Edu-(Tech)niques
Educational Technology in Practice in The Field!
Examples of our Blogs in Action
0116 days
It’s the first time I’ve been able to coordinate the launch of non-password protected blogs to a school and I’ve been thrilled with the first couple of weeks and how the teachers and students have reacted and interacted on them.
So far this year we have:
Grade 3: http://g3iss.weebly.com Under the guidance and leadership of @Shaza33
Grade 4: http://g4iss.weebly.com
G5 Class: http://g5sb.weebly.com
When faced with the teachers wanting to do a blog across the grade I was a little skeptical and not entirely sure of how it would turn out. But I wanted blogs up and running so it was a start and a push in the right direction. To be honest there are a number of things I actually prefer in a grade level blog over a class blog! There is more opportunity for student and teacher interaction, there is more of an audience and there is more chance of regular updates from the teachers and students. It works, in our school, as we only have 3 classes per grade level so it doesn’t get too busy and chaotic.
Let’s take a look at some happenings on our blogs so far.
Student Work
A Grade 3 student decided to do a PowerPoint for homework on Healthy Choices in our Who We Are unit. An example of some self directed learning from a student was now available to a wider audience after been posted to the blog.
Two layers of student work with these Grade 3 students writing their own post and also showing their experiment in pictures.
Linky
These Grade 4 students made up 3 Laws Of Peace on International Peace Day after Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion (that they were studying in their How The World Works unit)
Linky
There is so much work to show the families of K1 students a blog is a great platform to do it. K1 teachers take a lot of photos during their normal school day so putting them up for the world to see on their blog is not too much of a stretch to do.
Communication
One of the greatest things I’ve seen with our new blogs is the interaction between classroom and home. New channels of communication are opened up and families are invited into their child’s learning. Even the grandparents back home can feel closer to their grandchildren.
Student Reflection and Encouragement
Grade 4 students in particular have gone a little ga-ga (in a good way!) with commenting on posts. When we introduced the blogs we talked about our Digital Footprint and the importance of appropriate and supportive commenting. I’ve been very proud of our students and the way they have represented themselves with their commenting. A couple of examples:
I must have a chat with Shunya about CAPS LOCK! As I mentioned in a previous post there was some discussion about why our blogs are open to the world. I’m happy with the way our students are conducting themselves and that we can be there to guide them if they veer off the precarious path of appropriate online behavior.
I always say it’s best for students to make mistakes with us than away from the learning environment without us.
Life on the blogging line continues…
The Many Faces of PoissonRouge.Com
0123 days
by colingally
in Websites
It’s a challenge to integrate technology into a 5 year old student’s school day. First of all time and patience is needed to actually learn how to use the mouse/keyboard/trackpad. Which is why I’m a big proponent of using Ipods and Ipads in Early Years as they remove the obstacles of usability with their tactile and interactively easy interface for young children.
Lots of websites say they are for Early Years students but many fail at the simple things. And its frustrating for both the teacher and the student. BBC Early Years has some good activities but is more of a pick and play website for teachers to navigate. PbsKids.org try to mix it up a bit but there’s just too many buttons and options and the activity screens are waaaay too small.
The goal for me, always, is to find a website (or software) that a 4 and 5 year old student can navigate, explore and take control of their own learning with the minimal of instruction from the teacher.
PoissonRouge.Com does exactly that and to them I am grateful that there is a website out there that “gets” what a young child needs to experience with a website.
From the title page you can see that there are no words to comprehend, there are no advertisements to confuse and there are no distracting and misleading icons. This results in a explorative and exciting time for the young students.
Let’s take a look at some of the games (or activities, not everything is a game on PoissonRouge). To be honest I haven’t even gone through them all and I am surprised every time I see some new game from the website on a student’s screen.
A Take on Snakes And Ladders
http://www.poissonrouge.com/board/
I haven’t told any student in K1 and K2 how to play this and I was so happy to see students opening this up and realizing they had to click on the dice and move their ladybug the number of spaces rolled. Maths, critical thinking and logical reasoning at the click of a mouse.
Ten Green Bottles
http://www.poissonrouge.com/tengreenbottles/
If your students don’t know this song before they do this activity they will very very shortly. When students start this activity the song starts its first verse. And then stops. What to do, what to do?! Well click on a bottle, any bottle, and it will tumble to the floor. And the song continues! So simple but so engaging. The student becomes an active part of the song and that is very rewarding for the young learner.
As you can see with these activities there are no complicated “Click Here To Return Home” buttons and the students learn very quickly to click on the red fish to return back to the home page.
Alphabet Game
http://www.poissonrouge.com/abc/
An activity for every letter of the alphabet? Sure, why not?!
C for Cake proves very popular where you get to make the cake with the different ingredients!
If I wrote about everything on PoissonRouge I would be here a long time but to say I am very impressed with its total commitment to accommodating early years students would be an understatement.
Stay tuned for some students’ opinions on PoissonRouge coming soon!
So why SHOULD class/student blogs be open?
2148 days
I was hired in my current position to steer our Elementary School vision of technology usage to be more in line with current trends.
The first thing I wanted to introduce to the teachers was the implementation of classroom blogs. With most grades this turned out be more fruitful to be a grade level blog. It’s a step in the right direction and one I’m happy with. At the minute most grades are waiting for permission slips to be returned but our Grade 3 team (headed by @Shaza33) have a 100% return on permission slips and the blog is going amazingly well in our first few weeks.
http://g3iss.weebly.com
We have parents commenting, videos of various activities and guest student bloggers all combining to extend our Grade 3 classrooms beyond the concrete walls. It’s a great start and long may it last. I’m waiting patiently on the other grades to follow suit…soon! Especially the lower grades where it can a fantastic insight for the parents to see what goes in their child’s classroom.
A debate that arose within our school was whether the blogs should be password protected (obviously the Grade 3 parents didn’t think so!) so I spoke at our last faculty meeting to address this. The teachers who I was working with were all supportive of the open blogs. I mean, what’s the point of speaking to a limited audience in a small room behind a locked door? You get to the stage where you (the student or a teacher) will go “Why bother, nobody else can hear me?”
And that’s when blogs die and enthusiasm wavers and engagement subsides.
With a password standing tall and strong in front of our students’ work and evidence of their learning no other classes or teachers could find us and share with us their learning or questions. Without a password the audience can easily subscribe to an RSS feed to keep up to date with posts, this is not possible with a password as the feed reader can’t get through (I speak from experience trying to keep on top of 70 student password protected blogs last year).
Passwords are just another obstacle in the way to access and to receive information, feedback and…friends. Global friends. With different backgrounds and beliefs. Different than ours.
Tear down those walls…..
Tagxedo, Wordle and Worditout of ADE Reflections
3284 days
Just a quick experiment with Tagxedo, Wordle and Worditout.
I copied and pasted all the ADE reflections from Steve Katz’s blog and chucked them in to see what I got!
Of course, I went corny with Tagxedo as it gives you the option of choosing an image shape. Lo and behold there was an Apple. Groan!
Tagxedo has a lot of different options when exporting your image but the embed code was not working when I tried it (as you may see from the big space above this paragraph!). Will will leave it here anyway and see it if corrects itself. When you have it live, the words expand when you mouse-over them which helps the whole analyzing of the words used.
I like Wordle, it’s an old friend. Although Tagxedo has better “embed” options (when they work!), as you can see (ya gotta click on the thumbnail for the Wordle to get it bigger).
Worditout is a new one to me and pretty similar to Wordle but I think their interface is a little more clunky to be honest.
Word cloud made with WordItOut
I limited each generated image to 150 words. Nothing too deep or meaningful about the results but I like the way the word “Apple” is not the biggest word that is generated!
The words “People” and “Group” come before it and that sums up the ADE experience for me!
Reflections on ADE 2011
8289 days
Just like Ted Cowan, Steve Katz, Madeleine Brookes and Jabiz Raisdana I thought I would sum up my thoughts on the ADE Asia Institute 2011 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
It’s actually really hard to pick a point to start. It really says something about the whole experience in that I’m finding it hard to sleep with the sheer number of things that are running through my head as a result.
I’ll try to break it down into a number of factors why the ADE Asia Institute 2011 was amazing.
People!
Don’t bother applying to be an ADE if you don’t want to meet people as you will meet, work with and make friends with a number of people. Without a doubt. The creativity, ideas, shared emotions and contrasting philosophies will have your brain reeling with glee and sometimes bafflement! To share is to learn and we shared and learned a lot during the five days we were together.
From the Friday night, Rebecca Stockley got us into gear with some activities to get us out of our comfort zone. Normally I would cringe at the thought of running around finding somebody to do some weird dance with but this felt different, there was a purpose and Friday night set us up for the challenges we faced as groups later on. Rebecca was a constant source of reassurance and humor throughout the institute and I commend her for her energy and passion.
To be inspired at a conference is a wonderful thing. Has it happened to me a lot over the last few years? Sadly, no…
I can’t pick the number of times I was inspired over the course of the institute. From being inspired to get my DSLR out and start snapping again after listening to Joesph Linaschke to just being inspired to be a better educator from the overall experience of meeting so many fantastic PEOPLE.
Process!
The process of the two main activities and watching each other’s finished products were massive learning experiences for me. The Great ADE Race was a non-stop, ever changing, heavily involved group discussion and exhausting experience (running two blocks to get to Notre Dame cathedral for an on-the-hour photograph is quite the experience!). There were 5 of us ADEs and our Vietnamese helper, Ahn (who had quite the experience too!), we made plans, scrapped them, re-thought plans, performed the activities, re-thought plans and continued in that fashion. The editing on-the-fly on the iPod Touch was frustrating to say the least (thankfully I only took charge of a few pictures and videos taking (or making!). I don’t think the iPod Touch would have made it back if I had been in charge of editing…
The Saigon 360 PROCESS was my take-away moment of the institute. Teaming up with Jeff Dungan and Patrick McMahon with Jane Harris as a valued mentor we started off with great speed towards a concept of re-creating Apocalypse Now. A couple of scenes in and Jane was kind enough to interject and guide us to the WHY of our project. Were we going to be proud of the substance of our movie? What was the question we were meant to be asking? All great question and it stopped us in our tracks to re-think our…thinking. This leads us on to….
Problem!
We’ve all heard about learning from your mistakes. We didn’t make a mistake in our approach to Saigon 360 we just missed the boat a bit on the WHY. So we had the PROBLEM…what now?! I think we spent an hour and a half struggling, brainstorming and discussing this. To come up with another idea totally threw us askew, we had to get our brains into another way of thinking. What was our question? Why did we jump straight into thinking about re-creating Apocalypse Now? Were we influenced so much by Vietnam war movies?
Yes.
Hmmm. Were other people? Are our perceptions, as non Vietnamese, of Vietnam influenced by the phenomenal amount of Vietnam war movies? What happened to our perceptions after we actually visited Vietnam. We had it!! The euphoria was immense but we still had work to do. A visit to the War Museum and a couple of interviews with various tourists later and we had enough for a short introductory movie on our theme. Jeff, Patrick and I sat down back at the hotel to flesh it out, sort it out and export it out! We huddled together up until the deadline to put together something we were still not sure of. This is it.
Is This Your Vietnam? from Colin Gallagher on Vimeo.
The response we got from a number of people was emotional, gratifying and relieving. They re-affirmed our basic concept. One audience member said she was all “clenched up” inside watching it. Another mentioned their uncle who had been in Vietnam. Our video stirred conversation and emotions. We were elated, extremely proud and full of gratitude for the entire day we just spent together and the end result. If we didn’t encounter problems in the process we may not have had such a learning moment.
Taking It Home
These are my initial fundamental reflections. I learned a lot. It was a very personal and often emotional experience. If I typed out all the things going through my head right now I would still be writing 5 hours from now. But I have to get on with the reality of day to day work and continuing my passion and drive to stand strong for my beliefs and my “brand”. Let the thinking continue…