Day Two 'Walk the Talk' Alfriston

This was the first day of teacher visits to observe 'Walk the Talk' in action. The students were not phased at all and worked extremely well all day. The teachers were most impressed with how they were working and how they knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Writing
The children got back their printouts of their Inspiration or Google Doc Narrative frameworks. Their task was to now write their own version of 'Theseus and the Minotaur on Google Docs, using the framework they had worked on yesterday. During this time I took two writing groups.
This is the first group's Writing Assessment Checker...

And this is my version of a modelling book - A Writing Workshop. This is a work in progress, I add slides as I work with the students and identify what they need to know and what resources I can find to support that. In the example below, we are working on structure, looking particularly at Opening statements.



This is the second group's Writing Assessment Checker



And the Writing Workshop. In this workshop I have started off with some websites to see how well the children do with full stops and capital letters. They managed quite well with these so I will look at Slide 5, apostrophes, commas, speech marks. I will add some slides once I have looked at their writing, copied their writing and use that as a teaching slide.



Reading
Today I worked with the 2 journal groups. The first group's workshop was about summarising ideas in text. This workshop goes over 2 days. The reason why I do this is because we look at other resources at the same time, articles, news reports, factual information from the internet that has something to do with the story we are reading. If a country, city, town is mentioned in a book then I like to show where it is in the world and compare where NZ is in relation to the country we are looking at.



The second group was looking at skimming and scanning.

This is my version of  a 'Modelling Book'. I add slides as I work through the Journal stories with them, if I see a teachable moment, I include it in the workshop. If I can find a youtube movie or an internet page that relates then I add that as well. In the above workshop you will see that we looked at the Parthenon and the Acropolis by using the Tools - Research in Google Presentation, this showed us the pictures and gave us more information about them, that we couldn't get from the journal story.

Maths
Today I ran the equivalent workshop again and the students showed they understood everything they had learned so I sent them to the Whiteboard table for 10 minutes to play the game.
Everyday Mathematics - Equivalent Fractions App. They took one iPad and used the whiteboard table to reduce fractions they weren't sure of.

The second workshop I ran was Finding Fractions of a number.

This went really well with students coming with no idea of how to solve the problems to successfully solving them in minutes. The youtube movie on the second slide did a great explanation and then students started doing the problems I had added to the page in their books. I passed around the iPad and everybody had a turn at solving it while the others wrote in their books. They were sent off to continue with their Maths Tasks doc.
While I was taking the workshops the rest of the students worked on their Maths Tasks Doc, choosing their own learning for the day, recording  and reflecting on what they had done.

Inquiry

Today we worked at the Redefinition stage. Students went to the Inquiry page on the wiki, they clicked on the links to open up the individual Google docs, they made a copy and then highlighted all the keywords that answered the question at the top of the doc.

At the same time they also had open the Class Collaborative Doc and added their keywords to the columns, they had to ensure that they put in new keywords, there were to be no repeats. They did a great job on this and now they have a doc that they can refer to when they plan their own research question with lots of keywords to choose from.

Day One: Walk the Talk Alfriston

I am teaching for 4 days at Alfriston School in South Auckland in a Year 5/6 class.
The school has just started on their e-Learning journey with 3 classrooms Yr 0-1, Yr 3-4, Yr 5-6 who have all been working with me this year.
This classroom is trialling tables instead of desks, and after a couple of weeks, students are not missing their desks at all. The school has purchased one high table, and one whiteboard table to test out in the room. I heard some students say today "I love working at these high tables!

I have made a wiki that is for the students to get their resources from and for teachers to see how I did the teaching. Wherever possible I will be using the SAMR model to show how I thought about 'Teacher Delivery' and 'Task Design'.

View Walk the Talk Wiki

Today I set up 2 Apple TVs, one on the big TV and one on the small TV (18"). These will become teaching and learning stations for the students.

This class has 9 Google Chromebooks, 8 windows computers, and I have brought in 4 iPads, a Samsung tablet and a Surface Pro.

Writing

I introduced them to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur by handing out copies of the story which they read in groups. It is also available for them on the wiki. I walked around and discussed the main points with the groups.

After a while I stopped them and showed them the Narrative Graphic Organiser. They could choose to do an Inspiration one on the iPads or use Google Docs on the computers.

Once the students had finished the Graphic Organiser, it was printed out and is now the structure for their narrative writing for the next day.

Reading

Today was all about introducing 2 groups of students to their Reading Task Google Doc. This involved them downloading it to their Google Drive, copying it, renaming it and moving it to the shared class folder so I could view it. They then had to do the same thing with their Vocab log and Chapter Title Assignment. This was quite time consuming and this is where 'Teacher Dashboard' would have come in handy.

Example of one group's Reading Task Doc

Maths
The students are working on Fractions, Percentages and Decimals at the moment and I have created a wiki page that leads to all of their resources. I am focussing this week on Fractions.
This page has the downloads they need for some games and their workshops that are completed with me or independently.

View Maths wiki page

They also have an Independent self pacing Maths Google Doc where they have to record what tasks have been completed.



I worked with one group today while the others worked through their tasks. We started the workshop Equivalent Fractions. We focussed on Slide 2 and looked at Equivalent Fractions.

We tried some examples using the app Explain Everything which was shown up on the screen at the Big TV learning station.

This was very successful, and the students eventually started racing the person who was completing the task on Explain Everything by writing the answers in their maths books.





Inquiry
I started the Inquiry topic today with a focus on Keywords. This is the presentation I am using.


And this is the SAMR model I am following. We completed the tasks in Substitution and Augmentation. The students used their topic books to record their keywords. Both TVs were used with iPads mirroring the story.

Starting the School Year

Orientation
I was thinking about how I could best start an e-Learning class at the beginning of the year. I want my students to become independent learners as soon as possible so the best way to introduce them to this is the 'Orientation Contract'
This would include

• the 'Getting to know me' form
• great way of finding out how your students like to learn
• find some things out about them that you don't know
• the Wonder Wall
• get them thinking existentially
• great starters for discussion and independent investigations 
• Tasks in the spaces with small independent investigation
• individual, peer and group tasks
• Management Chart
• students start to manage their time and track their learning
• Digital citizenship tasks
• ongoing tasks for the year
• Device care contract
• how to look after equipment
• Setting up of books standards
• ensure that high expectations are set for book work i.e use of rulers etc
• Getting to know apps and trouble shooting
• set a list of tasks that enable students to learn how to troubleshoot their devices
• introduce them to the apps they are going to be using this year
• How to work in a work station
• how to mirror
• how to turn on TVs/Projectors/Apple TVs, troubleshooting
• Using class wiki and resources

There are a lot of tasks here, but what you can do is start off with a small number of them and once completed they would open up more tasks.
If you make your wiki or site the place to go to get the tasks then students will get used to the wiki.

Classroom Walkthroughs

Seventeen members of the e-Learning Classroom gave up their Saturday to visit some of the classrooms in the local area. Through the power of Skype we were also able to 'virtually' visit Sharon's classroom in Ashburton.
The hardest job I had was to stop the teachers talking so I could tell them we were moving to the next school. We travelled 51.9 kms from the first school to the last.

View Larger Map

First off we went to Shaun's class in Bailey Road, Mount Wellington. He uses Google Docs very successfully in his classroom and he is the administrator for Google Apps in his school. Nearly all of the students work is digital.

Using hanging material to make  spaces in the classroom.

It was interesting to see how he has managed to make spaces in his Year 8 classroom.

Sharon from Ashburton was able to participate virtually through Skype. We showed her each classroom and she was able to listen in when teachers were talking about their rooms. In this photo Viv is answering her questions.







The next school was Willowbank in Botany. Here we visited 3 classrooms that share one large space. All of the other teachers were very envious of  the amount of room that the teachers were able to use.

This is the shared Awhina area at Willowbank. A year 2, 4 and 6 class share this space. 

After Willowbank was The Gardens School. They are fortunate to have 13 laptops and 10 iPads. The furniture has been specially bought for the room. Sara and Jan have created some wonderful self management strategies which I will write more about later.

At this school we also gave Sharon some time to share with us (virtually via skype) what she has been doing in her classroom. She talked about the changes she has made in her classroom setup and pedagogy.

Next was Somerville Intermediate. We visited 2 classrooms. First up was Steph who has embraced the Arts in her class and has allowed her students to have time to use Art materials. She has made significant changes in her room adding different spaces. One of her focuses at the moment is using Multiple Intelligences.

Dave was next, who like Shaun has concentrated on Online spaces. He has been using wikis (plural!) as his Classroom Portal.

Last of all we went to Point View. Kimberley was first who shared her wikis that she created for individual students, learning centres and her wonderful classroom environment.









Lynne was next who also has a wonderful wiki and a gorgeous room environment. What I found very special about her philosophy was that...'Yes, they are only 5 years old, but they can do anything'. This comment came after her telling everybody that in the morning students grab the laptops and go into the secret garden to play the games on the wiki.

I have asked the teachers to reflect on their day and to think about what they would like to do next time. We have several experts in different areas in our group so it looks like we will run 3 workshops on one Saturday where we share our knowledge.

From my observations the conversations that were going on were the most valuable part of the day.
I have asked the teachers to evaluate the day.




I have been asked by one of the participants what did I get out of the day.

• seeing all the people who I work with who have met each other maybe once face to face or mostly online, talking like they had been colleagues for years
• hearing the conversations that were so much about their pedagogy of teaching
• listening to teachers asking each other probing questions
• loving the fact that Sharon who lives in Ashburton was able to be part of a great professional development opportunity
• the keenness of all to continue with what we have begun and their ideas for what they would like to do next
• the passion that these teachers have for teaching and learning that they would give up their free time on weekends and nights to participate in this project

and as Dave summed it up in one of his comments on the evaluation Google Doc 'Meeting like minded people!'

Online and Classroom Spaces

I worked with Dave and Steph at Somerville a couple of weeks ago and again Dave wowed me with the direction he is heading in with his online spaces. He has been the 'King' of wikis for a while and presented at L@S 2011 Web Tools For Schools

His class wiki worked extremely well last year and was a great source of resources for his students and a show case of student work. This year he has developed that wiki to be the 'portal' for his other wikis. He has developed separate wikis for numeracy, literacy and student Learning Journeys. I have asked him to make a Quicktime movie explaining how and why he uses so many wikis which he will add to his e-Learning page on our wiki.

Steph is new to our project but has been working on developing her classroom spaces. Like Dave she teaches intermediate children (ages 11-12). Like Dave her classroom does not look like a traditional classroom...there are comfy chairs and couches scattered around the room, she has removed most of her desks for tables and students use tote trays now. What impressed me about both rooms was that children were working in a variety of different ways, some were on laptops, others were working in exercise books, some were creating large posters, others were reading. In both rooms students were working collaboratively.
So, here are two intermediate classrooms successfully integrating their classroom and online spaces, visit their wiki pages on the e-Learning classroom wiki and then look at their own classroom blogs and wikis, it will be worth your time!