Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Comprehension and Retelling

North East Valley Normal School ICT Lead Teacher Karen wants to target her action research to improve her students comprehension and retelling skills of text they have read.
She was thinking about using paint for the children to draw a picture of the story they have read or heard to use as a prop or reminder for their oral retelling. After we played around with paint Karen decided that for her year ones, aspects of the way the programme worked would be very frustrating. It does require a lot of mouse control and patience.
We talked about how Karen could capture the oral retelling of the children. Karen is familiar with audacity and was confident she could record the children's retelling. We created a wiki for these audio recordings to be uploaded to. Karen will have a picture of the book and then several children's recordings orally retelling story on wiki.
Uploading these files to the wiki is the same process and Karen was confident if she played around with the wiki she would be able to do this quite easily.

At the virtual syndicate meeting on Monday we were discussing time and how teachers may have to put a little time in at the beginning of these projects to learn how to use a new technology, but this was worthwhile as you get this time back as this new skill saves you time later. Karen had commented that when she had started her blog last year it was slow but she became so quick once she got going that she barely noticed the time she spent blogging and there were many things she just didn't need to do because of the blog.
I think part of Karen's confidence to take on the wiki comes from these blog skills. Components of a wiki and blog are so similar or at least the concepts of what you are doing that learning to wiki is now so easy for Karen. Everything she learnt blogging, transfers to a new project.

Your ability to learn new things increases and also your confidence to teach yourself by trial and error, or the confidence that you will be able to find out how to do something as you go along and when it is needed. This is the type of change that we might not notice in ourselves. I wonder if the other Lead Teachers have noticed how much faster they are able to learn new skills?

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