Outram Term 2 2010

I had two really positive days at Outram School this term. There was a noticeable development of a positive attitude, improvement and excitement about the work we were doing from all staff. Many staff members had new teacher laptops that seemed to almost have them singing, they were so pleased to retire their old laptops after years of report writing and lesson planning they were not what they used to be.

Many teachers are using audio recording to meet students’ needs in writing. Writing is the school’s focus for all of their action research projects this year. Stacy is using this both to motivate and support some writers in her class. She observed how powerful this audio recording is for her as a teacher also. When she is marking the children's work she can hear exactly what they have tried to write. I’m sure many teachers particularly junior teachers, have had experiences of having no idea what the students writing says when they come to read the work. This enables Stacy to mark the work and identify what to bring up with the students without having to decode the writing with the student. This avoids a situation that can so often result in the child feeling as though they have failed, as their message is illegible to the teacher. The independence and success the student is experiencing is having a positive effect on their attitude to writing.

Erika's maths wiki

Erika has started a wiki with Dave. She has been uploading videos of her students demonstrating number strategies to share with parents what the students are learning at school and help parents understand the focus on strategies rather than knowing the answer.

We added some games to the website which complemented the strategies Erika's students were demonstrating and explaining. She has only just started to add these as it is a lot of work for her five year olds. One of the senior classes is also developing a wiki of mathematic strategies, so hopefully some older children will be able to help Erika out with the videoing. We talked about perhaps setting her resource room up as a little recording studio and having a 'recording in process' sign on the door. It's hard to find a quite time to record with very young children, there is no such thing as silent reading.

Clemency is ready to Podcast

Clemency has been using her blog to keep in touch with her class while she was overseas recently. Now that she is back she is ready to get the class blogging. When I visited last she was considering podcasting. She thought using audio blogging might be more engaging for the children and make it easier for them to report the class news without having to worry about the writing of their message as much as the message itself.

I said I would send a few examples from our cluster and of other schools podcasts. Clemency wants to have a class jingle at the beginning of each class news report. She is going to experiment with Garageband on her mac and during my next visit we will go through the process of uploading audio to her blog with podbean.

This is Petra's class blog and podcasts from George Street Normal School. You have to scroll down a little past all of the other exciting things they have been doing.

Click here to go to the cluster wiki's resource page on podcasting.
Point England School are serious podcasters.

Stacy is online

Stacy at Outram has been using a word document with some games hyperlinked to it to help her class navigate the web during reading time.

Last time I visited she didn't feel ready to undertake a wiki so thought she could learn to hyperlink in a document and understand this process and get this up and running in the class, sorting out the practical classroom problems and then going on to a wiki later. So she has a wiki and I think a lot more confidence in her knowledge and ability using technology.

She has been having some difficulty with some websites. She has been using them to reinforce phonics and spelling type teaching in her class and many of the games audio has been recorded with accents that change the vowel sound. We found a few more sites that she could use.
We also talked about the students using the digital camera to collect picture of objects which represent a target sound and displaying these in Comic Life projects on the wiki. I have sent her some examples of this on Margie (GSNS) and St Leonard's Junior wikis.

I am hoping to get back to help Stacy transfer her links from her document to her wikispace and putting some pictures into her wiki to represent her links and make her wiki look flash.
The main benefit of a wiki over a document is that it is portable, anywhere you have the internet you just put in the wiki address and up pops your wiki, at home, at the library, on school trips, holidays, snow days, any classroom. This is the really advantage that Stacy will now have.

Managing a wiki once you've made it.

Lynda has made her maths wiki during one of her CRT days. It was all finished, we just added a few touches. Making sure that the children had pictures they could click on to represent their maths groups, as many of Lynda's NE class members are beginning readers.

We also put some picture of her class during mathematics time on the wiki to personalise it. Then we went over to Lynda's class and made her classroom computers homepage the class wiki, and put some links in the toolbar of the internet browser of her classroom computer so that the children could get straight back to their wiki if they get stuck in a game or a bit lost online.

We also looked at the resources that Lynda could use that you can download from the cluster wiki to support managing you computers in the classroom. There are posters and help signs etc made up, these will save Lynda having to dream and type these up. There are lots of tips on this page for managing computers in the classroom to make you life easier and the classroom a little quieter.

Moving forward with a wiki.

Kerry and Janferie have put their action research projects together which is very sensible since they share the same classroom.

We went over some of their questions and reviewed a few things that they say they were not ready for last time. This is a very important point when trying new things, you need to be ready to take them on. That is why frequent efforts to do things rather than putting in great chunks of time tend to work better when you are doing something new.

Just like anything learning to build a great class wiki takes time and you do go through a period when things feel more annoying than worthwhile, but the more you preserver the easier it does become. While we were focusing on all of the next things they want to do, it is also a great time to celebrate what they have achieved since my last visit. I hope they had time afterwards to think about that. They could go back and read my last blog post about them.

One thing Janferie and I discussed was concepts. She explained that it is important for her to understand what she is doing and I totally agree. If you get the concepts behind what you are doing, trying to do, you tend not to need to know every little step. If you have the big picture most of the steps just make sense, they become obvious or common sense. With a bit of deduction and trial and error you can usually work out what to do. And of course frequent practice makes perfect. Janferie said last time I visited they weren't ready- now they are and I can't wait to see what they end up with.

Planning and filming video to teach Number Strategies

Sarah at Outram School has been working with the students in her class to develop a video library demonstrating number strategies to each other.
Sarah has been getting the students to learn a new strategy and then plan an instructional or demonstration video for each other to teach what they have learnt.

She has been storing these on her class wiki so that the students can continue to review their work. She says that this activity which is a part of her maths programme now as an independent activity has been a really good way of increasing students confidence and communication skills to explain their thinking and has really helped students to remember the strategies and use them.

The wiki has become a resource for the class that they can also share with parents at home. This helps to demonstrate to parents the strategies that are now a focus for students in numeracy. Many parents are still trying to understand the teaching of strategies rather than teaching pencil and paper algorithms.

The students have taken control of all of the planning and filming, Sarah just exports the video so it is a web size (small for uploading and playing back) and puts it onto the wiki.

She is developing pages for each strategy she teaches. Sarah will be sharing her work at the next Virtual Syndicate on Numeracy, but you can have a peak now by clicking here.

I Can Count

I said in my last post that I worked with seven teachers to build a class wiki but only mentioned four. The other three Tania, Ryan and Amber have had some experience building a wiki so we covered different things.

Ryan and Tania were experimenting with adding sound into their wiki. Although it can be really frustrating at first when you get it right adding sound to a wiki is really quite easy. You add sound just as you would a file or picture with the symbol of a little tree.

Tania did a great post on her wiki of a student reading a book. The best thing for me was that I didn't know how long you could record for and stay under 4MB (this is the limit for uploading to a wiki). Tania's recording was just over 5 minutes and uploaded easily. We didn't check the file size Tania. We will have to next time. Ryan and I did this with his file as we thought it might be one of the reasons why it wasn't uploading but there was something wrong with the recording which Ryan can now fix. You check the file size on a Mac by selecting the file and pressing command and the letter I (I remember that by thinking Information).

Ryan also gave every child in his class a sign in for his wiki he went to "Manage Space" on his wiki and selected User Creator.
In here he followed the instruction given to list each child in his class with a user name and password, then all of these logins were created. It was pretty easy.

for example
Username, password
bobg, 0utram1
amyi, 0utram2

Ryan will be giving the students their logins and passwords and keeping his own copy also.

Amber has made a cool jigsaw out of a class photo for her wiki and changed the navigation bar on her wiki. If you don't change it it will automatically make every page you create a link in the navigation side bar.

I also sent them a link to this website to have a go at some other tricky things when they are ready or interested.

Looking forward to seeing their wikis next visit, people should be warned that blogs and wikis can become obsessions once you start doing some of this cool stuff.

Wiki Mania

I worked with seven teachers at Outram who are all taking on a wikispace to manage and enhance effective computer use during Maths or Reading time. Janfrie, Kerry, Megan and Lynda have the best advantage for their action research, that they will all be able to support one another and save each other a lot of work. One of the most time consuming things about making a wiki can be finding the approriate games and sites to link to. This searching and reviewing should be made easier as it can be done as a team.

One of the best things about wikis is that you can copy pages etc of other people's wikis and if you work in a syndicate situation where everyone has a wiki you can take turns making some of the pages your class works from, modifying pages is much easier than building them from scratch.

We discussed some of the management ideas and the wiki has some ideas to support thismanaging ICT in the class . Janfrie was concerned that the children would not play the computer games correctly and made a good point about learning opportunities being lost because of too much choice. We talked about what she does with floor games in her class currently. She gives children a specific game she wants them to play which relates to what they are learning and she teaches the children to play this game before she sends them off to play it. The computer should be no different.

Greg was in the room at the time and suggested numbering the games, most teachers will be doing this so they are able to tell the children "circles will be playing number 12 today."They can match the right game to the child and learning intention without any extra preparation. Once the games are there and all numbered, all of the work is done. That is even easier than floor games- you won't be trying to put all the game pieces back in the right bags during the holidays.

We all looked for games to link to from the following sites. I will start compiling a list on the wiki in the future as the year goes on and hopefully all of the finds of these fantastic five will be added in there and we can all benefit from their searching.

Literacy
Big Universe
Starfall

Numeracy
NZMaths We also looked at the digital objects.
BBC Maths this is a link to the main BBC schools site which has Math, Science and English stuff which is really fantastic. Go to the Primary part. KS1 is juniors KS2 Year 3ish-5/6 KS3 will have some stuff which is appropriate at Year 6-8.

KS means Key Stage ( a bit like our curriculum levels in NZ)


One of the best things to know when building a wiki especially for little ones is how to take a screen shot. To take a screen shot it is the command key, shift key and the number 4 key together on a Mac on a PC you need a programme. It is also important to use tabbed browsing (having a few tabs open at once) you press cntrl (PC) or command (Mac) and the letter T, to open a new tab. Then you can have you wiki open in one tab and use other tabs for searching in.


I can't wait to see how all of these teachers work together and what they all do in their classrooms.

Stacy can hyperlink

I worked with Stacy who teaches New Entrants for maths at Outram. She announced to me that she knew nothing about computers and was "the worst in the school". Funnily enough about four people told me that, just that day, they can't all be the worst. In fact Stacy was a very fast learner and had heaps of skills. It is easy to feel like you don't know a lot when you compare your self to what other people know. The only person we should compare ourselves with is ourselves a year ago or four years ago, or last week. That is why we are making a note of changes to our learning and thinking and Stacy did this at record speed.

She wanted to get the students to use the computer well during Maths without interrupting her and to make sure that learning stayed the focus for them when they were on the computer. We discussed a lot of ideas from the Otepoti wiki.

Stacy felt like a wiki was too much at this stage so we discussed hyperlinks. Stacy didn't know how to make a hyperlink and had heard the word but wasn't too sure about what it could mean to her programme. We talked about how hyperlinks enabled children to get the idea of connected thinking. We discussed how children can start to link something they are writing about to something else that relates. I told her about some children who have written poems and linked words to images to create feeling and mood in their poems. Stacy started making a table with hyperlinks for each math group to use during their time on the computer.
Next time I see Stacy we will put these into a wiki. A few people who had been making blogs and using hyperlinks didn't know how to do this in documents so now Stacy can teach them all.

Clemency at Outram School

Yesterday I visited Outram School to see how they were going with their Action Research ideas. First up I worked with two teachers but will separate their blog posts as they were both doing different things.
Clemency teaches a year 2 and 3 class at Outram and blew me away with her enthusiasm for the blog that she has made for her class last year. She has independently completed her own Action Research last year and has already learnt so much.
She showed me a really neat post on her blog of a little girl in her class in a 30 second video clip swimming. She said for the parents to be able to see this was a real moment when she realized how powerful the blog was as the girl had been terrified of the water previously and her parents at work would have missed this significant moment where she had achieved.

This year Clemency plans to take her blog further by involving the children in making the blog posts, and reporting on the news in their class. She has assigned roles for the children, three children will complete a blog post each week. She is going to train the children and provide some pictorial instructions on how to do a blog post.

An idea I heard Jane Nicholls talk about once was to use a lanyard or some type of identification tag to give the job some status, such as this picture with the title reporter or official photographer for Room 8. I thought this was a simple and effective idea, for a bit of fun.

We also discussed podcasting. As Clemency's class are younger children for some the writing of comments and captions may be difficult, for Clemency it means she will have to edit and proof read much of what they have written. This year Clemency will trial the students using voice to report their blog comments. I left her the link from the podcasting information on the wiki and a link to Point England School in Auckland who are serious about podcasting. They have really gone to town with it.

Clemency's enthusiasm has made a real impression on me. She has been keeping a diary of new ideas and steps she has been taking during the process. I told her about how some teachers thought of keeping a parallel blog of their own about their action research, there are no rules about how you present you action research. Finding an easy way to keep track of the learning and changes that happen along the way in the early stages will mean there is no pressure at the end of the year to remember what you have done. It may seem silly now but by the end of the action research it might be really difficult to remember where you started.