Friday, June 26, 2009

Liking iCal

Yes it worked again. Lucky it did because I was just packing up to leave.
Last week we had 14 teachers from various school come to our school on the RED Bus Tour. As a lead teacher there was no escaping a visit. I decided not to totally change my plan as I was behind with my art work. (Art exhibition on, thats another story!) What I did was to base ICT activities around my art unit.

We used 2 different programs to make slide shows of our art photos.

Key Note - There were children working on 2 laptops. This was a relatively new program for them. There was 1 expert who assisted the children. (I worked with this child and showed him some basics of KeyNote the day before.)

Slide.com - This is a Web2.0 tool. My class have been using this for quite some time practicing making slides. On this day they maked a slide and uploaded it to their e-portfolio.

Using the camera.

We have 2 class photographers. Each child in the class needed to have a photo taken to upload to their ‘Artist Profile’
The photographers then imported them into iPhoto for the class to use.

Wallwisher

This is another Web2.0 tool. The class have used this on different occasions. It is a site where children can go to to add notes about a given topic. I set the topic and the children had to add notes to the topic of art.

Pages
The children used pages to complete their ‘Artist Profiles’

KnowledgeNet
Children were updating their profiles on their e-portfolio.

I was very proud of my children who really showed off their skills.

Friday, June 12, 2009

IT WORKED!!!

I was wondering what the ringing was on my laptop!!! Then I got it. BLOG BLOG BLOG! It works. My timer went off to remind me to make a post.
Wednesday afternoon during our team meeting I showed my team how effective vocaroo could be when making reflections in e-portfolios. I was totally blown away by how enthusiastic my whole team was. One particular team member was so excited that she requested my support during my e-learning release! I will need to fit her in asap as I dont offten get to work with her class. One of the classes in my team started using Vocaroo today!! The children had a few teething problems but after 5 minutes they were away! I am so proud of this teacher! At the beginning of the year she was terrified at using ict in her room!

This morning I set up a new wall using wallwisher. The question that was posted was "What do you like about School?" I showed 3 boys how to make a note and they were off. It took the class about 15 mins for everyone to make a post. In the end we ended up with 39 posts. We then looked at the wall and discussed some points that we need to remember next time. We decided that the next time we made a wall we would put only our initials. We also said that we would explain our answers a bit more indepth and we would make sure that our spelling is all correct. The class were really excited about using WallWisher that they wanted me to make another wall then and there. I told them that I will have one set up for them on Monday.
I am going to show my team how to use Wallwisher. Hopefully it will be a success like vocaroo!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

EastNet Lead Teacher P.D

Look at me!!! 2 post in a week! (Only because we have to make a post today) haha.
Had a great day today looking at different Web2 tools. Have been using WallWisher today and see that it will be a great tool to use in my class. It is basically a tool that you can use to brainstorm ideas individually but then have a collaborative wall with other posts.
Looked at a lot of different Wikis and got lots of information. There was a lot of reading in some of them.
Still find Lenva's wiki very helpful. Cool Tools for School is very helpful to find a variety of Web2 tools.
Have now set iCal to beep at me every fortnight to remind me to post a comment to my Blog. Hopefully there will be another post this Friday!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Arrrgh

Well so much for my commitment to post on my blog fortnightly! By the time Friday arrives all I want to do is get my planning finished and head out the gates to begin my weekend.
We have had our first collaborative conferences at school using our e-portfolios. There was a lot of head aches and heart aches leading up to this point! In my block the AirPort service was not very good at the best of times. So I had the problems of children spending time making reflections or adding work to their e-portfolios only to find that when they went to save their work we had dropped off the network and all their work was lost! I had a few children who actually ended up in tears. :( I think we have managed to sort this problem out now as we have changed the location of the base station. Since this has happened we have had no problems. (Fingers crossed!) By the time the conferences came about the children and I were all very nervous and hoping that we were all up to date and that the conferences would run smoothly. The parents were all amazed at their childs e-portfolio. I know that some of my parents were very nervous to see the amout of ICT savvy their children have. The children ran their conferences. They showed their parents their e-portfolios and I was there to make comments about the feed back that I had posted on their goals. It was great to see some parents who were very unsure about e-portfolio take delight in the fact that the children were leading the show. I have been showing the children some Web 2 tools. Vocaroo and Slide.com seem to be the hits at the moment. Vocoaroo means the boys dont have to type their reflections they can record and do it so easily. The girls are loving slide.com. It will be great when we have finished our art photos and they can put this up onto their e-portfolio.