Voicethread - interesting reading

A link to some interesting ideas for using voicethread. Check it out!
http://judyarztblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/ideas-for-using-voicethread-powerful.html

Voice Thread

I enjoyed our ICT session at our staff meeting on Tuesday on Voice Thread. Was definately not as hard to create a voice thread as i had thought. the set up process with the children photos would probably be the most time consuming part, but once it is all set up and the kids and they know how to create a voice thread, i can see they would be able to run this pretty much without teacher support. im looking forward to trailing this with the class, and will spend this week setting up the photos and training my ICT monitors so they can teach others. will let you know how it goes!

http://voicethread.com/share/2387185/

Quietube a useful tool

Something else that i found out about at the Ulearn conference was quietube! This is a fantastic tool that you can use to watch videos, say on youtube, without all the distractions. You can load the video that you want to watch through this site, and it takes all of the advertsing and other smaller clips away. I can see it will be effective in my class as often when we are watching clips and information in class, children are distracted by the things that are happening around the rest of the page, particularly on sites such as youtube. check it out for yourself following the link below:

http://quietube.com/

Fotobabble! A new web tool from Ulearn!

Reflection on my ICT Journey

Wow! What a busy term we've had! i started last term with great gusto in ICT and blogs, but found towards the end of the term we were just so swamped by finishing off things and being so tired and exhausted that reflecting on my blog and trying out new ICT things with my class was just too difficult to fit into my daily programme.  I was a bit disappointed by this, but found it so tricky to find time for each child to get onto the computer to make their reflections and goal setting.  It is hard to find a balance between the learning log reflections and blog reflections, because of course it is so much easier to get a class to sit down and reflect in their learning logs at the same time, rather than getting each child on the computer one at a time.  This of course takes longer and is harder to monitor.  And of course, while students are on the computer reflecting on their blogs, they are missing out on whatever the rest of the class are doing and then need to catch up on this work.

I guess it is a case of me finding a time that works best for them to be missing work, say in the afternoon during topic time, and making sure that children get used to the routine of getting on, reflecting and then getting the next person on the list to jump on and reflect, rather than me constantly reminding them, as i will often forget when we are in the middle of a lesson.

I am looking forward to using the flip videos this term, and can see them being really effective with our oral language programme.  I plan to record each child doing an impromptu speech at the beginning of the term and then get them to set goals based on their ‘first attempt’.  Once we have had some practise in speech making we will record another impromptu speech and reflect on our progress.  It should be a really great way for children to visually see which areas they need to improve in.

Written Language Meeting With Pukete School

I really enjoyed getting together with this group of teachers this week to discuss writing.  Even being in another teachers classrooms was inspiring enough to get me thinking about how i could adapt different things i saw for my own students!
We spent a great deal of time talking about our writing process, how we choose our topic for writing (these are based on what our big idea topic is), Our porposes for writing, the process we have for writing, looking over both schools rubrics (which had many similiteries, but some differences) and how we get students to conferece and discuss thier writing. 
We felt that our grading of childrens work was consistent between the schools, and found children at similar levels were doing similar things.

Some Interesting Observations:

• No portfolio or learning logs. Teachers report back to parents using samples taken at the beginning of the year that the teacher keeps in thier own ringbinder.  Children are not invovled in this process.
• Children are not invovled in the goal seeting process.  The teacher choses the goals they have for writing, and there is no pre/post samples of writing completed for genre areas.
• ICT technology is not used as a tool for teaching writing
• Had some great discussions, and the teachers rooms have some fantastic displays around writing.  Very inspiring.

My Very First Post!

Wow!  how exciting, my very first blog.  im very excited about my new blog, and how it looks.  What do you think?  im looking forward to all the things im going to learn to do using this new learning tool!

My wallwisher

My Wonderful Class for 2011