Sharing the Addiction

Working in a largely admin job these days, I have been told that I can spend an hour and a half a week in schools to keep ‘in touch’ with schools and to try out different tools with children so that I am talking from a place of some credibilty. I found this very exciting and instantly got in touch with a few of my old cluster schools to organise it. I ended up heading along to the smallest school in my cluster which has a total of 23 children in the school and agreed to take all of them for an afternoon slot. Being excited at the moment by a tool called Pixton which makes it easy and fun to make 2D comics, I went along ready to use this with the kids. I have to admit that I did not put that much work into preparing as I thought the tool was pretty straightforward and that it would be great to get the kids to problem solve and figure things out on their own.

Of course, ICT often doesn’t work as planned. I was without a laptop and I couldn’t get the data projector to connect to one of the new computers in the classroom (where was the fn button!). Giving up on that, I gathered them all around one computer screen and logged into my account and took them for a brief tour. I hadn’t set up a structured activity at this time as I wanted them to explore first. Looking back, what I should have done was at least talk about the genre of comics and explore features of this kind of visual language. I should also have had a better idea of what I wanted them to have accomplished by the end of the session.

I then set them up in pairs to go and explore on their own. This is where things really started to fall over. I had to spread the kids around three rooms to get them all onto computers and hadn’t gone around and logged in to Pixton first. As kids are likely to do, they started to get a little noisy while waiting for me to log them in (I didn’t want to give them my login details – I should have set up one they could use without me logging them in). My stress levels started to go up a little. Next major problem was that Pixton wouldn’t let me log in to my one account from multiple computers! Obviously, I should have got to the school a little early and tested this! I could get kids on but as soon as I moved on and logged in a few more, Pixton would freeze on them and kick them off again. As I moved around the rooms I had kids coming at me from a number of angles asking me to come and help them. My stress levels rose considerably at this time as I hadn’t prepared ‘plan B’ (which every person using ICT knows is a sensible idea!).

Giving up on Pixton, I gathered them all together again and showed them Voki as at least something they could go on to and doesn’t need an account. I had no clear direction in doing this – I was simply in ’survival mode’ by this time. Again the kids spread out but still the problems continued. This time, the internet connection at the school wasn’t really fast enough for 10 computers at once to connect well to the internet so many kids had trouble getting their Vokis to load and work properly. Still, most got something going and then I asked them to pack up and sent them off home.

So what will I do next time? Well, I am not one to give up easily so I am going to give Pixton another go but this time, I am going to put a bit more thought into what the LEARNING is that I want rather than just playing with the tool (I know that seems so basic but even those who are doing this all the time need to be reminded sometimes!). I am going to have an offline and online component to the activity so that I reduce the pressure on their internet connection. I am going to go early and set up and check that everything works. I am going to have a ‘plan B’ this time that is not technology based. I am also going to set up more than one Pixton account so that kids can be working in a couple of different ones. I will let you know how it goes.

So what about your biggest ICT failure? Leave me comments letting me know what it was – I think we should always talk about what doesn’t work as well as what does. Teachers often have issues with ICT that then stops them from wanting to use it again. I think we need to let everyday classroom teachers know that everyone experiences failure but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep refining and trying again.

Tags: failure

Well, people might be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth with me putting very little out into the cyberverse recently. Basically, I started working for CORE education full time at the beginning of June and I had to hit the ground running with Milestones from clusters to read and respond to. I have now finished working my way through those and am now doing some work on building up resources in the ICT PD Online area. There is a section in ICT PD Online to collect and organise cluster and school internet spaces and links. If you are a New Zealand school or cluster and have any that you would like me to add in, either leave me a comment with the address or send an email to me at suzievesper@gmail.com. If you want to give me any feedback on how the section of links could be better organised or what you think is missing, I’d also like to hear from you.

As part of my work on ICT PD Online, I have been brushing off my GIMP skills considerably and trying my hand at some aspects of design. I needed some textures to add to some of my images and I have found some really useful sites that gave some to me for free that I thought I would share with you. These are:
ImageAfter
Texture King
CG Textures (where I got these lovely bones from).

Another thing to report on is my recent visit to schools in Auckland with my old cluster. This was an excellent trip and I got heaps out of it! There is a page on Teacher Portal where I have uploaded my notes and the schools that went are all supposed to add to (hmm…..haven’t seen evidence of this just yet!). Thanks to Lenva for showing me http://glogster.com and http://www.circavie.com/ which I plan to have a good play with when I have a spare minute.

Tags: cluster links, School Visits, textures

Yesterday, our cluster visited Brooklyn School as a cluster. It was very interesting to see how the school had structured their curriculum model. They have a set of key competencies but the contexts that these are taught through are decided by the children in the school. At the beginning of every year, time is spent with the children to develop a set of questions that the children want to find out about, these are compiled as a class to find some common themes, and then these themes give the contexts for study for the year. I thought this was a very interesting model but it did raise a few questions for me.
1. The children ‘don’t know what they don’t know’. Would their set of questions be therefore rather narrow in focus at times?
2. Setting up themes at the beginning of the year to last over the rest of the year seems a little long sighted to me. Would these themes still be relevant to the kids by term four? (though the teachers are able to re-negociate these themes at any time)

The school believes that giving children this power over their own learning has benefits across all areas and that behaviour and attendance is improved so I will continue to touch base with the school to see how they are finding the process.

They also use tablets intensively as they have been lucky enough to be part of the digiOps scheme. It was fantastic seeing children using the computers as a tool as they all had enough access to computers to be able to use them seemlessly as part of their classroom programmes. Watching the Year 1/2 writing with the tablets was fantastic.

I also enjoyed my discussion with Dean about the schools use of Web 2.0 on their school’s website. They have used Word Press and integrated it into their existing site. I will be watching to see how they make use of this tool as well