Strath Taieri Wiki

Addie at Strath Taieri is using the class wiki to share the weekly homework with the class, she has made a homework blog to do this and has put the blog into the class wiki in an Iframe. This decision was made so that the homework files did not need to be managed and the students could see the homework sheet without having to download it, also the blog made it easier for the student to comment on the homework or perhaps share sites etc that helped them to complete their homework with their classmates. The senior class are doing speeches. The plan is to use a video camera to record the speeches and then share these on the class wiki. Warwick the classroom teacher liked the use of video exemplars for assessment he saw in Andrea of DNI’s Action Research Project last year at the Mini-Conference.

Strath Taieri

Today I was out at Strath Taieri School in Middlemarch with Lead teacher Lisa and Principal Vicki. We set up two things at the school, Skype and Google docs- so they can collaborate as a staff during meetings on a shared document.

We met as a whole staff about the action research the school will do. Strath Taieri have decided to do their action research together, with the aim of building a school wide planning document.

One thing the school has noticed is that when their students are not able to use the computer, save documents etc the learning within these tasks is slowed and effected with many students becoming frustrated. They want to see if they teach some of these skills (only the types of skills with are transferable and useful in many computer programmes and for many types of tasks) if the students are able to focus on the learning rather than the doing when working on set tasks.

They are going to randomly pick 20% of the children from each class and set them a computer task, the teacher observing will keep a tally of the types of interactions the children have while they complete the task, categorising these as about the learning, computer, or social comments.

They will do this both now before the teaching of the computer skills and then again at the end of their teaching. I think the results of this will be really interesting. They are going to start by getting the students typing using dance mat typing, later they will introduce file management and printing skills and finally researching and safely using the internet.

Lisa and I put together a progression of these skills this afternoon and as they trial this, they will refine it to suit the needs of their learners. The results will be really interesting for all of the schools in our cluster.