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.

Managing different tasks

Shona McRae has been taking on so many challenges over the last two years. She has been integrating lots of ICT into her literacy programme, including having her students make digital portfolios of their work.

She has used webquests, made a class wiki, and used powerpoint and word to present and publish work. Parts of the programme are getting a bit out of control as she has found many students skill level has accelerated at such a rate that some students can complete a lot of work quickly while others are still catching up with past work they have been set.

She has been using peer teaching to teach her class the skills they have needed to do much of the work, which has worked well but she has learnt a lot along the way.
Shona has identified one problem is that many of the same tasks or skills which students need help with is taking her time and her next step will be to develop a system that deals with this issue and helps her manage and track the work set and completed by different members of the class.

I hope she takes the next step slowly and enjoys everything she has accomplished with her class, it is amazing how much she has changed in her class just in the last year.

Presenting

Chris Rodriguez at GSNS will be doing her action research on presenting skills. She will be allowing her class to choose how they would like to present their work, ideas etc during the year.
She has already begun introducing ways the children can present their work using traditional ways, posters, etc.

We went over the basics of powerpoint for her class, so they will be able to add this to their list of choices for presenting.

Chris will be teaching her class presentation skills and this will be what she will measure at the beginning and end of her action research.

Chris has a third year student teacher with great ICT skills so she is using these skills to facilitate her own new learning and involving him in the action research process. What a fantastic model for a new teacher to follow an associate who shares their learning process with their student.

It is obvious that the culture of that of a community of learners, Chris constantly shares her new learning with her class and we structured into the lesson several reflection times for the students to share their learning with one another. They did this easily as they are obviously used to this process, Chris is an excellent role model of this and also skillfully phrases her questions for student to use to reflect from.

Skyping Experts

Claire Spencer at GSNS has been involved with video conferences to Japan in 2008. She has been traveling the College of Education to use the video conferencing equipment with her class to get to know students in a school in Gifu, Japan. Gifu school is GSNS sister school.

Get to college for the conferences has been a bit of a hassle so someone had suggested Claire and her class use Skype for these conferences.

Claire will use Skype for these conversations, we went over the features of Skype. Skype not only provides a video call but can be used to send files including pictures and to type comments to the person you are speaking to.

Claire would like to be able to get the students to have time speaking to a buddy in the class in Japan. She feels, although the whole class conferences are important, they can be a little impersonal.
She is then going to extend Skype as a classroom resource for gathering information. We emailed Te Papa to see if someone would be available for Claire's class to Skype regarding their current topic study.

As the year goes on Claire is going to teach interviewing and questioning skills so these sessions become more and more worthwhile. Her data collection will be to gather these questions and she will be able to measure the children's skill level of questioning to show progress.
Claire will make decisions as she goes about how she will teach her class about asking higher order questions.

Below are some links about ways levels of questioning can be developed and communicated in the classroom.

Questioning Pedegogy

How teachers can use questioning in the classroom, measuring questions.

Jamie McKenzie on teaching questioning

Improving students' questions

It will be great to see what exciting things Claire's class does with a new tool.

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.