Using and Managing Audio Recording in Class

This morning I worked with Margie Hanning (Junior Teacher) and Petra Olrich (Year 3-4 Teacher). They were both wanting to firm up the direction of their Action Research, Petra wanted to focus on her oral language programme. After the three of us talked about Action Research and choosing something specific to inquiry about she refined her focus to "improve the quality of her students personal responses when communicating or reporting to others." Petra had heard about Podcasting to decided she would like to do this. She is podcasting with podOmatic. Petra is a confident user of ICT so we spent the rest of our time talking about how she would manage the children podcasting with only 1-2 computers to use for this. We discussed having a roster, so children are the podcaster of the day and must collect infomation related to their reporting role and later in the day podcast this with Petra's help initially and then on their own. She would like to link this to her class blog so also made a Blogger account.

Margie wants to focus her Action Research on sound and letter knowledge. She has reorganised the order she is teaching the letter sounds in her room so that it is allined with her handwriting programme. We found some examples of a simple idea demonstrated on Rachel Boyd's blog and slideshare account, Rachel is a Primary School Teacher and ICT Facilitator in Nelson, Rachel has a letter of the day, the students go around the school and classroom and take photos of things which start with that letter. Margie, Perta and I discussed how this could be managed and thought that two children could be the photographers while the rest of the class does their handwriting also on a roster system. Petra had made some small frames and has given me the masters for these. I will put them in the picture area of our wiki as a resource to share. I have used cardboard frames for children to practise framing a shot before they get the camera, this is a good strategy if you have more children than cameras, but Petra's BLM is a better solution as it is more durable and when laminated waterproof. I then showed Margie slideshare, last year Margie became a powerpoint expert and thought she could use her skills in this area to train the students to make a slideshow with the pictures they have taken. Slideshare enables you to upload your powerpoints to the internet and then gives you an embedding code to put your powerpoints on blogs or wikis.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens in their classroom on my next visit, it was great working as a mini group and I think Petra and Margie helped one another more than I helped them. At GSNS the teachers are working in pairs from the session to help one another after I have left, having someone to talk to is important. The insight someone else has through a different perspective can solve many difficulties easily.