Homework in Google Slides

I am not a huge fan of homework unless it is purposeful and authentic to student learning. But if your school policy is to have homework and there is a parent expectation then you can set up an easy homework regime in Google Slideshow.
The example below which you can download by clicking on the Options button - Open Editor (Make a copy) and adapt for yourself, has these components

• Click on the Spelling City link, add your words for the week and test yourself, type in your score
• Double click on the youtube movie to practise your timetables for the week
• Add your spelling list words
• Add your basic facts to learn for the week
• Add to your reading log the books you have read this week

Your photo jigsaws on iPad, iPod Touch, wikis and blogs

A great way to start off and introduce your wiki/blog at the beginning of the year is to add a jigsaw using photos of your students or places around the school. Jigzone allows you to upload your own photos and embed jigsaws into your wikis and blogs. (It will not embed into Google Sites).
The jigsaws will also work on your iPad or your iPod Touch.

• set up an account at Jigzone
• Click on 'New to Jigzone'
• Click on Add Photo (Make sure that the photo is smaller than 1 megabyte)
• Click Browse, find the photo and then click Upload 

•  Click Embed/Link

 Choose how many pieces you want the jigsaw to end up as

Embed in Blogs
Select Fixed size for Blogs, click in the html box and copy the code.
Go back to your blogger page, click where you want the jigsaw to go, click on the HTML button next to compose, paste code, click back on Compose, add a label to the right, click Publish

Embed in Wiki
Scroll down to Stretch to Fit. Click in the html box and copy the code. Go back to your wiki page, click Edit, click where you want the jigsaw to go, click on Widget, click Other, paste in code, click Save and click save again to save the whole page.





How can I use this with an iPad or an iPod Touch?

Go to Safari and enter your blog or wiki address, tap on the Share button and select Add to Home Screen.

Now you have a direct link to your blog or wiki.

You might want to consider setting up a Jigsaw blog or a Page on a wiki.
Ideas for photo jigsaws

• kids in the playground
• class trips
• favourite areas of the classroom
• kids learning in the classroom
• pose a question and have a photo of the answer
• spelling words jigsaw

Day 3 e-Learning in the Classroom

Maths
Students are working well through the activities, some of them need to be reminded that they have to record their scores from the online math activities. Children who were working on the mimio workshop are learning to be co-operative with each other so that they share ownership of the mimio pen!






Reading

The reading session went extremely well today. Students were moving from task to task independently.










We introduced two new options, the audiobook on the iPod touch and the Easi-speak microphone.
The students with the Easi-Speak had a great time recording themselves reading a story and listening to themselves reading it.

Students sat with the iPod  touch, the splitter and head phones and listened to 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' audiobook.

The children are also very fond of using the flip video to record their plays.












Writing

The students are getting into the swing of using the Writing task board. They were all moving their names across to the appropriate column. Some of the students started on the Conferencing options. At this school the students can't print from the school computers, only the teachers laptop is enabled to print so we are adding another management space to the Writing task board 'Ready to print' so that the teacher knows which students have work to print out, and can print it out at a time that is convenient to them.

Handwriting, Keyboarding and Spelling
The blending of these subjects is working well. Students know who are on the computers for Keyboarding and Spelling, while the others do their Handwriting and Spelling in their books. Keyboarding is already starting to improve.
Several children are confident with the Home keys (asdf jkl;) so I have started them off on the Keyboarding cards.

Day 2 e-Learning Classroom

Another great day in the classroom. The children settled down to their tasks straight away and were not phased by all of the teachers in the room observing them.
Maths
Most of the students realised that they needed to write their progress and answers in their maths books. The teacher of the class was amazed by 3 children who were working on the 3 computers in the withdrawal space. He expected them to be not on task, but they were totally involved in what they were doing occasionally helping each other at the same time.



I also noticed that the teacher was able to leave the students (He feels comfortable enough to let go of control)  who were working on the workshop for short periods of time to look around the room at what the other students were doing. There were not enough computers for all of the students but they all managed to co-operate well with each other.


Reading
The students understand how the task board works now and are eager to try out the different options, especially the iPad stories. So that we can find out what activities the students like doing the most they will fill in the following tracking sheet

Reading recording sheet

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This will assist in future planning of activities and also identify individual student preferences.

One group of students went with the 'Grab some friends and act out a play'. We gave them a Flip Video camera and they videoed their efforts. Their first effort they viewed away from the rest of the class, lots of laughing but they soon realised that they needed to make some drastic changes. They went outside and did it again and did a great job!

Spaces

Gareth created a secret space today and introduced it to the children as a 'Quiet Space'. The students used it well today. This photo was taken when another student came and told me that the child in the Quiet Space had been there for a long time, when I went and looked this kid was reading quietly with another student.

Writing

Gareth talked about Conjunctions in the writing process today. Teachers who were observing were amazed at the level of engagement with the children that were working on the iPads and iPhone. Students are now starting to use the Writing Management Board as they move from the Drafting stage to Editing and Conferencing. We will be introducing the conferencing choices tomorrow.

Handwriting, Spelling, Keyboarding

Already the students are concentrating consciously on their keyboarding skills. Most children had 2 hands on the keyboard and were touching the space bar with their thumbs. We have timetabled 9 children everyday to do Keyboarding exercises rather than Handwriting and then they can continue with their Spelling activities after 10 minutes of typing practice.

Spelling activities

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The students who aren't on the computers continue with doing their spelling in their spelling books.

P.E

Gareth has made a 'Large Ball skills' assessment sheet for his children. They looked over what was expected of them, students took turns at videoing groups of other students. When they came inside they watched themselves and critiqued their performance. They now have their learning goals for the next P.E session.

Art

The topic at the moment is Disasters so Gareth prepared a PowerPoint with images to do with disasters. Students will be creating their own disaster icons for posters. Everybody started off on paper and I worked with a couple of children on Paint. More about this tomorrow!

Walking the Talk: Day One 'Computer Lab'

For the next nine weeks I am teaching one day a week in a school in South Auckland. I am working with 4 different Year 6 classes running lab sessions. I have started a Year 6 wiki for them and the main concentration is going to be on the children's writing and publishing.
Day One
Introduction of me and my expectations for the next nine weeks.
What are the rules?

Writing And Publishing Online

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Look at our Wikipage.










Practice our typing.

Keyboarding Practice

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Play a Spelling game or Typing game.
Find a Recount we have already typed into Pages.











Make a Wordle of it. The students had to learn lots of skills for this activity, how to move between Pages and an Internet Page, keyboard shortcut keys such as Command-A to select all, Command-C to copy, Command-V to paste.
They also had to learn how to do a screen capture to save to the desktop, Shift-Command-4. They took a screen capture of their Wordle and uploaded into their Wikipage,

Wordle

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Keyboarding and Integration

Most teachers tell me that they do not have enough time to teach keyboarding skills but there are ways around this...Integration!
The best time for Keyboarding teaching is when you are doing other things! Have a couple of old keyboards handy or laminated printouts of keyboards. (Click on the picture below to see a larger view and print out.)
As you are modeling writing talk Keyboarding at the same time. "Now we will put a full stop at the end of the sentence here. How do we make a full stop on a keyboard? Which finger do we use? Pass around the keyboard and show the person next to you how you make a full stop (or a capital letter, or a comma etc)."
When you are using a computer keyboard with your Interactive whiteboard, talk about what you are doing. "I need to insert an awesome adjective before this word, so I click just before the word, I type my new word, and then I press the Space bar."
Ask questions like "How many times do I press the space bar to make a space between words?" or "What is the quick way to delete a word?" or "What fingers do I use to press the Enter key and the backspace key?"

Click on this plain keyboard, print out and photocopy. These could be placed in student's Handwriting or Spelling books
Part of the Handwriting lesson each day could include a focus word. I have made some of these up in PowerPoint, a keyword to each slide (when I have a lot more I will upload a slideshare version of it)
Students can practise that focus word on the photocopy of the keyboard after they have finished their handwriting.

The other keyboard could be used to practise spelling words...'Type out your spelling list'.
Always talk through what you are doing when you are keyboarding in front of children, don't just assume that they know!

Walking the Talk Day One

Today was the first day of my 'Walk the talk'. I am teaching in a Year 5/6 class for 2 weeks (first 4 days of each week).
This is a Decile 10 school, with very capable children. It was a totally mac school until the recent purchase of some linux netbooks. The class of 28 children has 3 E-Macs and 1 teacher laptop. I have taken another iMac, a Windows computer and 4 Windows laptops and and a netbook. I was able to get them all onto the internet which is great as most of my planned programme is Internet based.
The most exciting thing for the students was the LCD TV and the Wii. They all thought they were going to be jumping around playing tennis and bowls, but that rumour was quickly dispelled as I showed them how it can access the internet wirelessly and I had some maths games bookmarked.
It was also noted that I had iPods, iTouch, and a PSP.
Once I set up the computers and the mimio, the children started filtering in, the first child was a bit of a character and very interested and capable with all things digital. He has become my main man and by the end of the day, he was teaching others how to use the mimio, access the internet sites on the Wii, save files to memory sticks and any other troubleshooting problems that arose. His job is to now train another person, and then it will snowball from there.
I showed the children my planning and told them how they could access it from my computer. My 'main man's' job is to get it set up in the morning from now. I set the routines of
1. Before School 3 different people per day have to click on the Morning Routines, one to look at the Weather, one to pick a news headline and one to find out what happened this day in History. I showed them how to Screen Clip the item they want to share to a new page in the mimio Notebook.
We needed to discuss how you need to read what you are going to screen clip so that you understand it enough to read and talk about with the class.Will be interesting tomorrow to see how the kids cope with it.
2. I showed them their spelling words which will be on the screen for them tomorrow, and set the routine of Bells ring - come in - start Handwriting card - move on to Spelling activity (on screen) - practice Keyboarding which will be on the Wii. More about this tomorrow!

This school streams their maths classes, so I lost most of the kids to other classrooms and had to train up a new lot. These are very able top stream students and seemed quite taken aback when I told them they were going to be teaching themselves, managing their own learning and booking me when they needed help! I gave them a pretest I had created on perimeter, area and volume. We then marked it and they had to write down on their Student Assessment Tracking sheet what areas of the test they needed to work on more. I showed them all the activities that were going to available in books, worksheets, computers, internet, Wii, PSP and iPod Touch. Tomorrow is when they have to come in, choose their activity or learning opportunities. I have told them I will be running a Perimeter Workshop which is their choice to attend...shall be interesting! More tomorrow!

The Literacy part of the day was Explanation Writing where we looked at the PowerPoint.

How to write Excellent Explanations

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This will be broken up and different parts concentrated on over the next few days. Children were very excited about the drafting and publishing possibilities. More about that later!

Ran out of time quickly for reading but was mostly about what the routines will be, and that students could choose from a wide range of Reading Options when they were not doing Guided Reading with me or related reading activity. More on this later.

The afternoon session was introducing them to the Class Wiki and especially the Wiki Promise



We made a start on our Research Unit. The children have been looking at Communication so I wanted to see what they had learned previously so they worked on an Inspiration diagram 'Fact Recall'. Tomorrow we are going to look at how to create a research question and find keywords.

Visit www.moblyng.com to make your own!

Spelling, PowerPoint and hyperlinking

Create your week of spelling activities in PowerPoint. I like to use PowerPoint because I can hyperlink to websites and files on my computer. In this example I have listed the topic words for the week. Students who have access to the computers can type out this list 3 times and it is projected on the screen for the rest of the class to copy into their books. There is a hyperlink below that to a website called Look, Cover, Write and Check. You can type in your word list and be tested online. This is a great activity for fast finishers and for children who need some incentive to learn their words.
This next activity has been created in Jigzone. Upload a photo to Jigzone, set the number of pieces and save it. I created these images in PowerPoint by typing in all the words, rearranging them, inserting a shape behind them, grouping all the images and then right clicking to use the option 'Save as Picture'. Then I uploaded the image to Jigzone. I could then hyperlink the image I had made from PowerPoint to the jigsaw I had made.





This activity has been created in Inspiration and has been saved as a file to my computer. So all I had to do was hyperlink to the file from PowerPoint.

Jigzone

I used to subscribe to the website Jigzone years ago, but it became too addictive. Especially if you have the jigsaws emailed to you everyday! But it is a great educational tool, all you have to do is upload a jpeg, choose how many pieces you want then embed into a blog, website or wiki...or hyperlink through PowerPoint to the link where your Jigzone has been saved.

This activity has been created in Jigzone. Upload a photo to Jigzone, set the number of pieces and save it. I created these images in PowerPoint by typing in all the words, rearranging them, inserting a shape behind them, grouping all the images and then right clicking to use the option 'Save as Picture'. Then I uploaded the image to Jigzone. I could then hyperlink the image I had made from PowerPoint to the jigsaw I had made.

This is a photo that a child took of another child playing on the Adventure Playground.

ICT and everyday activities

For years we have got children to do the same activities over and over again. Some children like doing them, some do not. Some of these activities do not suit everyone but are typical 'drill and kill'. Revitalise those activities and they may attract a different audience.

An example of this is in the subject of Spelling.

Write this word '3' times.

or Match the Capital and lower case letters

endings of words

or contractions

How many times have you had children finding dictionary meanings for words?

And then unjumbling words or writing in the missing letters.

Think about some of the activities you do on a regular basis. Which of those could you recreate using Word, PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote, Kidspiration, Inspiration or any other software you may be using in the classroom. These are also great interactive whiteboard activities. They can be shown on the projector for children to do in their books and then followed up later as fast finisher activities or learning centre activities.