Sharing the Addiction

Today I have been working with teachers at Waterloo School looking at the program Clicker 5. I will add resources for this program to my software wiki in the near future but just wanted to say a few things in support of this program. When I am going around schools, people who have heard about Clicker see it as only useful for special needs children. I disagree with this perception as it is a very flexible program and can be used for anything. Until I do get more about this on my wiki, click here to be taken through a tour of what Clicker can do.

Secondly, I was one of the presenters of an afternoon workshop looking at how ICT could best support the early stages of inquiry. We looked at websearching tips and how to use Kidspiration to collate ideas over the course of an inquiry. Here is our attempt at putting our ideas into a Kidspiration mindmap before and after doing a mini inquiry on “Was Ancient Egypt a good place to live?”

My thoughts on the TUANZ conference

I attended the TUANZ conference today and found it a useful exercise. I thoroughly enjoyed the keynote presentation. Some key thoughts that I took away were:

• Teachers of today will be the last to have the prerogative to decide whether or not to teach using modern ICT tools.
• We are the first generation of teachers to be preparing children for jobs that don’t even exist yet.
• You have to own something before you can give it away – in other words, teachers need to be using the tools such as blogs and wikis themselves to be able to give the knowledge and passion to kids.
• All knowledge content is often no more than two clicks away so why are we still focusing on getting children to learn content instead of showing children how to evaluate content, establish networks and think creatively.
• One of the criteria that Microsoft employees are judged against is to ‘Manage Ambiguity’. We often we spell out every aspect of what we want children to accomplish and give them carefully managed resources to work with. How is this training them to deal with ambiguity?
• From the connection with the teacher in the US via Skype, I have realised that it is possible to take a workshop from a distance – you don’t always have to be there in person for it to be powerful.

I also really enjoyed the discussions I had with two other teachers at during the workshop on “The Agonies of Access” with Gillian Eadie. As a primary school teacher, I was grouped with a secondary teacher and the technician from the same school. It was really interesting to have these different perspectives. I think there are not enough chances to have discussions between primary and secondary staff.

Finally, it was my first time presenting at a conference. I put together a wiki with the all the resources I talked about during this session which I plan to continue adding to as an ongoing resource. This wiki on educational software and web 2.0 tools can be accessed by clicking here. I think the session went fairly well though I may have tried to pack too much into the short time slot.

tuanz2007 TUANZ2007

Yesterday, I had great sessions with Petone Central staff. In the morning, myself and two staff members worked with their media team. I gave the children and the two teachers a snippet of video to play with and some still images. What was really interesting about this I told the kids to just try and figure out how to use the software without me ‘teaching’ it first. I busied myself with trying to sort out the video camera problem (unsuccessfully!) and so I didn’t have a chance to intefer and take over. They picked it up so quickly and were ‘fearless’ when trying things out. I couldn’t help but notice that this is quite different to working with adults who generally prefer to rely on being taken through things step by step (at least until their confidence grows). I am determined to try and get staff more comfortable with ‘having a play’.

I have started a new wiki (yes – yet another one with tips for different software packages and downloadable notes I have made for each piece of software. The site can be accessed from here.
I was meant to run a workshop on Kidpix in the afternoon but ended up looking at some of my favourite new discoveries instead when the networked version of Kidpix on the computers at the school failed to open correctly – ahh the joys of technology. One of the things I talked about is an online application where you can easily make online diagrams. The site is Gliffy and you register for free to use it. It is such an easy to use format – again I think it could be really useful. This is a rather lighthearted practice diagram I made when I was testing it out:

Today I have been working at Muritai School. I have been working with all the teachers from one syndicate at a time which has meant that all of the teachers in the syndicate get a chance to have the time and space to discuss how to best use ICT and they all come away with the same message which I think is a really good way to do things. This obviously requires a lot of relievers so has its drawbacks but is a really useful way to work.

We focused on using ICT to support both the Yr 3/4 syndicate and the Yr5/6 syndicate. The year 3/4 group are planning to focus on dinosaurs looking at how the changing environment effected them. I suggested one great website could be ‘The Earth Floor‘ which has a great section on how why we no longer have dinosaurs.
There are also other dinosaur links on my website. The syndicate are planning to use Kidpix to illustrate dinosaur poems. As the focus is on oral not written English, the children will illustrate poems by other people and record their voices onto the slides.

The Yr 5/6 syndicate looked at how ICT can be used to support their upcoming ‘Take Action for Air’ topic. The syndicate decided that they wanted to use mindmapping tools for the children to collect and organise their information onto during the course of the unit and then use video to film the ‘Take action’ part to make into a movie. We explored using an online mindmapping application that is extremely easy to use and can be accessed from anywhere called ‘Mindomo‘.I think this application has a LOT of potential and is something I have just discovered recently.

The teachers felt that they really needed to teach the kids how to search the web so have decided to teach structured lessons in the suite on this. Stu Devenport had some excellent posters for working with kids on search tips and evaluating websites (which he has offered to let me have a copy of and I’m sure he’d let others have them as well).

Other good places to get tips on searching are: the Google help centre, Berkeley University (not very kid friendly but very detailed) and Fact Monster (designed for kids)

Want a list of great search engines to try? Check out this exhaustive list. Other interesting search engines other than Google to try are Clusty which organises your search results into topic areas, Librarian’s Internet Index with reliable and safe links, or Ask for Kids for searches guaranteed to be safe for kids. Dogpile says it takes the best search results from a number of search engines.

Sites that give advice on evaluating websites include the Berkeley university site.

I was at the home group meeting today for the central and lower North clusters. We had a lot of valuable discussion and something I found really interesting was listening to a secondary school’s perspective and thinking about what schools might look like in the future. I had just seen the YouTube video that was below and couldn’t help but think that this was the type of school that I would have enjoyed and it seemed to really put the students at the centre of the learning. It is a Sudbury school called Fairhaven School. Their website is here if you want to find out more about them.

I have had a great couple of days working at Korokoro School. We have been working on making classroom blogs for each of the teachers in the school. The idea with these blogs is that they will be used to keep in touch with the wider community about what is happening in the classrooms and in the school.

These blogs are in their infancy at the moment but the teachers were all impressed with how easy it was to set up the blog and add in extra features. One tip that we can pass on is that some of the features in Blogger didn’t work that well in Safari so we downloaded Firefox for everyone to use as their web brower before we started.

We worked on adding widgets to the blog from other websites such as a badge from Flickr (log into your Flickr account, change the internet address to www.flickr.com/badge.gne and follow the instructions to get code to add to your blog) and a useful button for people to enter their email address into so that they can receive notice when your blog is updated (blogarithms.com). I will include links to these blogs when the teachers have had a chance to get them established. You can find links to places to get blogs and things to add to your blog from my website by clicking here.