Tuesday, June 2, 2009

North East Valley Normal School


Today I was at NEVN working one-on-one with the teachers. They have just got netbooks in their classes, which are really hard for adults to use ( I felt like I had giants' hands when I was trying to work on them). I did get used to them, makes you think, how difficult is it for young children on adult sized laptops?

There are always a few problems setting up new gear and getting it all networked and working as it should. It is quite exciting what the teachers and students will be able to do with these new resources. It made me think about how important it will become for teachers to have resources that can move with them, such as wikis and blogs etc. When you change classes, schools etc it is bad enough having to physically move so many resources but if you have painstakingly set you computers up with games/software it is another job which will only become more frustrating with the more computers in each class. With web based resources all you need to do is set the internet up to your own web resource (wiki, blog etc), your resources can easily move with you. Of course there would be software you would want but most of your resources can be linked together on the web.

I spent a bit of time with Fiona sorting out a few issues she was having with Picassa http://picasa.google.com . This is a great tool for bloggers, you can make slideshows and collages with Piccassa and load them up in one hit onto your blog, rather than doing these one and a time.

Karen is linking her blog and wiki together, she is putting some help sheets on her wiki for parents to learn to leave comments on her blog. They will be able to link back and forth without noticing they are leaving the blog and Karen can take advantage of the properties of both tools.

Tracy is working away on her Reading wiki and will be adding some podcasted stories to her wiki. She will be using a nice easy but effective idea from Tania (Outram's wiki).

The senior classes have been working on their word processing skills and are ready to start their writing blog. The children will write in word and then cut and paste their story into the blog. There are ways of blogging offline, but small steps and understanding the process is an important part of getting to that stage. Eventually each student will have their own blogging login and will be able to independently blog. At this stage the process will be teacher controlled.

Michael's action research will be of interest to many people who are working with a screen, projector or interactive whiteboard for the first time. He is challenging himself to use the screen in his room as many ways as he can over the year and keep a diary on how he is using it and reflecting on the benefits students got from it. He is trying to ensure that he doesn't use this tool just for lecturing but that it enhances engagement and learning in his class.

No comments:

Post a Comment