I Frame- Blogs in Wikis at St Leonard's School

At St Leonards two of the classes have been using wikis in 2009. Both had decided over time that they would like a place to put news or share work. As time went on they wanted to archive this work and things had started to get messy. Their wikis were not originally intended to have this information on them but as their skills have grown they now wanted to use them in this way. A blog is really a better tool to use to update news and have it archived as the blog does this for you. So we made two blogs and went over how these worked which was easy for these teachers as they were able to relate the skills and understandings from their wiki to learn to blog. The parents are well trained to visit the wiki and they didn’t want to manage two online spaces. We could have linked the blog into the wiki with a button but we decided to use an Iframe. We used some html code to put a window in the wiki which you could see and interact with the blog through. Check them out, they look great. Room 1 and Room 3.

Lianne at St Leonards has been thinking about using her class wiki for news board, she will get students to write onto the wiki and at the top of the writing she will write DRAFT so parents know it has not been checked by the teacher. Thanks to our National Facilitator Jill for this idea.

We talked about then using the children’s writing at newsboard to edit this work as a class, taking responsibility for the wiki’s presentation as a class. This would mean Lianne doesn’t have to do this after school in her preparation time and the students benefit from an authentic editing experience as newsboard time.

Change

One thing that was very obvious at St Leonard's when I visited was how well everyone was working together to learn new ICT skills and to change their practice.
I don't know how tech savvy everyone was there before the contract started but they all seemed pretty competent and confident yesterday.
One thing I didn't think about before this contract was how far I had come and how much I had learnt. I doesn't really occur to you yourself. Sometimes it is not until you stop and think about where you were a year or two ago you realise how much you have learnt or changed.
I have just emailled the team at St Leonard's and asked them to think about this very thing, I was just wondered if they had all noticed their own changes. Change can creep up on you, especially if it happens slowly or amongst things that are a bit annoying-like smoothing out technical difficulties etc.
Lianne (Lead Teacher) has obviously done a fantastic job of passing things she learns on and supporting everyone but also all of the staff have all shared all of their skills and really committed to learning new things. They are a very impressive community of learners.

Wikis and managing files

Katrina (senior teacher at St Leonard's) action research will be focused on successfully incorporating ICT/internet use into her classroom programmes, including the students learning some basic file management skills.

We started in her classroom with a quick session on managing and organising files that the children save. Katrina has been using Kid Pix in her class but they have been saving the files in a lot of different places. St Leonard's school has now created a folder for each class on the desktop of all of their computers and a folder for each child in the class folder for them to save all of their work. We went over with the children making a folder in their folder for each digital story they make to put any related files into the same place. Katrina will continue to reinforce this as it does take students a while to get into the habit and also understand the concept behind keeping their files tidy and organised (a bit like everything else they should keep tidy and organised).

Just as Katrina wouldn't clean up children's own mess in the classroom, she is expecting the children to take responsibility for keeping the classroom computers tidy. We will be working on a few poster resources for the children to remember the file path and some tips for naming their files and folders. Just as we might do to help children to keep the classroom tidy.

Then Katrina and I started building a wiki, we had a few technical hold ups but got there in the end. Katrina was a bit of a whiz, she had made a home, reading, mathematics and game page by the time I left. She had found some really neat pictures to illustrate each of her reading and maths groups and will be working on building up the links to games and activities for each group over the year. We found a few widgets for her wiki, a clock, calendar and a cluster map, which shows where the visitors to your wiki are from on a world map. Check out her wiki here.

Alphabet Books

Jilena and Verity at St Leonard's School are going to be focusing on alphabet knowledge for their action research. I forgot to ask them how they will be measuring the effect their work has on students learning, but as they teach such a young and sprightly little class I assume they will be able to measure their progress with the alphabet tests they frequently do throughout the year.

The reason we didn't get to that was that we were having so much fun working out how to make the little alphabet books that they are going to embed in a wiki.
They are making a little alphabet powerpoint book for each letter of the alphabet, there are pictures throughout the book and audio of them reading each word which captions the picture. They will animate the words so that it bounces, or slides onto the screen and the children can play the sound when they click on a picture or the sound icon.

Jilena has set up a wiki and an authorstream account. She has made a page for each letter of the alphabet and then embedded the powerpoint book they have made for each letter.

Here is the page they are working on ,they haven't made many of the powerpoints yet, it is a work in progress but it is going to look fantastic. Best of all it will be easy for them to manage and for the students to use independently.

Google Docs and Skype

Verity Harlick (Principal at St Leonard's School) and Megan Odgers (Principal at Ravensbourne School) wanted to begin using Google Docs (documents) to collaborate together on join projects. Google documents is a resource provided as a part of the Google Apps (applications).

Google documents allows you to upload a document you have worked on, or start a new document and share this with other people. You can then both make changes to the same document, at the same time or different time and at the same place or different places. This would be a fantastic tool for syndicate and staff meetings, if you are all planning a unit of work, everyone can talk and add to the same document at the meeting all at once.

All google apps are free and when you sign up for one you have a username to sign in with to all of the other apps.

Verity and Megan could see a lot of uses for this tool as they often work collaboratively and their schools are similar sizes and down the road from each other so often what will work in one school can also work in the other.

Next we tackled Skype using Skype to speak to one another and to other Skype users has added advantages to ringing one another. Skype also has a chat feature and documents can be sent by dragging them into the chat writing box and pressing enter. There are lots of advantages to being able to see the people you are speaking to and to speak easily to multiple people. Both Megan and I were able to talk to Verity once she returned to school at the same time.

When I left they had already Skyped a few times that day. I hope these tools make things easier for them.
They both picked up how to use these things easily, google docs in a lot of ways works quite like email, well looks similar so they were able to transfer these skills.

The biggest problem was passwords and sign ins. I know how annoying it can be having so many usernames and passwords, I have tried to make most of mine the same. Sometimes though a certain application has requirements of passwords etc that mean you have to change your usual one, and once you add multiple email accounts things can get pretty messy.

One thing that seems to work for me is keeping a document on my computer called LOGINS. It is a list of all of the things I have signed up for with the passwords etc. I know anyone using my computer could see them, but there is nothing on there that is highly sensitive. One advantage of this is they are all in one place. Most importantly I have to remember everytime I sign in to a new thing I put that information into the document. Whenever it is possible I check the option box to have my computer remember the usernames and passwords.

If other people have different systems to solve this problem please comment on the blog.