I Meet The Future . . . I teach

I’ve had a great week with my class this week, they have really shown me that live in a digital world. This is their space. I think I’ve known that for a while but I’ve held back because I wasn’t sure if it was okay to let them loose and to be digital rather than pen and paper… what will the school community say? I’m I going to have to explain why it is so important for this change to happen in our classroom? What will other teachers say? is always in the back of my mind.

I’ve made one big mistake though, one of the children asked me if they could draft their work on the computer and I said no we’re only planning our work then printing it out and drafting in our draft writing books so that you can edit in red pen and then conference with me on it. You should have seen the look of disappointment on his face. ARGH why did I say that! I guess it’s because I have this preconceived idea that I need to check how they are editing their work and see what they are doing in their draft to be able to conference with them effectively.

Well I’ve been watching & listening to a few of the Shift Happens videos and ideas on the Shift Happens wikispace and I’ve changed my mind. If the children in my class are motivated by being able to draft and edit their work on the computer why not let them? I’ll be changing their writing contract next week to ensure they are able to plan, draft and edit and publish using the computers if they wish to… the only problem is I know that almost all of my 29 students will want to do this so how do you cater for that when you only have 7 computers available?

I’m also aware that I have to assess their handwriting this term so they do need to be practicing that as well but how can I assess that if they are all doing their work on the computer? Is their still a place for handwriting? At the moment when I think about how many forms I’ve filled in during the last week that just had to be handwritten because they companies and people I was doing it for wouldn’t accept a digital version I guess there still is a place for legible handwriting. However I don’t think that teaching only handwriting is okay I think I’m going to have to be teaching some keyboard/typing what ever you want to call it skills as well. This is an area that lets quite a few children in my class down, they just don’t get enough computer time at home to develop the speed they need to be able to operate at. So maybe I’ll be added a keyboarding/typing activity as well.

Lots of things to think about. Would love to see your thoughts!

Well it’s only been two days but already I’ve had teachers comment about the changes I’ve made to my classroom and most importantly the children in my class are loving it. They are at home with the new computers at their fingertips design of our classroom and wish they could have more. I knew it would be something they enjoyed but I didn’t think that it would be that enjoyable, I guess I underestimated how much more engaged they would be.

Things to smile about:
- new writing, reading and mathematics contracts making use of computer groups for warm ups, discussions and brainstorms
- engagement in learning even when they aren’t using the computers.
- whole class is more involved as they have a 1:3,4 or 5 ratio so more opportunity to contribute

Things that need tweeking
- creating comments via our blog, not working too well through our network
- getting the cords to stick in the right place so they don’t get run over by seats, desks or feet.
- traffic jam around art area

Watch this space …. photos and more tweeking & smiles to come

Well after much debate and lots of moving of desks and chairs I’ve come up with a new classroom layout for term 3. Of course this may all change again once they children finish their scale maps on how they would like to the classroom to look. Thanks to

Here’s what it looks like for now….

BubbleShare: Share photos – Easy Photo Sharing

There’s one big group in the middle with xtenda and decent speed xp system and three other groups to the side, one with a mac laptop and two with older xp based machines. I’m hoping to get another machine to take over the mimio & projector duties as it’s a pain having my laptop permanently attached to it makes release time a little harder as I have to pry laptop away from the children.

Well a huge thanks has to go to Jacqui Sharp again for her inspiration for mathematics workshops… I’ve created two more for this terms strand focus which I plan to share with the rest of the team.

To get the great animations and the sound effects you’ll need to download the file from slideshare The children in my class enjoy music and like to have things move around the screen so I’ve added a few in this time. Slideshare also wipes out the inking I’ve used via my tablet so you’ll need to download the file to get that as well.

Well it’s finally the last day of term 2… it’s been a long term. Today I wanted to reflect on the choices I’ve given my class in the last week. I like to round off each term with a finishing off period where we work on reflecting on the term and getting things finished that we might not have been able to during the previous weeks in the term. This means that the children get a choice as to what they are doing. We create a Big Scary List together that really isn’t all that scary and they need to finish everything on it in order to participate in fun things on Friday or the last day of the term.

Now this works really well for most children in the class they enjoy being able to work at their own pace and to choose what to do next. One thing I have noticed this year especially with having year 4’s is that there are more children who can’t handle this opportunity, they choose basically not to do anything if left to their own devices. This means I end up having to walk them through one thing at a time in order for them to get the work done. I believe that it is important to develop children’s independence and their ability to self manage. I’ve worked really hard with the children in my class to show them that they have control over their own behaviour and are responsible for their learning – I’m of course there to help them every step of the way. I was impressed today to watch the children that last term needed very small steps become able to just do it on their own this term. There are a few others that I still need to work with and there probably always will be, it’s nice to see the progress happening though!

I’ve been working with the children in my class on measurement this term with a focus on length, width, area and perimeter. Today as one of the last activities of the unit I talked to the children about how I’d like to change the classroom around during the upcoming holiday break. I explained that I’d really like them to decide where we are going to put everything so they are going to create their own classroom maps and we’ll vote once they’re finished.

Being a class full of kids hungry for competition they thought this was a great idea. We had a short discussion on how maps are made and what scale means on a map. We also talked about using a scale of 1m = 10cm just to make it easy.

Anyhow I set them to work on measuring pretty much everything in the room so that they could then use our scale and create their own classroom maps. They all went about this rather mamouth task. After working on this for about 25-30mins one of my girls came up and said “This is so much better than doing maths” I thought that was a classic comment.

It really illustrates how important it is to give children a chance to put their knowledge and skills into practice in a practical way. They crave the ability to become part of the process rather than have the process given to them. I’ve always tried to do this as much as possible but maybe a little bit more thinking on it would get a few more comments like this is better than reading or writing. Who knows

Here’s one of the workshops I used (thanks to Jacqui Sharp for the inspiration on this one) for the children after we’d done a bit of work on length, width and measuring using a ruler: (I’ve removed some of the links as they were specific to my class you can sign up to smart kiddies here unfortunately there are no free subscriptions to rainforest maths any more but you can use it if you have a matheltics subscription.)

Yahoo, I’m finally getting the hang of the write anywhere tool that comes with the Mimio software – Mimio Notebook. I love this tool!

If you haven’t used it before it’s basically a quick and simple way to change your writing into typed text. Very useful when you’re adding things into something other than Mimio notebook (when you’re in Mimio notebook you can use recognise ink to change your writing into text).

Today we used it to add examples to our table in a word document we were working on. It meant I could write just like a would with a whiteboard marker and just like magic write anywhere changed my writing into text and put it into our table. The children thought it was fantastic!

Recognise ink in the tools section of Mimio Notebook is also fantastic, the children in my class have been using it in our roll call file to change the names they have written into typed text. It’s very powerful because difficult to read handwriting becomes difficult to read typed text – it will come up with symbols and jumbled letters.

If you’re looking for info on Mimio try these websites:
www.mimio.com
www.mimio.school.nz

My class and I have been experimenting with Voice Thread what a great tool. One that I discovered a while ago but didn’t really get into until now. We used it to comment on Despereaux that I’ve been reading to the class.

It was great to listen to the ideas the children had about the book, ideas that I would’t have been able to gain from some of them had we left it to. I got the children to write down a PMI just a sentence for each one before they recorded their opinions. This helped them to feel a little more at ease when using the microphone.

There faces while listening to themselves were classic. What a fantastic opportunity to talk about what we hear when we’re speaking and the things we need to be careful of so that others can understand our message. We came up with a set of things we needed to think about when talking into a microphone that will help them to improve next time.

Well worth the experimentation time and the frustration of getting the children all logged in and recording at the same time!

Wouldn’t we all love to have our children actually comprehend what they have just read in their reading group? I have been struggling with this over the past term but have found a few interesting resources to use that might engage a few more children in the process…

Firstly Into The Book, a great little American website that works through some of the most important comprehension strategies children need to have. I’ve found this site fantastic as it even has videos of children using the strategies (in the teacher’s section). I’ve shared a few of these with my class and they have not only enjoyed the great American accent but have engaged with the strategy when we practiced it afterwards. They are starting to use the language of comprehension and even looking at using more than one strategy at once WAHOOOO!!

Secondly we’ve been really lucky to have the great expertise of Alison Davis on site. We had a very challenging session with her earlier this year and have all been fortunate enough to receive a copy of her book. If you get the chance to read it go for it… many fantastic ideas and a really in depth look at what it is to teach comprehension to children.

Thirdly I’ve challenged my children to use their vocabulary to fill in the blanks with cloze activities I’ve made using the Hot Potatoes program. This little gem of a program also makes crosswords, quizzes and a few other neat little activities that I haven’t used very much of yet … but I will
Any other ideas about comprehension would be greatly appreciated please add them as comments to this post.

My class had a new favourite website…. www.kerpoof.com most of them spent a good part of the day creating their own digital version of this narratives.  What a fantastic site!  If you haven’t managed to get here yet… TRY IT NOW.  There are so many different applications for this website in the classroom.  It’s free to sign up for a teachers account, takes about 24 hours to activate then you’re ready to go.