Sharing the Addiction

Random facts meme - tagged twice so here it is

First, the Rules:
* Post these rules before you give your facts
* List 8 random facts about yourself
* At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
* Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

1. I was into music in my younger years - I played trombone and sang in the NZ Secondary Schools Choir - we won an international singing competition in Hawaii.
2. I went to ballet classes for eight years as a child and was in two NZ Ballet productions in the children’s chorus - then puberty struck!!
3. I used to have an addiction to a chat network called IRC around 10 years ago. I could spend up to 4 hours a day chatting to people I’d never met (a bit like SL for some people these days
4. I spent four and a half years in London and travelled somewhere new every school holidays. I often went on my own meeting people along the way. I miss the travel!
5. In London, I worked as a specialist ESL teacher for two and a half years and wrote a booklet on software and internet sites to support ESL learners sold through an organisation called BLEN.
6. The silliest thing I have ever done as a teacher was when teaching about Native Americans. I decided, in order to give the kids more motivation to design totem masks for art, to perform a little ceremony on them to help them find ‘their inner totem spirit’. You can imagine the reactions of some of the parents!!!
7. I met my husband by moving into his flat.
8. We had an Art Deco wedding because I really love everything about that time. We went to the Art Deco festival in Napier to research it.

Now - I don’t know many people to tag that haven’t had this already but here goes.
Room 5 at Arakura School
Mrs Kelso’s Class in Auckland
Mr Frater’s Class In Wellington

And that’s going to have to do

I think I have found a social networking tool that I can imagine using with a class of children. It is called Imbee and it is designed for children ages 8 to 14. It is a chaperoned site which means that you have to be validated to join and then all the sites by children can be monitored.

They are specifically courting the use of the tool by teachers with a special area for teachers with lesson plans and information on how the tool can be used in education.

I found out about this site by listening to a MediaSnackers podcast (thanks for the link on your blog Allanah!)

I felt the need to blog about a really great course I went on yesterday. The title of the course is ‘Effective Speaking’ and it is run in Wellington city. I think that everyone who presents regularly should have the opportunity to take part in a course like this.

Key Points for me were:
1. Really distill what the key message of your speech is - down to a short sentence only!
2. For each ‘assertion’ you make in relation to this key point, make sure you have evidence to back this up. Evidence can be direct examples, metaphors, numbers and stats and expert endorsements. Assertions without evidence means that the audience is not engaged.
3. Put transitional phrases between each section of your presentation summing up the section you have just finished with and outlining the next one.
4. Use dark grey slides to focus the attention back to you as a speaker - you don’t need a slide for every aspect of your talk (I used the grey slides to remind myself to transition!)

This is just the tip of the iceberg! So many great practical tips. I even learned things about Powerpoint and I thought I knew a lot. Did you know that you can type a slide number during your presentation to jump to that slide?

This course goes for two days and I’m sure that the second day next Monday will give me even more tips so I’ll post more then.

The holidays are upon us - I hope everyone enjoys them and comes back refreshed for our Expo. Just a quick note to let you know that you can now try out a draft version of Blogger which allows you to directly load videos into your blog rather than having them stored somewhere like Google Video first.

I have found a number of interesting online mindmap programs recently that can be embedded in wikis and blogs.

There are more applications like this online on my wiki.

Hello again. Yes, it has been awhile. I’ve been busy working with the data we’ve gathered from teachers to find out how we are measuring up as a cluster. The results have been mostly good but there are some pockets of teachers around our cluster for whom the sessions with me, as the facilitator, don’t seem to be hitting the mark. This has led to a fair amount of soul searching on my behalf. I have come to the conclusion that, while I do have some things that I hope to ‘tweak’ about the way I work, there are also factors that make my time more successful at school and teacher level.

1. Teachers will see my sessions as ‘one-offs’ unless what we look at together is part of a wider picture. Schools need to have spent time in teams discussing what ICT would best support the curriculum and the needs of the students (with support from their lead teacher or me as a facilitator). When this happens before I come to work with individual teachers, this focuses teachers on what they are working towards within their classroom programs.
2. If there are workshops run with all the teachers present who are working on that ICT integration, then teachers get a chance to talk about how well they see that technology will fit. Then sessions with myself can be used to consolidate or bring in children to work with the teachers. Everyone generally needs more than one ‘go’ at something to feel confident enough to try it with the kids. Nothing helps a teacher feel more confident than seeing first hand that children will cope with the demands we are asking of them.
3. The most successful sessions are ones where I have been told what teachers want to cover at least two days before the session. It can be hard to come up with ideas on what teachers could be doing with their classes AND do the PD for these ideas within the short time I have with teachers. That’s why it is better to generate the ideas at planning level beforehand. I am also able to more prepared this way. Too often, I am having to think ‘on my feet’ which, while I’m not TOO bad at it, is not the ideal situation for anyone.
4. Teachers need further support to be able to implement the use of ICT with their children. Too many teachers feel as if they are ‘drowning’ under the workload expected of them. Schools need to find a way to reduce other demands on teachers who are trying to bring authentic uses of ICT into the classroom. Not many schools are making use of the in-class support that I offer and yet, from the survey results, these are the sessions that teachers often find the most useful. Also, the ICT teacm in each school needs to look at ways to give teachers support such as the release Onieka is getting each week to go into classrooms of teacher to keep the ICT on track.
5. Finally, there are times when I come in to run sessions at the school and the gear hasn’t been checked and there are issues like batteries being flat or software not working. Spending time trying to sort out these problems before being able to get started eats into precious PD time.

I am not saying that there are not things that I need to improve on. I am looking forward to going to the two day ‘Effective Speaking’ course in the holidays as a way for me to present more effectively. I am also prone to trying to squeeze too much into the short sessions I have with teachers and need to be careful to not overwhelm them. Still, this contract is not all about me as a facilitator; it is also about the ways schools build in the use of ICT and manage this and it needs to go beyond the release sessions that teachers have with me. Between us, I hope that we can work to making the PD effective for all teachers in the cluster.

On a completely different note, here is a two second podcast that I have put up on a new tool I have found called Podcast People. I think this tool is really easy to use and could be great in the classroom.

My Podcast People Experience

After being silent for a little while, I am back with a new post. I have just been on a trip to see two other excellent schools with the cluster. I think that is one of the most powerful aspects of being part of a cluster is the chance to see other schools in action and get ideas from those schools. Thanks to Coley St School in Foxton and Russell St School in Palmerston North for hosting us. People were overwhelmingly positive about the experience and got a lot from seeing the schools. Coley St staff have obviously worked hard to achieve a strong inquiry program that clearly made a difference to the learning of the children. Russell St were doing very interesting things with digital portfolios and had a strong culture of supporting staff with PD for each technology introduced.
Here is a PMI we did about the trip at the end of the two days. I used a web tool called AuthorStream to upload the powerpoint and embed it in the blog. The good thing about AuthorStream is that it keeps all the transitions, animations and audio.

I had a very quiet first week back this term. I haven’t been working in many schools. Therefore, I took the opportunity to look around and experiment with some of the latest technology available at the moment. I thought I ‘d put a round-up here of some of my favourite finds.

ProfCast
This software is $30 US but gives you a 30 day trail. Basically, it allows you to record your voice during a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation and then it syncs your voice to the slides and has tools to help you easily share it as a podcast. I used the software to record a presentation on digital storytelling (click on podcast link in the left-side column). On listening back I realised my voice could be far more inspiring but I’ll work on that for next time This could be great for sharing presentations by children with parents or for the children to listen back to and assess their presentation. You could also use it to record your presentations on a topic that you have made to the class for them to listen back to in their own time. It is designed to work with Mac applications such as Garageband and iTunes. I found it very easy to use.

Google Apps
Basically, Google Apps gives you a suite of online applications that can almost do the same thing as School Zone. You can take your domain name with you and then have email addresses using that domain name. You can manage setting up users on your account. You can build webpages using their tools. You can have shared calendars and shared address books. And all of this is FREE. Imagine the savings to a school if you don’t have to pay anything for webhosting or account management.

Other Google Toys from the Lab
Google labs is where online Google applications are trialled (Beta). There are some great new tools in there such as Google Notebook, Google Page Creator and Google Maps.

With the notebook, you can download an extension for Firefox that puts a button to click on at the bottom of your webbrowser. This opens up a small window with your notebook contents. You can then clip the url or just a part of the site you are on and it is saved to your notebook. This notebook is great if you are working on more than one computer as you can have access to the same contents in the notebook. No more trying to copy and paste to a word document. Do it all in your notebook and then export into Word.

Page creator allow you to make websites using templates (not the same as a wiki). Very customisable and gives you the ability to edit the html if you know how. The websites are attractive and kids could easily make pages. I have a test page that you can visit by clicking here.

Google Maps allows you to search for one than one place on a local map. When places are found, you can attach pointers to each place which gives you more detail when you click on them. Great for showing people different locations that will be visited on a trip. See this map made for our trip to Palmerston North as an example.

Well, it has been a busy end to the term and I have been a little slack in adding to my blog. Still, I have a day out of schools today which gives me a chance to catch my breath and talk quickly to some of the things happening around schools. A couple of schools are venturing into Web 2.0. One school is using a wiki to make a webquest for their students on forces. Resources at an appropriate reading age have been difficult to come by so if you know of any, please email me and let me know. The address of this wiki is: http://wilfordmidsyn.wikispaces.com/

Other teachers are planning to get the children presenting their knowledge using Powerpoint. They really want to focus the children in on elements of good design and effective presentation skills so are using rubrics and examples of ‘bad’ powerpoints to get them thinking. Click here to go to a database of ready made rubrics that you can search called Rubistar.

Click here to go to my wikispaces page with resources for powerpoint (including a ‘bad’ example to download)

There has been some interesting discussions around the cluster about working with juniors and ICT and how much should be ICT to improve teaching or ICT the children do themselves. I think that there is nothing wrong in looking at ICT as a teaching tool where you use the ICT to make a lesson more motivating or exciting. Just because the children weren’t involved in creating the ICT content does not mean that it is not a valid exercise. In one school, we have been talking about using a powerpoint presentation to create a ‘hook’ at the beginning of the unit where children view the powerpoint slides containing images associated with certain jobs and then try to guess what the job is. I consider this a good use of ICT.

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?”