit was the importance in the wording of your learning intentions. For example when I introduced the task of creating a crayon/dye hoe for our waka, our WALT was Make a crayon/dye print. But then upon the conversation we had around it today, it hit home that our WALT should have been Using crayon/dye effectively or Use a range of colours together effectively, as that is the skill the students are trying to get better at, where making a crayon/dye print is the vehicle or the final product. It’s all in the wording, plus it is transferrable to another art unit we may do later in the year.
On Tuesday, I was released to liase with my school buddy Tammy about using formative practise in our classrooms. She teaches Year 1′s in the class next door to me. Last year we had a period of release time to do the same thing, so we were lucky that we had already engaged in conversations like this before.
One of the things we discussed was the most effective ways to involve children in the building of success criteria. I shared with Tammy that with my class when we finished our art unit, we designed the criteria for a successful artpiece. We were able to do this as along our design process, we talked about the things which made our art stand out. We outlined things like big thick patterns, thick chalk lines, no mosquito holes in our crayoning etc. Then together we established our success criteria based on those things.
Another thing we discussed was how do we as teachers know our students were getting better at achieving success criteria. We talked about how a lot of this comes from teacher observation and your students confidence in attempting skills around a particular learning area. Also having your students measure their own work against the success criteria and being able to say they have done this part well, but they are working towards achieving the next part etc.
I found this chat valuable with my buddy and it is great talking with someone who doesn’t teach the same age as you as they offer a different perspective on the way you as a senior teacher teaches.
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