KimP’s Blog

The best laid plans of a bracing walk through the wilds of Scotland with John were overthrown by the weather, and so we spent a great few hours in the cosy surrounds of the elegant lounge room at the Bridge of Orchy Hotel (in the west central Highlands of Argyll).

We chatted our way through most of the ills facing education today, planned and plotted how to fix the world and made our way back to what we were all up to and planning for the next year or so.

In The World According to Three Educators by a Fire, this is what we came up with:

Know your goals as you set out.

Take a steady approach, but always with your goals in mind.

Be prepared for serendipitous events, embrace them, use them and learn from them.

Allow students to lead their learning – support, encourage and celebrate learning as it happens.

Need to backward plan at times to enable a more open and exploratory type of learning to take place.

Thanks John, with your knowledge and understanding of students, learning and ICT I know you will continue to make a positive impact on learning in North Lanarkshire schools.

Do we “tick the boxes” or teach in a creative, child-centred and thought provoking way where students and teachers are given permission to learn and discover together, in a partnership of learners?

Do we encourage young teachers (all teachers?) to engage with their students, form relationships and learn together using new technologies and applications to enhance learning and relevance?

Do we support the exciting and innovative, scaffolding the teacher (like we do the students)  so that they have freedom within a framework?

Quite simply, I think we do, I think we have to.

We owe our students and teachers to encourage and advocate for the inspiring, the innovative, the exciting and the relevant.

Do we?

Can we?

Will we?

Snug and warm in a tiny café off the Royal Mile, we met up with the Adventure Author team: Judy, Cathrin and Keiron, to catch up and to discover what everyone had been up to since we last met.

The Adventure Author Project has finished, and the intrepid three are moving on so it was a good time to recap and talk about what they had found out and where they might go next.

Judy shared some of the newer features of the Adventure Author software:

1.    Comment Cards – which allow comments to be made and shared between students and the teacher

2.    Evaluation Page – specific criteria to be evaluated

-       star rating

-       attach evidence option

3.    To Do List – to keep track of what has been done and what needs to be done next

And we discussed how they have been used by students how they might be used by teachers to scaffold and support writing (as well as game making).

Judy and her team insist that students are at the centre of their learning – that students need to drive their own learning, work together to explore and discover and then share what they have found out.

This approach seems to give students the permission to take responsibility for their actions/plans, gives them the structures to develop their learning around and the confidence, time and expectation that they will then share and evaluate what they have done or discovered.

We discussed how this approach works in various settings (with undergraduates and Primary students) and all felt that an unexpected bonus was the creative way students could (and did) respond to the challenge of being in control of the what and how of their learning.

As always, some wonderful and thought provoking ideas about creativity ensued – eg does one create and then find a purpose for the creation or does one create for a purpose or does one create because they can?????? (Maybe all at different times).

Thanks team for a great afternoon and night of interesting, provoking and thoughtful discussions and sharing. Looking forward to hooking up with something new in the not-too-distant-future.

I have always got my class to set goals at the beginning of each term or semester. I think that this is one small way that my students can learn to grow as effective and more independent learners. I think that setting  goals for the term or semester can help my students organise themselves and “learn to learn”.

Goal setting is important

• to focus
• to get involved
• to “own” learning
• to build confidence
• to motivate
• to set what needs to be done
• as a path to learning

Some times and classes are more successful than others -

• is it the particular students, their understanding, their commitment?
• is it the structures or scaffolds that help the students to set goals and targets?
• is it the follow through/reminding / checking / follow up that SUPPORTS students and keep them focussed?

Students gain much from articulating their goals and their targets to reach their goals, and in my experience they need to

write it down

mark it off

check it

compare

look for “personal bests”

celebrate reaching targets

think about the goal

affirm themselves

Student goal setting needs to be open, students need to be accountable, they need to be able “see” and “say” their goals and targets.

You’ll find some useful proformas to adapt and use this semester, and a SMART site  might help.

Now, in the spirit of keeping on, we will track where  we want to go this semester ….

Image: ‘P1000737.JPG‘
www.flickr.com/photos/61724844@N00/683155329

  In this session we looked at the various characters in the game.We discussed (as we moved through the game, often retracing our steps, or jumping ahead to see/watch/view the particular character we were talking about)

• the lack of main or “big” characters in Haluz
• what each character added to the game
• the personality characteristics that each character had/showed
• how we knew what the character was like – and what made us think that way
  • background music
  • way the character moved
  • what the character did
• what the character might have been feeling/ hearing/thinking at different points in the game
  • and how this influenced the characters movements
  • how the words we used to describe  changed according to how the character was feeling/acting

During this session we couldn’t help but act out different ways of moving, of reacting, and of thinking whilst we were “in character”.

The kids then had some time to work on writing about one of the characters. I think they made some great attempts at actually “being” the character …… what do you think?

“Sendrick the snake had never heard music before, so he hastily pulled himself out of his basket when the strange music began playing”  Sarah.

“Zaffa the hungry snake ferociously swallowed the cute furry mouse like a racing car going at great speed” Moustapha.

“Watching the mouse as carefully as a shark spying on it’s prey, Valisa, the suspicious snake waited for the mouse to peek out of the tiny hole” Momtahina.

“George excitedly popped out from his basket when he heard the beautiful music”  Steven.

“I stomped outside to see what was going on. Even though a vulture-like predator had my satellite dish I couldn’t help but smile. I was about to embark on a miraculous quest …” Timothy.

“Peeping out of the ancient box, one eye after the other, I rise carefully with caution, to the roof of the slimy lizard’s mouth. Jerking upwards towards the lizard’s dirty, disgusting tongue, I shake my head sideways and bump into the lizard’s throat, giving him a constantly sore throat” Naomi.

“Carelessly, I sprang out of the straw basket swaying to the music, not thinking of what I was doing. Only one thought was on my mind, “sway to the music” for I had not heard the marvellous music that I was swaying to right now for what felt like a hundred years”  Natalie

I am so excited about being able to embed things like this into my class blog, that I had to blog about it here too

How cool is this?

Last week we tried out a mind mapping tool called mind42.com to organise our thinking about Natural Disasters.

We had just been introduced to Natural Disasters through some wonderful hands on science activities from the CSIRO and we thought that we would like to investigate further.

This is what we came up with – have a look at the map above – you can move themap, make the text bigger/smaller, open and close the nodes. WOW

AllStars – leave a comment about the area you would like to investigate.  

Thanks to a motivating post from Jess McCulloch (language teacher from Victoria, Australia), I am trying out a preview post to focus on the week ahead.  

Jess said, “I get to think about what I really want to get out of this coming week which allows me to focus my planning a bit more. I’ll be able to check back at the end of the week and see how I’ve gone and then start all over again for the following week. Hmm, could be a good process!”

I agree! I always seem to have a plethora of things that I have to accomplish, it all gets overwhelming, so I give up and accomplish very little at all. I’m hoping that by focussing and writing down a few items to concentrate on, I will be able to keep what is important at the forefront of what I am doing, and I will be able to actively work at achieving/doing what I set out to do.

1. Laptops: I am going to take advantage of our mobile school laptops in my room. My students can use them for their individual “Areas of Focus” work in Maths. This will allow everyone to work through the protocols of using the laptops, as well as having the opportunity for some on-line Maths work.

2. iWB: I will use my board in three new ways this week (Thanks again Jess     )

3. Blogging: tutoring of class “newbies” by class “oldies”  worked really well last week, so I will continue this week by focussing the class on

• positive commenting – keeping conversations going
• “inside” a blog – how to find your way around, what it all the headings mean, how to post

So, I know exactly where I want to go this week (and I’ve written a blog post too    ) and as Jess said, “Bring It ON!”

Image is “Focus” by ihtatho

Our negotiated task for this term was 

to create a game, based on our study of history, using the MissionMaker program. 

Here’s a brief outline of how we went about it……. 

1.    Exploring world history. “Taste testing” periods, people, stories from 3 eras:           

• Ancient history          
• Medieval history           
• Modern history 

2.    Focusing in on a story that they enjoyed –            

• Researching         
• Familiarizing          
• Comparing info/accounts of the story 

3.    Playing with MissionMaker

• Playing MM games           
•  Watching training video for ideas, ways of using the props, objects, rooms           
• Exploring the program themselves 

4.    Negotiating task requirements«           

• Pick up 5 objects           
• Use a story from history           
• Demonstrate knowledge of your period in history           
• Rubric 

5.    Aligning historical story with MissionMaker game. Deciding on worlds, characters, objects that are available in the game           

• Mind map of possibilities – who, when, where, what, why, how          
• Physical map of the game – rooms, characters, objects, clues

6.    Making the game – this is where we are up to now

7.    Presenting the games for play 

It’s school holidays at the moment so we have had to take a break from game-making for the next two weeks, but will continue when we get back to school.  

I have been encouraging the students to blog their preparations and plans as we go. To “see” what they have been up to please visit our class blog –  07 AllStars and click on their individual blogs down the right hand side of the page.

Further to a previous post on my student’s commenting skills, I decided to explore the issue in a teaching unit recently. The series of lessons fit into our English syllabus as they involve Talking & Listening, Reading and Writing. 

I wanted to improve the commenting being undertaken by my students. 

We started our discussions by looking at lots of comments on many styles and types of blogs. Students classified them into 3 star, 2 star, and 1 star comments. 

We cut and pasted some comments onto one page and discussed these comments further, trying to find examples of what good comments were. 

Next, students tried to articulate the aspects of comments that made them worthwhile and meaningful to them as recipients. What did they, themselves, feel was useful in a comment? 

We looked at some sentence starters we had up in the room, and why they were good.We looked at open-ended question starters that we use in our Reading Circles and discussed how they were useful. 

We had a chart in our room that we had made earlier in the year that had our class requirements for commenting (full sentences, grammar, punctuation, positive, constructive). 

 We discussed this and realized that we had to add other criteria as well. We came up with a number of areas that were missing from our original chart: 

• Links – to our own life and experiences         
• Responding –  to what the blogger is saying/ thinking/ asking           
• Conversation – between the blogger and you, asking questions for clarification, for more info 

We found it really hard work:  

• to respond thoughtfully to what the blogger was saying, and to respond to their message.           
• to articulate what was required in a great comment 

But we all have a clear definition of what is required now

PS: we practiced our commenting on our blogging friends blogs, and this is what Mr Pearce from Geelong in
Victoria had to say recently 

An “opportunity to talk to and learn from teachers and educators across sectors ……. to talk through issues confronting education in a Web 2.0 world …… enjoy the feeling of being a part of something new and different and stimulating. … “ Megan Poore, Chair, Learning Futures Coordinating Committee. 

Held in the beautiful grounds of the Australian National University in Canberra mid September, The Learning Futures Symposium was an eclectic gathering of people interested and passionate in responding to and embracing the changes that must be made for formal education to remain relevant in the 21^st century. 

Keynotes from Jillian Dellit, the Learning Federation, about the knowledge economy and the slow uptake of digital technologies in the education sector. Schools and teachers are the products of governments’ inability to change and to acknowledge the “knowledge economy’. 

Dale Spender spoke on the digital revolution and how it isn’t optional – how the implications for education are transforming learning, literacy, creativity and assessment. The world wide web has changed reading, writing, creating, thinking – it’s changing social, economic and political structures but it has not yet changed education and education structures. 

The spotlight speaker was Garry Putland, from education.au, who spoke on the applications that kids are using out of school, the applications used within schools, and user-generated content. He pointed out that connectivity is already part of our kids’ lives and that when we put up barriers, we are really just encouraging kids to go around the barriers.  

Garry mentioned that we as teachers have to tread carefully, but innovate and become entrepreneurial – push the boundaries because while kids use these technologies they are also “clumsy” with them. It is our role to discuss, explore, articulate and teach to the needs of the kids. We need to help develop our students’ critical thinking and analysis skills rather than banning everything we don’t understand/agree with. 

Lots of food for thought here! 

What I liked :)

• Chance to talk with other educators across boundaries           
• Sharing uses of technologies and applications           
• Networking with others          
• Hearing about exciting projects 

Things that worried me :(          

• “We are already doing this” (no we are not- KimP)          
• “It’s the teaching NOT the technology” (its both! Lets more on from PowerPoint – please!!!!!!! – KimP)          
• “My system can’t/won’t/is unable to change” (it will have to – go on, lead the way -  KimP)