Learning at Schools 2012- 10+ways to raise achievement in literacy with Jill Hammond

The key message in this session was MOTIVATION. In any area of learning children must have a stimuli, something that will motivate their learning. If it is writing they need to have an audience otherwise what is the point? With an audience comes feedback and with feedback comes improved writing.
So often we tell our students how to present their work but Jill posed the challenge of expressing themselves in a way that interests them. That makes sense but I also think they need to have a certain level of understanding in all areas of writing to be able to deliver their message in the best possible way.
One tool that Jill introduced me too was Etherpad. This is a good collaborative tool for writing and will be great to use on my reluctant writers. It reminds me of Google docs but is probably more child friendly. Students can then work together on a piece at the same time or one could be writing and the other buddy could be editing it as they write. When it comes to editing using track changes (in word) can be a useful tool as it gives the students ownership and credit for their hard work as it is improved.
She also spoke about using wordle to highlight to children how frequently they use words such as 'and' or 'then.' I can see this being a powerful tool as you often point out to students how often they use these words but you wonder how much they take it on board, but if they understand how a wordle works and realise that the bigger the word the more often you have used it in your writing it may make them think twice about using them next time.
Another tool she touched on was using powerpoint and using the action button to create a story that has numerous endings. This could be a fun reading/writing activity that requires students to think at a higher level in each creating a different ending for the one story. Later in the year I will keep this in mind to try as a collaborative task with my top reading group to extend their understanding of what a good book needs.
When looking at motivation I loved the idea of Lulu.com that Kevin Honeycutt introduced us to a publishing tool where you can actually purchase the children's work. How cool would it feel to be a 7-8-year-old and be a published author. I can see how students would then take more pride in their proofreading/editing phase.

Learning at Schools 2012-Solo Taxonomy with Pam Hook

The SOLO taxonomy session with Pam Hook was great for learning ways of showing students how to clearly follow their own progress and then create their next learning steps. What I like about this higher order thinking is that it gives students the power and they become responsible motivated learners. While at primary we often have to push for work to be handed in or finished but when they get to high school there won't always be someone reminding them of when assignments are due, so isn't it better to prepare them now rather than later on how to become motivated life long learners? While the names of the stages are quite large (prestructural, uni and multistructural, relational and abstract) I like the images that are linked in and the hand signals children can use. In class I will often use the thumbs up if your confident with the instructions, thumbs sideways need it explained one more time and thumbs down need to stay on the mat and work with me; I can see the hand signals of SOLO taxonomy being used in a similar way.
In the Middle Syndicate we always allow a page or two for each of the key competencies under the headings of thinkers, managers, communicators, contributors, explorers. There are great rubrics based around each of the key competencies which I will be putting into each of the kids learning logs and getting them to rate themselves as managers, thinkers, contributors, communicators and explorers and what they need to do to reach the next level. One important aspect when children are anaylysing where they are at is that they say my learning is at a relational stage NOT I am relational.
One great idea that Pam used as an example which I will be keen to try was teaching children to back their ideas up in their writing (could be used for expository). In one colour paper the children sequence the event, with the piece of paper going vertically up the page. Alongside this they put another colour paper to answer the why questions and add the detail. Once children had this planning under their belt they writing becomes a much stronger piece.
A cute You Tube view that explains SOLO a bit futher was put together by Newmarket School and can be seen on the link below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV6Dmm7X4Eg

Learning at Schools 2012-Marnia View TV

It was really neat to go to my second session with Marina View school to learn about their television studio. I don't know if part of my interest was sparked from my former occupation as a journalist or my own enjoyment of being part of a television studio at intermediate but it was the idea of a TV station at school that drew my interest to this workshop. It was great that a dozen or so children came a long and could give us teacher (or in this case students) some what of a crash course in how to put together a basic show. I was amazed to find that they do it all using an Adobe programme (Adobe Visual Communicator).
The childrens enthusiasm for the show was evident particuarly in the fact that every Monday, Wednesday and Friday they get to school at 7.30am in order to set up ready in time to go live at 9am.

What Marina View School have now is as the result of 10 years of hard work.
So where do we start with this cool new tool?
-Could it be used to screen book reviews?
-Could the class put together their highlights of the week and screen it in a show to share with family?
-Could it be used as a publishing tool for students to show their work at the end of a topic?
-It would be a great tool to teach the technique of interviewing and asking the right questions, leading into writing newspaper reports.

The teacher challenged us to come and visit the school to look more closely at what they are doing with the TV station and to make our own bulletin back at school which if we sent it to him he would include in Marina View's show. I then discovered that Cambridge East School have also more recently set up a television station, so I would be keen to take a visit out there on one of my BT day's to learn more about how they use the TV station, what it adds and what benefits it has for the kids. As well as taking Marina View up on the challenge of sending in a bulletin from Vardon School.

Learning at Schools 2012 - What is Good Thinking with Mary Ann Mills

Wow what an awesome two days to re-inspire you with different ideas to use in daily teaching!!!
The first session I attended was all about thinking and giving children the opportunity to teach (or lack of). So often children do not recognise opportunities to ask questions to further their thinking or understanding. Ways around this was to keep a journal of things at home that were of interest and then ask themselves further questions around that topic. Or to do a similar thing with newspaper articles or stories that raise further questions and therefore thinking. She started the session with an interesting activity showing us a picture of around seven different footprints, she got us to tell a buddy what the story behind it was. Following our sharing she asked what questions it raised and what assumptions we made from the picture. (If you want to see how this works check out http://ohthethinksyoucanthinkatvardon.blogspot.co.nz/ shortly, our new thinking blog for Room 11).
Thinking is one of the key competencies but Mary Ann challenged us to look at the way we are teaching this skill of thinking. Particularly the higher order thinking as looking to the future so much of NCEA is based around the higher order thinking. She showed us some great examples of children furthering their own thinking through personalised projects which got me thinking....so much of our topic time is teacher driven in regards to the overall theme or big idea that we choose to teach. I then asked myself....What high standard work would we get, especially out of our reluctant learners if they had two weeks to conduct an individual research project (IRP) under teacher guidance/facilitation?
Coming home that night I had lots of ideas buzzing around thinking about thinking. I went home and set up our Room 11 thinking blog attached to our class blog. In the first week I want to set up a voicethread giving each child the chance to explain what they think thinking is/means, this is something we can then revisit. As well as experimenting with the picture idea that Mary Ann began her session with. Further ideas for the thinking blog is children's personal inquiry...responding to articles with their questions...responding to quirky artwork.
I look forward to what this thinking brings and the added spin off that it may have in children's questioning skills during reading time.

Fotobabble experiment

Voicethread

I am very excited to be trialling voicethread with my class. At the moment I am just teaching a few of the children in my class to become voicethread experts. I am showing them how to record their voice matching it to their image and storing it in voicethread, an exciting way to capture student voice. At the moment we are just doing a class trial. Looking at celebrations we have done some work around Diwali and the children now know a bit about this celebration. It is great to have them talk about what they know giving them a chance to speak uninterrupted. Looking to Myra's list of ways to use it, and thinking ahead to a second way to use it. I am thinking of putting a random picture eg: a stick, in the middle and asking students to tell me if this was in a story what would it be and its role maybe? They can then let their imaginations run wild turning it into a witch's broom, a sword, a tool used to make fire. Then they can play back each others comments and hear how many different identites this one object could take on. The kids are very enthusastic about trialling this new tool as with any new tool we have trialled this year. It is great to see how they take it on board and are willing to teach others. One thing I must set up, an idea which came from Marcelle was the idea of an experts wall around the computer. So that if students are on the computer during classtime and get stuck using one of the tools they can ask the expert rather than interrupting the teacher. Looking forward to what this next web tool can bring.

BT course on ICT

It was interesting to go along to my BT course with Toni Twiss leading an ICT day.  I guess I had never really compared my own ICT growth against what other schools are doing apart from at clusters like Southwell where we are all obviously on some ICT journey. But going to the course today it was surprising to see the number of teachers who didn't have a classroom blog or wiki. It felt great to know that I am already using these valuable tools available through the support and guidance of my school. ICT is not only part of the curriculum but is important to motivate often reluctant students and to create life long learners with tools they will need for their future. It was amazing to hear what Korero Pt England School are up to with their blogs and using itunes to showcase their book reviews. Putting it on a place like itunes meant a wider audience and audience is often something we talk about but is sometimes hard to create an authentic situation with a variety of audiences, (not just the same old same old audience, which no doubt looses its impact over time). This school has become so widely viewed that when new books are published they receive a copy to review along with the likes of magazines and newspapers. (A great way to add to your school library!!!) I would like to try a smaller scale idea of this perhaps getting one interviewer and one child summarising the book they have just read using the flip. Going back to the idea of an audience, should we be connecting with other schools blogs to widen our audience? The kids love it when another teacher from within our school comments on their post. How excited would they be to know that other people at other schools were interested in their learning? Another example we were exposed to today was a teacher using flickr where she had a five frame story. She had photographed the kids doing something which could then be turned into a story. This could work for our procedural writing at the moment having the language experience with photos and then referring to the photographs to write. Perhaps it could be taken a step further to embed it using voice thread and with each picture the student reads out their step they have written??? Toni also told us about using define:(WORD) in a google search engine and it will bring up the definition of a word. I know that ICT needs to be incorporated throughout daily programmes not just saved for ICT time so perhaps this is a new tool for getting students to look at their vocab words occassionally??? The next step for my class in the short term is to set up individual blogs for my class. I started the year with a class blog as all of this blogging was new to me and my students. But the students are working well with the technology now and our class blog is becoming bombared with information. I also want to set up voice thread and have a go at using this to leave comments on the video footage I have from their speeches.