Tech Tips Tuesday

Pair Programming

I have been further dabbling with code and programming in my classroom using Scratch. My students got on board and are enjoying trying it out and creating new things. They've taken to it quickly and have found ways to add complexity to their designs.

This week I wanted to have my students working with a partner on their programming. This was in part for the benefits of learning together, and in part due to the limited number of computers. I found this amazing video about Pair Programming at Code.org, that explains the process so well, and in terms the students can understand. We watched it through before I gave my students their task.


Their task in this lesson was to create an animated greeting card for Christmas. I admit, my idea for this was not entirely unique, but rather inspired by the Ted Talk by Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code. Mitch Resnick went looking for a Mother's Day card for his mum on Scratch and found a whole collection students had created. I thought I would carry that across to Christmas.

Students enjoyed working in this way to solve problems and create something new. They changed "drivers" often, allowing each to have an opportunity to work the mouse for some parts of the process. It was great to see the collaboration, and watch the knowledge spread across the class between pairs. Someone would call out in frustration "Ugh! I can't get my penguin to talk!" and within moments someone from another pair was helping them out. They learn together.

A Twist on Christmas Craft

This year I decided to try something a little different for Christmas craft. As my students have been learning how to write procedures, I thought I would give them a chance to find an appealing Christmas craft and write up the procedure for their classmates to follow. The instructions I gave, can be seen here.

Students used books, iPads and classroom computers to research Christmas crafts and find one that they wanted to make. Some worked independently, others in pairs. They then wrote up the procedure for their craft using Google Docs. This was their first time using Google Docs so I was really pleased with how well they took to it. The pairs shared the document so both could add to it at the same time.

At the end of the first session students worked out which materials they would need in order to make a sample. Some sourced these from home or the art room, others gave a list to me. The following lesson we brought together the resources and students made a sample, taking photos as they did so and adding these to their original document.

As always, the trick was then getting the file to a printer. So I set up a folder on our shared drive for students. They jumped on a desktop computer, opened their Google Drive and downloaded the document as a Word document which they saved to the shared drive. Moving to the computers also gave greater flexibility in terms of resizing images, and moving to word allowed for further wrap options with images. I was then able to send the contents of this folder to the printer for printing.

I shared this idea with the other Year 3 classes and we now have a great assortment of Christmas crafts to try. Next week we will set up rotations across all three Year 3 classes so that students can move around trying the different crafts and following the procedures.

12th Teaching K-6 Carnival

Welcome to the January 2010 edition of the Teaching K-6 Carnival. This edition marks the start of the second year of this carnival. As we head into 2010 we look forward to another year of learning filled with inspiration, collaboration, and challenges.

Brain Strain

Allison Johanson presents a great read for those teachers on vacation who are looking for ways to keep their minds active. You may also find some useful ideas for the classroom in her 55 Tips to Instantly Make Your Brain Stronger and Faster posted at Masters in Health Informatics.

Nightwalker explains Content-Based Instruction – A Cognitive Approach in his post at My English Pages. This is a good introduction as a starting point to learning and applying content-based instruction.

Gripes and Brags

Mimi shares her passion for children's books and tells us about a close encounter with the author type in Warning: People In Mirror May Not Be As Fabulous As They Appear posted at It's Not All Flowers and Sausages. If you haven't discovered her blog yet, don't hold off any longer - it's a winner.

In the News

Keira presents Why Should Kids Read Newspapers? posted at Literature Young Adult Fiction, saying, "Reading the newspaper is a great way to encourage reading habits and teach skills."

Innovate - Beyond the Slate

Rachel Lynette of Minds in Bloom gives us a great list of ideas to help us Get out of that Rut! These suggestions help to shake things up in the classroom to prevent boredom setting in.

Tom DeRosa presents Use a Deck of Cards to Set Your Child Up For Future Math Success posted at I Want to Teach Forever. These simple suggestions help students to develop skills with sorting and counting and pave the way for more difficult concepts.

MG presents ideas on Teaching our kids to save. posted at Personalize Baby. Why not use this suggestion to inspire an art project to make personalised piggy banks that students can fill at home?

At A Reader's Community, M Dahms presents an answer to the question What is Reader's Workshop? Here you can find all you need to get started and keep going with Reader's Workshops.

Elementaryhistoryteacher presents Bespoken Blacksmiths posted at History Is Elementary. This post helps us to think more about the importance of teaching subject specific vocabulary, and also helps us to understand the context of blacksmithing.

Vera Lang presents How to Knit Christmas Tree Ornaments posted at Fine Craft Guild .com. While a little late for this year, these may come in handy for 2010. "These little Christmas tree ornaments are so easy that kids could make them as presents for their family home. Great seasonal projects. Free patterns, illustrations and craft tips provides."

Why not submit your post for the next carnival?

The Teaching K-6 Carnival is posted monthly on the 7th. I will be collecting submissions throughout the next month, looking in particular for posts that discuss and exemplify innovative teaching and the integration of technology in the K-6 classroom. I also invite some discussion around education related news articles and a few "brain strains" to keep our minds alert and challenged. Please submit only articles of which you are the author and refrain from using this merely as a sales pitch. For full details, please read my call for submissions.

If you have a relevant post that you would like to submit to the next edition of Teaching K-6 Carnival use our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Support this Carnival

If you enjoyed this edition of the carnival, you can support its continuation by sharing it with others. Link to us, add us to a tweet, stumble or digg us. Thanks!

Technorati tags: teaching k-6 carnival, blog carnival.

11th Teaching K-6 Carnival

Welcome to the December edition of Teaching K-6 carnival. With Christmas just around the corner, teachers in Australia and New Zealand are getting more than their fair share of the silly season. Finishing the school year is tiring business - with Christmas concerts, graduation ceremonies, reports, Christmas crafts and the hustle-bustle to finish everything off in time. The summer heat doesn't help either as tired children feel tension in the friendships that have been so strong throughout the year.
There haven't been an overwhelming number of relevant posts this month, so enjoy this small sampling of delights. As you 'unwrap' this month's offerings, I hope you find some goodies to motivate and inspire.

Gripes and Brags

This month Sonja Stewart shares her frustrations about the state of education in US schools. In Where Have All the Students Gone? posted at Parenting Squad she wonders how her child is going to receive a world class education with only 15 days at school during the month of November. She questions the usefulness of half-days and their impact on student learning. Why not pop by and share your thoughts on the issue?

Following on from this, Edwin Choi presents Elementary School in Seventeen Easy Steps posted at K12 Directory of Schools Blog. These tips may be useful considerations for parents when determining the best place for their child's education. It always helps to know the philosophy of your child's school and what the school offers. This list may also help schools to identify those issues of greatest concern to parents. Edwin Choi also shares her list of The Top Ten Books for Preschoolers. These all time favourites would make great Christmas prizes or presents. Alternatively, they could be purchased for a fresh new library set at the start of 2010.

Wendy Piersall at Classroom Jr. shares free Christmas Math Worksheets saying, "These were a huge hit last year, so I wanted to share them with your readers early this year!"

Brain Strain

Tracy Rosen shares her thoughts from Alfie Kohn's QPAT speech in her post On de-rubricizing at Leading From The Heart. She questions our use of rubrics and goes so far as to call them 'creativity killers'. Rather than limiting students to a set of boxes in which they find a place to sit, she encourages us to lose the rubrics, but raise the bar.

Innovate - Beyond The Slate

In his post at Open Educator, Graham Wegner considers the term Digital Transition to describe the current state of his school - somewhere between a traditional paper based, non-digital classroom and the always on, 1:1 connected environment. Read his blog and consider your own situation and your progression within the 'digital transition'.

At NZ ICT Edublabberings you will find the must-read post from Rachel Boyd, For Kids, By Kids: Nelson Kids' ICT Expo. Here she shares the story (and videos) of the amazing things her 6-7 year old students are doing with ICT. Not only have they developed skills in the use of ICT, but they have also taken the initiative to share their knowledge with others. This a very inspiring post demonstrating what can be achieved with the right encouragement and opportunities.

Look No Further

Ferrari Dude presents Top 50 Bloggers to Help You Study, Focus and Learn Better posted at Best Online Universities.com.

Why not submit your post for the next carnival?

The Teaching K-6 Carnival is posted monthly on the 7th. I will be collecting submissions throughout the next month, looking in particular for posts that discuss and exemplify innovative teaching and the integration of technology in the K-6 classroom. I also invite some discussion around education related news articles and a few "brain strains" to keep our minds alert and challenged. Please submit only articles of which you are the author and refrain from using this merely as a sales pitch. For full details, please read my call for submissions.

If you have a relevant post that you would like to submit to the next edition of Teaching K-6 Carnival use our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Support this Carnival

If you enjoyed this edition of the carnival, you can support its continuation by sharing it with others. Link to us, add us to a tweet, stumble or digg us. Thanks!

Technorati tags: teaching k-6 carnival, blog carnival.

The Blogger Behind This Blog #2

Bad things don't seem to happen very often to me. And when they do, they don't end up seeming so bad. Everything works out quite quickly and with minimal inconvenience. I wouldn't say that I'm particularly lucky, just not unlucky. And I have an amazing husband who bends over backwards to make life good for me.

During the week my house was burgled. I came home after pool day, staff lunch, and welcome drinks at my new school to find a number of things not quite right outside and wasn't sure what to expect when I got inside. I thought that maybe my hubby had come home early from a business trip. But as I have the only set of keys, I thought that unlikely. I stepped through the door and looked into the lounge room. My 42 inch plasma TV had been ripped off the wall (literally) leaving a great gaping hole in the lounge room wall. A quick look around showed me that there were other things missing too - including my laptop. The laptop I use to blog, podcast, twitter, EVERYTHING!

Long story short, cops were called and came, insurance was called (should be able to recover costs), friends and family came to my aid and all is good.

The miracle is... As my laptop was getting full and slow, my wonderful, amazing, perfect husband had bought me a new laptop for Christmas and had wrapped it up and left it in the spare room for me. Miraculously, the burglars didn't take it. And the best bit of it all - my wonderful, amazing, perfect husband had actually copied all the files from the old laptop onto the new laptop before he left so that I could start using it straight away! So, as soon as the cops had left and the dust had settled, Hubby treated me to an early Christmas - my Christmas Miracle!

Friday Fun

On Fridays I like to reflect on some of the more enjoyable things from the week. In my complete exhaustion it reminds me of the great learning that has taken place during the week and helps to refresh me for the week ahead.

Fun this week:

Advent Calendars - This week we made star advent calendars to count down the days until Christmas. The star was a geometrical pattern and we made colourful links - one for each of the days until Christmas. Children take off one link each day as they count down to Christmas.

"Photoshopping" with Paint - I taught students how to use MSPaint to cut a photo of themselves and paste it onto a background. I saved background files from the Creative Commons Attribute Licence page with a name that referred to the photographer. Students made their new pictures and printed it out with a sentence attributing the background to the flickr artist.

Investigating Capacity in the sandpit - Students paired off and selected a small container and a larger container. They estimated how many sand-loads of the small container would fill the larger container. After 30 minutes of focused 'work', I gave them 15 minutes playtime in the sandpit.

Great Barrier Reef Paintings - We painted an A3 sheet of paper with water colour blues. We then cut out sea creatures from bright coloured paper and glued these onto the background. Students got ideas from a flickr slideshow based on the search "Great Barrier Reef". I also took digital photographs of students pretending to swim and printed these out for students to include in their artwork.

Shivoo - On Thursday night we had our end of year concert - our Shivoo. A stage was set up in the school playground and families brought picnic baskets and picnic rugs to pread out on the lawn for our performances. The classes performed a range of great items to entertain. The Year 1 classes did "On the Good Ship Lollipop" to tie in with our "The Way We Were" unit and "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree" to tie in with our "Are We There Yet?" unit. Once students had finished their performances, they either sat with their parents, or played with their friends. They had a ball! They wrote a journal entry about the night the next day in class.

Heads or Tails - We explored chance through the game of "Heads and Tails" and then students experimented with coins to record the way the coin landed after a number of flips.

Daintree Rainforest - After reading "Where The Forest Meets The Sea" by Jeannie Baker and discussing some facts about the rainforest, students began designing posters to encourage people to look after the Daintree Rainforest without actually writing "Protect the Daintree Rainforest". The challenge I set was to make it look so beautiful that no one would want to harm it. They got a good start to the posters and will finish them next week.

Christmas - To teach, or not to teach?

At this time of year many teachers are pondering how to cover Christmas, if at all. Our classes are multicultural and we desire to respect the diversity of beliefs of the children in our care. For teachers in Australia, Christmas also marks the end of the school year, and traditionally the last couple of weeks have become a time for "Christmas Crafts" - making decorations, cards, presents, colouring sheets, singing Christmas carols etc all in preparation for the holiday. Christmas, in our minds, is also connected with all the happy feelings around finishing the school year and the coming of the summer.

In our schools we now have a number of students who follow Islam, some Hindu believers and also of the Buddhist faith. One way that schools acknowledge this diversity is to include units of work that look at the beliefs and celebrations of all of these faiths. Last year, when I was teaching Year 3, we did a really fascinating unit "Kaleidoscope of Cultures" where we did just this. One significant part of this was when we visited Places of Worship around our city. We learnt a lot from seeing these places and hearing from people of various beliefs. But these units of work are not included in the curriculum every year, as such students do not get to revisit this to such a degree each year. Some teachers then feel awkward about teaching Christian celebrations in the absence of the celebrations of other religions.

If teachers do decide to celebrate Christmas with their classes, they are then faced with the question of how they will accomplish this. Do they then go with the secular approach - Santa, reindeer, gifts etc, or do they reflect on the Christian belief and the story of the nativity? Often they will select the secular - choosing the least offensive approach to people of other beliefs. In the past, I have tried to mesh the two (secular and religious), and throughout the year I explain the other beliefs and celebrations of students in the class at times like Ramadan. I haven't found the ideal answer yet, but I am interested to hear your perspectives.