Sorry folks but after all our efforts our Moturoa class blog did not win the New Zealand Class Blog Awards. I feel gutted as we love our blog as it is a pivotal part of our on-line learning and great way to link class to family and to communicate with others. Through it I feel that I am not teaching alone and that others do care for what we do in our classroom. Maybe we shouldn’t have entered the competition at all and I wouldn’t be feeling this way. ‘Pride comes before a fall’ is the saying, I think. Our blog is just what it is- one of many. Maybe I had an inflated opinion of the worth of our class blog- it was in the final five after all. Not winning still feels like losing.
Before I started blogging personally, professionally and as a class I would never have dreamed of writing as a response to such an event and now that is the first thing I think of doing- to put my thoughts in writing. I think that I shouldn’t take it so personally but as we put so much energy and enthusiasm into it I have strong feelings about it. It is more than a ‘thing’- it is a growing, living entity.
Teaching is the sort of professional where I never feel I am ever good enough and the job is never properly done- the longer I teach the more I realise just how little I know about teaching. We can always do more, do better, work harder, achieve better results.
There are many wonderful blogs out there- like my school colleague, Raewyn’s, class blog. Her blog, just doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves and she is starting to get disheartened by the lack of contributions from outside her classroom. Bloggers need to know that someone else apart from themselves are reading and contributing. She knows that people are viewing because her hit counter is ticking over but few are participating by actively leaving a comment. If you can spare a few minutes could you please go to Raewyn’s blog and leave her a comment to encourage her and pop back from time to time so she knows that she is not alone. I think sometimes we think that we can’t write something clever enough but just a sentence or two to lets the bloggers know that you are reading is enough.
If people do not take the time to comment on the others’ blogs it is really no better than writing on a piece of paper and hanging it on the classroom wall for a very limited audience. We all need the encouragement of others to continue.
Moturoa class blog is fortunate to receive the recognition that it does locally, nationally and internationally, even though we didn’t receive an award. We build into our blogging a time to reflect on the blog posts of others and leave comments. How do we build a feeling of a supportive community unless we continue the conversation by becoming actively involved?
I am tempted not to post this entry but seeing I have taken the time to write it I will hit the publish button. Writing it has helped me come to terms with not being successful.
The blog started from humble beginnings with me adding most of the content. Now it is mostly being added to by the children as we continue to link and learn with those outside the four classroom walls. If you go to the voting page linked from the graphic you can read more about the finalists, view their entries and vote.
Here comes the plug- please vote for Allanah King’s blog as I would love to have a little laptop to carry about. By voting you could win a 16GB flash drive as well.
Voting closes next Monday 19 of October so you haven’t got long.
Isn’t it nice how this blog and Interface share the same colour scheme!
How simple it is to make connections and support the learning of children both in my own classroom and another in Bangkok. Last week Jeff Utecht at ISB, Bangkok, sent out a couple of tweets inviting people to encourage a few of his fifth grade bloggers who were just learning how to blog and recording their instructions on constructing a science experiment exploring variables. It helps, maybe, that I had met Jeff while on holiday to Bangkok earlier this year, but that personal encounter isn’t really relevant to the connection.
I made a few comments on the grade five blogs and was particularly impressed with young Haley’s post. To encourage her and show her how the whole blogging thing might work, I decided to replicate her experiment in my own class the next day, using Haley’s procedural writing to help us with our instructions.
Setting up the experiment took five minutes of my time and my class took a couple of photos and quickly blogged about their results and I added a link to it for Haley through her blog comments so she could find our post the next day at school.
Haley learnt about the power of blogging in a real context and my class made another connection and further cemented their own learning about variables that we had completed as part of our science fair earlier in the term. Following up on a question that Haley asked in a comment I was able to share a Voicethread we had made earlier on New Zealand currency. You can see how these things can grow.
Jeff later blogged about his own ideas for extending the collaboration…..
What if we share our data with the class in New Zealand?
I wonder if longitude and latitude is a variable we need to consider (Social Studies)
I wonder if we’ll get the same results? (Science)
How can we best represent our data for someone else to read? (Math, Science)
Why is writing clear instructions important? (Writing)
These connections don’t need to be huge, or time consuming, or hard. They just need a little time, a little energy and a buddy who wants to share and learn. The whole process isn’t in the least bit scary.
Early in February this blog got a little recognition from the New Zealand Education Gazette so I asked the Wayne Erb, the reporter, if I could put a copy of the article on the blog and he said that would be fine so here it is for downlaod in case you missed the paper copy.
Our new photocopier at school scans to a pdf and sends it off to an email address so it was a useful exercise in coming to grips with a new bit of learning.
John Sutton wrote an insightful post that turned up in my RSS feed from the UK this morning about internet use agreements.
At Appleby we wrote ours a few years ago now. We review it every year and ask children, parents and teachers to sign it each year agreeing to the policy and asking parents if they allow their child to access the internet at school and to ask their permission to publish their child’s images and creations on the web.
If you are interesting in reading our AUP you can download it here in pdf form.
Most parents agree to their children’s images and work being contributed to our blog sites etc but a few do not want their children to have direct access to the internet for whatever reason.
John raises an interesting point in his post. By not allowing children access to the internet we are restricting children’s learning opportunities. At school we access Google Docs to share digital portfolios, we are part of the e-AsTTle on-line assessment programme, we blog, I podcast and generally collaborate on line with other classes in other parts of the world. By not allowing children to participate we are limiting their ability to learn using 21st century technologies.
Maybe a way forward is to inform parents of our policies and educate children proactively about safe internet use and just get on with it. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. What do you think?
If you have good people in your network you learn good stuff. Last night I caught a tweet by Wes Fryer about a another great digital tool called Capzles. He was impressed and so am I as I quickly made a Capzle from a few photos and a class digital story movie. I added some feedback text and an audio mix of my commentary and some FreePlay music. The features of Capzles that I like are the intuitive interface, the quick ease of uploading content and the timeline effect. It harvests the data from your photos and knows when they were taken and puts them in a timeline. It has great quality in full screen mode as well.
It fits well inside Blogger. A bonus is that as it embeds you can chose to only have the audio play when you click on the little speaker icon. That’s great ‘cos I find it irritating to have audio play on a blog when it hasn’t been asked so the audio doesn’t come to you uninvited. The only downside I can see is that comments go live immediately. For school I would like to see some form of comment moderation or at least notification of new comments but I don’t think it would be a huge problem.
For next year I thought it would be fun to take a photo everyday- children could add a photo highlight a day and we could grow our portfolio over the year embedded in our blog.
As posted before “I love my job”. How great is it to get paid to do a job that you love. Here is a little bit of my day today….
Late night chat via Skype with Barbara Reid on the perils of Milestone Reporting
Early morning chat via Skype with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in Buffalo on future thinking.
A little bit of milestone writing in the morning- there’s got to be a downside there somewhere!
In the afternoon a student/teacher workshop looking at animation at Upper Moutere. Will Richardson at ULearn had showed me Google Docs presenter so had made a presentation on animation to practice with the tool. This is the third in a series of workshops with students and teachers at Upper Moutere as we look at different ways of making animations, today we were looking at I Can Animate My Personal Learning Network (Fiona Grant) and Atomic Movies came in handy here with screen grab tutorials and a paper handout to guide me as I had never actually used the software before.
Then a bit of a mad dash (driving dutifully at 49 km/hr) over to Mapua School for ULearn08 feedback. We took more of an unconference style to the reporting back which worked really well. I started off with a couple of links to EdTalks and K12 Online Conference and then ULearn08 participants shared what they had done with people who wanted to know more. It was a pretty good result I thought and people enjoyed the experience and went away good vibes and a few more ideas to take back to their schools.
Home safely driving at 99km/hr to check my emails and catch up with my RSS. It seems that this blog is on a reading list for some pre-service teachers in Australia as they seem to be posting and reflecting on some of the things that I have posted lately. I am honoured and flattered by the attention. What about giving a little extra encouragement to Meaghan, Natalie, Renee and Amanda who are studying at UTS in Sydney.
A little work on my blog and a little more work on my miletsone and a distraction from Greg Carroll showing me how to convert a PC into an Apple. Not a bad day in the life of a ICT facilitator from NZ!
I am very proud to say that I an one of the twelve New Zealand finalists in the 2008 Microsoft Partners in Learning Innovative Teachers Award. I have been beavering away at making a poster to present at ULearn08.
The poster space is about 1mx2m so I have plenty of space to fill. Here is my centrepiece. There will no opportunity for interactivity where I have to present my poster so I made this interactive one that people will have to come to my blog to access it. All of the watermarked photos lead to blog posts that illustrate how I create, innovate, communicate and collaborate.
It took me ages to hyperlink the photos- you could test drive it for me!
The file is hosted by Fileden which may well be blocked at school- if the download doesn’t happen for you try again from home.
A number of schools and classes in my cluster are now blogging in earnest and getting plenty of feedback and interaction flowing from it. Now they are ready to take it to the next level and go out their and use their blogs to foster links outside their classrooms and schools.
For me that collaboration really started through Paul Harrington from Wales and I exchanging comments on each others blogs and podcasts but teachers want to know how to go about starting those links and working on some meaningful projects with other classes.
Lenva Sheering has compiled this reference to the benefits and curriculum links of using collaboration on her Auckland Home Group wiki.
Here are some links that they may like to use to do just that…
Teachers Connecting- A teacher will register and complete a profile of their class level, interests and level of teacher technical skill. Others who are keen also to collaborate can see what projects are on the go that might suit them.
Rocky Jensen (NZ) has put together this wiki of collaborative projects that people can easily add to and browse fro something that might suit you.
Of course, most obviously, there is Twitter but it make take a while to build up a network of co-collaborators. On a side note it was great fun on Saturday night to gather a group of us via Twitter all watching and tweeting on the Kiwi triumphs at the Olympic rowing events.
Kim Cofino, in Bangkok, also has a project site that offers links to collaborative projects organised by grade level.
Then there’s always our own English On Line Book Backchat where classes get together and discuss books- again arranged by class level. This site hosted my very first on line discussion and the results still show up deep in a Google search!
The Flat Stanley project is an oldie but a goodie. The idea is that you send off a ‘Flat Stanley’ around the world and follow his trail- sort of geocaching for little kids.
E-Pals is a long running site linking classes of similar ages and interests to get together and form bonds.
Voices of the World is a Ning where people who join have a community where they can post media, audio, blog, links and the like. You have to join the Ning first then look for what is current with the project. It is based in America so the school terms are different to ours but it is nice to concentrate on hearing the student voices speaking with different accents and languages.
Lastly is another Ning organised by Jen Wagner. This Ning even has a group of Kiwi educators. We are starting to use it to talk about ULearn08. Again you need to join first- this Ning has many groups where educators from around the globe can form areas of common interest to link their classes.
I am heading off to Blenheim on Friday for a workshop on Voicethread. They want a paper handout to go with it so I made one and updated the Bling4yrblog Voicethread post while I was on a roll.
If you would like a copy of the paper handout pdf click here. These sorts of things are good for me because I delve more deeply into these Web2.0 tools and this time uploaded a video to the Voicethread and did a spot of doodling which I hadn’t done before. You may like to look at the full page version by clicking here.
Thanks to all the good folks who commented so quickly on this new play Voicethread. It will definitely show people how useful they can be for fostering global links. You rock.
If you are a loss of what to do between 4-5pm this Wednesday 13 August you may like to join us in a conversation about blogging arranged by Angela Page of Centre4 fame. To participate ring the audio bridge at 0800 693363 PIN 1506#
Angela posted these ‘Rules of Engagement’.
Please dial in between 3.50 – 3.55pm (and no later) as this interrupts the flow of conversation after 4pm
You may record your name after the tone and then hold to join the conference
Log off after 5pm please, and not before, as this interrupts the flow of conversation
To mute, press *6
To come off mute, press #6
You are most welcome to bring your questions, ideas, experiences
To speak, state your name and then ask your question or respond to a discussion point
You may experience some over-talking, but please be patient and continue when there is a pause in conversationEnjoy!
Three great finds today- one was going to the afternoon pictures to see the NZ movie, “Second Hand Wedding“. I was really impressed with this movie- it had a great mixture of comedy and sadness, joy and angst. I would recommend it to anyone.
The second great find is a mixture of two really. A lot of people have been posting about Wordle which can have all sorts of classroom uses. But the best find is Flowgram which is in beta testing but it is an excellent tool for capturing and discussing web pages. To do so you sign up- add the URL to a web page you would like to discuss and then hit record and you are underway. You can also annotate and embed. To see what it looks like and to hear my cold ridden audio click play! Magic!
This week I had the pleasure and privilege to visit with Greenwood Kindergarten in Motueka. Elaine Newton, the Early Childhood ICT facilitator invited me to lead a workshop on creating music with Garageband at the kindy. I was so impressed with their set-up. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Head Teacher, Shayne, has the place really humming. They have recently started blogging as a means of fostering links with the parent community. They only post video on their blog for security reasons but the effect is awesome. Their blog is only one month old but well worth a visit. I am sure they would appreciate a comment or two for encouragement.
The photo is of my good self at the front entrance beautiful poupou. The story of the poupou is described in a Google Doc linked from the blog. Now why didn’t I think of doing that with my classroom blog which I am happy to say is still ticking along nicely even though I am not there to motivate. The latest post is from Miriam- remember how incredible Miriam’s debut was on the world stage last year! She is going from strength to strength and is now singing for her peers. She sings the Norah Jones song, “I don’t know why he didn’t come“. Here is another rather nice You Tube Version.
Again through my Twitter network via @Murcha from Aussie and @MrKp from the UK I found a link to a fun website, Feedjournal.com, that makes your most recent blog posts via the RSS feed into a newspaper
To see what it looks like click on the above link or the graphic. Great if you’re not fond of reading on line. A thought ran through my mind as I re-read the newspaper- without this blog I would not have the motivation to write at all- and I have written and shared quite a bit over time!
And then to finish off I uploaded it to Issuu an on line publisher to give a cool little page turny look to the whole thing. To see it in a better size click on OPEN PUBLICATION.
It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I keep getting sidetracked by new finds and interesting conversations. The school holidays are great.
The writing of my first cluster milestone is starting to weigh heavily on my mind. I suppose its a bit like writing school reports- a necessary evil.
Good for Animoto for sharing their educational account so that teachers can now create longer than 30 second videos for free and download them for playing and keeping on your computer- great for playing and sharing if your internet is slow and spends a lot of time buffering.
As Ewan McIntosh says- it takes zero skill levels to create great videos. To access the educational side of Animoto use this link and ask Rebecca for an educational registration key. She does ask to be kept in the loop as to the kinds of things you are creating.
The quick example I made celebrates my first term as ICT facilitator for Discover IT Tasman.
Yesterday was a big day with a very early start to drive over the Whangamoa and Rai hills to the Marlbourough Colleges’ Cluster Day- it was a major undertaking- they had closed the colleges for the day and given the kids the day off- the day before Easter Friday. 160 or so teachers came along to hear Greg Gebhert speak followed by two two hour workshops. With lessons learnt from the previous Lead Teacher Day I heard little of Greg’s keynote as I was busy making my computer behave and connect to the network before feeling comfortable that everything was going to go smoothly. I was presenting sessions on blogging with newbies- two hours was a good length- long enough to spend some time showcasing what a blog can be used for then long enough to actually play and make one.
I used our Moturoa class blog and our Blogmeister blog as examples and my Bling4yrblog blog resource with pdf handout on how to get started and how to add a few extras. The sessions were really humming along and I got a good buzz from the groups which was superb.
Then it was off the Warren’s place for help with a migration of my 12inch Apple G4 iBook that I had won in a radio competition to my brand new nearly all paid for 15 inch Mac Book Pro with RAM to burn! Things did not start out well and there was a few nervous moments as disks failed to be recognised but it all came right in the end and after a drive home in the dark I spent till 2am playing! Not to worry- the long Easter weekend looms.
The sensible path was not to migrate the applications downloaded off the net but to re-download the latest versions with Leopard fixes and the like. Everything is going smoothly and I am re-populating my dock. Only a few little question marks- KidPix and Microsoft Apps to replace. Click on the photo if you want to find out what made it back to the dock and what missed out!
Skitch did give me a little grief until I remembered our slight change to the SYSTEM PREFERENCES- NETWORK- AIRPORT-DNS settings of the additions of these two numbers!
Kudos to here for help to do this and to the soon to be departing Chrissy who pointed me to it last year and to my Delicious who let me store my bookmarks on any computer which made it very easy to re-locate that much needed web reference.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! Chrissy Hellyer tagged me for this Passion Quilt Meme through Miguel Guhlin- the idea is that you post a photo of something that you feel passionate about children’s learning. For me this is developing connections between children globally and sharing our learning with our global community.
This photo is a mash-up of our collaboration between Paul Harrington’s class in Wales and my own Moturoa class at Appleby. Over the year we had been building links between our classes- so much so that children felt a personal connection with Paul and his class. The children were familiar with each other via our blog posts, podcasts and Skype conversations. The connection became face to face when Dino and his family spent time in Paul’s class while on a family holiday in the UK. We came in to school late at night so we could talk to Dino and his Welsh buddies directly via Skype video. The virtual friendships become real.
The photo credit from the Welsh end of the conversation goes to the Times Educational Supplement that did an article on how classrooms use Skype to link up globally.
3 Simple Meme Rules:
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter.
Today was my first day officially as ICT Facilitator to Discover IT Tasman. I loved it. I still don’t know quite what I’m doing but I am enjoying doing it.
I started by helping a secondary school history teacher to scan some of her OHP transparencies of the Irish Uprising. She had never used the scanner before and I managed to throw in a couple of useful extras for her like how to make and rename folders and how to organise her photos into folders. After that I quickly showed her how to do a Google image search for new and interesting photos on the topics she wants to illustrate.
Then a French teacher & I had a discussion on ways to record her students for NZCEA and another teacher asked if I could show her how to use Photoshop.
I had a go at sifting through papers in my ‘office’ to see what paperwork was left behind by the previous facilitator- never had an office before!
Then off to Upper Moutere School- only getting lost once!
Upper Moutere is a delightful rural school with a very creative principal. I couldn’t resist a photo of their recently completed WELCOME sign made by pupils. Isn’t it great. Together we planned a series of workshops on ways to introduce Kid Pix with Year 3/4 and how to encourage and enhance their already blogging classes with a sense of community.
What a great start- at this stage I have sense of freedom to go with my strengths and really make a difference- positive feedback was instant. A great beginning.
At the beginning of the school year (in the Southern Hemisphere that is) you might be keen have you students build themselves an avatar if you are not sure about putting individual photos on line or as a identity in Voicethread. Chris Betcher recently posted this find ‘Build Your Wild Self‘ from the New York Zoo. You can build your avatar and add animal features to it. Kids would love the opportunity to be wild and wacky.
This week’s highlight has been an impulse buy- Parallels for my TELA laptop. I was going to buy a new 17inch MacBook Pro but got the speed wobbles when I realised how much it was going to cost. This is my compromise. I may still buy a MacBook at a later date. The installation went smoothly and now I not only have a back-up of my PC on my TELA Apple laptop but I can access my books and other Publisher files from my Apple. I even got my new Polycom Communicator that only runs with Windows XP to work with a quick test Skype call to Lenva Shearing just to check. With the Communicator you can make Skype call with the speaker to a larger audience and not have to worry about feedback. Tino pai rawa!
I can’t wait till our next Skype collaboration- maybe with Lisa Parisi from New York as we learn together via our hemispheres wiki to find out about how things work in our different hemispheres.
After an all day Sunday session at school tidying up for move to another classroom and a new level of children. I felt in need of a little light relief as I had cleared my Bloglines and checked out the tweets and thought I would ‘Google‘ myself. I was amazed that this German blogger had found his/her way to my Teacher tube Video, One Woman’s Wanderings with Web2.o. These links are truly incredible.
They link to each other but until this evening I have had to convert the .m4a enhanced podcasts made in Garageband to .mp3 audio only files, upload to another Podomatic page that I made just for that purpose, use the Firefox add-on UNPLUG and through a tricky piece of code embed the .mp3 into Blogger. The ‘how to’ on this procedure is on my Bling4yrblog page if you still want to do this.
But tonight, just for fun, I tried to upload the .m4a file to Blogger movie and it worked! Now our enhanced podcasts play right inside our Blogger posts without having to click on an outside link. I didn’t think it would seeing it says they only process AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media. Yay!
I still prefer to view our podcasts within iTunes but I like the visual appeal of viewing as well as listening to our podcasts from within our blog. Click on the screen grab to view how it looks. Kieran will be ever so pleased now he can add another video to his blog.
