e-Learning Conversations

What a fabulous sharing and learning day. On Saturday the 24th of September we had our inaugural e-Learning Conversation's day. Point View school kindly hosted this 'free' event and teachers attended of their own volition.

So... what was different about this day? 

• Each session was lead by teachers who volunteered to talk about something they were doing their in classroom. 
• For some of these teachers it was the first time for them to talk publicly about what they do in their classroom.
• In each session I could hear real conversations going on, questions, answers, sharing of similar or different experiences, new ideas. 
• In most cases there were no presentations, just teachers showing photos of their classroom, websites they used, examples of work with students... and talking. 
• It was very relaxed...teachers could come and go as they like.
• This was not talking about what you could do in your classroom or in your Professional Learning, this was about what real teachers are doing right now!

It was a small group of 42 teachers from 16 different schools, 13 from our e-Learning PLN. The rest of the teachers had heard about it and opted to join in.

e-Learning conversations

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp

This I would consider is the best Professional Learning you can have... teachers who are passionate about their craft that they would give up one of their Saturdays to talk to like minded teachers from different schools all over Auckland.

Talking... Conversations... Face to Face...Fabulous Professional Development and Learning for all!

Infographics and Inquiry Presenting

All of my schools at the present are embroiled in Rugby World Cup fever. Students are researching and finding out information not only about their own country but also adopted countries. Soon they will need to present this information so I have been talking to teachers about how 'Infographics' are a great way to present student work.
Students will have created their research question, found their keywords and used the smart researcher tools to find information.
They will have copied photos or graphics to folders and the internet references to WordProcessor (Word, Pages, Google Docs) along with 'brief' notes copied from Internet pages that answer their research question. They will synthesise their notes and present facts and 'hopefully' they will present new ideas with conclusions and inferences.

Now how could they present it?

The following example has been created in Comiclife.

Or in PowerPoint

 
Or in Keynote

 
The following diagram lists all of the possible elements  that could be included in an infographic

 

The criteria for an infographic presentation is

1. Keep a balance between graphics, text, charts and numbers
2. Be aware of what colours work well together, not too many and remember complimentary colours (opposites of the colour wheel)
3. Check all of the time that you are answering your research question
4. Reference your facts, graphics etc
5. Include graphics, photos, graphs, flow charts, graphic organisers, statistics
6. Add your own inferences from the information presented

For younger children you can simplify the criteria

Some of the programmes that would be suitable for creating infographics

• PowerPoint: more suitable then Word as all of the different objects will not move around randomly + version 2007 and 2010 have great Smart Art graphics
• Pages or Keynote (for Mac): easy to move objects around and place them
• ComicLife: great Title graphics, easy to create 'Chart' type infographics
• Kidspiration and Inspiration: Mindmapping type infographics

One way to introduce students to 'Infographics' is to show them a variety of examples and examine what make them great presentations, itemise the best points and use them in their own infographics.
I am gradually adding examples to Scoop.it that are suitable to show younger students.
Click on this link to see examples suitable to show students.

I will be following up with more posts on this subject as I develop ways of how to teach students how to find the right sort of information, graphics, symbols etc to suit their presentations.

Tracing Activities

The Foundation font is a perfect font for our New Zealand Schools. Download it and use it to make Handwriting activities for your children.




One of the fonts is made of dots.
Make tracing activities for the children of the letters they need to practice.

One of my junior teachers that I work with finds Black and white images on Google Images and copies them onto her notebook software page.







Children use these as tracing activities, great for students who need to practise fine motor control.

Post it Wars

I saw @mrwoodnz tweet about Post-it -Wars and then I read his blog post. I was confused until I read the link to the herald story about Post-it-Wars in France. It is a corporate 'collage' war using Post-it notes stuck to windows.
Have a look at the 20 photos on the Herald page.

Shaun had created his own Post-it-War using Linoit which enabled him to use different colour Post-its. I tried it out, it is not as easy as it looks.

Sticky Notes on Win7 worked quite well and was quite quick to create notes but there is a limit of notes, so use wisely.

iCardSort (Free or NZ $8.29 ) is an iPad app that was easy to use and didn't seem to have a limit on sticky notes.

There are other apps available for the iPad

• Sticky Notes free
• Sticky notes for iPad
• ABC Notes

So how could this be used in Education?

• create icons or emblems
• create flags
• take a popular graphic and problem solve how to make it with square shapes (i.e.stickies)
• investigate how pictures are made up of pixels and plot/plan a picture on a spreadsheet and then make it with the sticky notes
• have a post-it-war with other classes using the windows of the classes to show case your efforts
• if you are using technology then post images to a wiki or a blog

Thanks Shaun for making me spend 4 hours investigating this...it was great fun!

Photo of the Day - Google Presentation and Wikis or Blogs

Andrew wanted to showcase his students 'Photos of the Day'. He thought about just uploading the photos to a wikipage. I suggested he created a Google Presentation, embed it on the Wiki with a link.
So when the students upload their photos to the Google presentation they will be updated on the Class wiki.

Google photo of the day

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp

Click on link to add a photo to the presentation

Educaplay: Make your own activities

Educaplay enables you to create activities and then embed in your blog or wiki. You need to set up an account. The default settings are Spanish, so make sure you select English.
Ways to use this in a classroom

• spelling word activities
• topic word activities
• shared book activities (as shown below)
• making crosswords about topics or books
• specific grammatical activities like changing tense, adding endings, plurals etc
• Comprehension activities

Make a Wordfind
Make a Cloze activity Make a Jumbled Sentence

Primary Wall

Just came across this link on twitter today 

 "@Elle_Gifted  Alternative to Wallwisher for primary sts shared by @plnaugle http://primarywall.com/ at Tech Smackdown #RSCON3."

Primary Wall looks like a great alternative to Wallwisher especially as it seems to be 'broken' quite often. It has a few different features from Wallwisher and is very easy to use.
Here is an example of what it looks like





And you can choose to send your notes to Wordle

And here is a list of ideas you could use Primary Wall and Wall Wisher for...

Kids and Blogs

I was working with Cheryl (@cjmcleod) yesterday and she was talking to me about her year 4 students and blogging. She was disappointed with the quality and standard of blogging and comments from the children. We had a look at the Kids Blog page on our e-Learning wiki and saw that Shaun (@mrwoodnz) had updated the page with lots of useful information.
We came to the conclusion that blogging and commenting needs to be modelled and talked about. So first steps are to look at the Kids and Comments slideshow I had made last year and have now updated.

Kid's comments and posts

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp

Cheryl is going to use this as a starting point, she will embed it into her wiki so that students will always be able to refer to it.

Shaun has added a blogging rubric created by Kim Cofino


Cheryl and I decided that we need to adapt this one for younger students and add a comments row as well.



Cheryl is going to use the class blog posts so far and assess them against the rubric in a class session. They will also use the Kids Comments and Posts slideshow to discuss what makes a great blog post.
So let's wait and see, we will be looking forward to great future blog posts from Cheryl's classroom.

Update:
@MsLaidler posted on Twitter a link to another page of Kim Cofino. This one has a very useful resource called 'Student Blogging Guidelines'.

Publishing Junior stories

One of my junior teachers has had a frustrating time trying to publish her Year one students' stories. She uses Word and has a frame for her Picture box and a text box below that for the story. After she has saved 24 pages of this format and typed in her students' stories, text boxes and frames have moved and she has the tiresome task of moving all the boxes in place again. She asked if there was a way of anchoring the text boxes, but unfortunately there is not. So I came up with the idea of making a PowerPoint Template.

1. Open up PowerPoint, choose plain template
2. Go to File - Page Setup and change Page Orientation to Portrait
3. Next choose a Layout, choose one with a Text box space, she deleted the title
4. Next resize the text box and add a square shape for the picture box, move them to where you want them, set your font and size
5. Remove the bullet points from text by clicking on the bullet point button on toolbar
6. Last step is fix the rulers, because when you remove the bullet point the second line of text indents and you need to fix that

Once you have the template looking the way you want it, then duplicate the slide by clicking on it once in the slide tray, Press Ctrl D or Command D however many times you need copies.

Go File - Save as and Choose Template from the dropdown menu. Make sure that you know where it is saving to as when you choose 'Template' it defaults back to Template folder.

Now when this teacher publishes her students' work, she can open up this template, type in the stories, no text boxes will move around and she can print it out for the students to illustrate. Once she saves it, she still has the blank template to use over again.

Modelling Books

One of my schools use 'Modelling Books' for teaching writing. One of the teachers (Lisa Pearson from The Gardens) has started using her mimio notebook software as a modelling book.

If she needs to print out any pages she can and it is a record of the work they have done together.

She also uses the mimio notebook software to record the work she does in maths as well.

She has taken screen captures of the activities created in Kidspiration and used those as part of her maths lessons

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!'