Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip - Strengths Spreadsheets

I am in the process of conducting a study about enrichment at my school. We are due to write a school policy statement about how students are identified as being gifted and talented and how they are supported. We believe that all students have strengths that need to be identified and nourished.

For this phase of the study I have been focusing on the students in Year 4 to determine what students' strengths are and whether they are accessing the programs we currently run to develop their skills. The Strengths Analysis has been a very lengthy process and to manage all the data I created a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has helped me to see the information and sort it in different ways. I can now identify students' areas of strength and see which programs they have accessed in the past year.

While I don't think that all teachers need to do such an in-depth analysis of their students, I DO think that teachers need to determine students' strengths early in the year. While we quickly notice the students who are performing below their peers and put actions in place to assist them, I don't know that we do as good a job on the top end.

It is important to determine students' areas of strength in order to provide them with experiences to extend them throughout the year. This can be done with a simple spreadsheet using data from the previous year:

• Put your class list in the first column (with surname first to allow an easy sort by name)
• Put students previous grades in additional columns under subject headings
  
• Copy and past the data into additional sheets - one per subject
• Select the data on each page (including names) and sort by grades in the subject
  

If you want to do a more detailed analysis, you could ask students to identify their areas of strength with a quick survey. You could also draw on results from state or national testing.

So then what? Firstly, keep this data in mind as you plan and teach - make sure that you are giving these students opportunities to develop their strengths and interests in class. Then, find out what enrichment/extension programs are available in your school to meet students' needs in these areas and recommend that your students join these programs. If there are no programs, bring it up in a staff meeting and see if anyone has any ideas.

Friday Fun - 14/8/09

Fun This Week

Maths - Volume
This week I held a Circle-Time Maths session to teach Volume. It went as follows:
Check In: My name is... I think volume in Maths is...
Mixer: Show students the definition for 'volume' using the Mathletics Dictionary. Also look at related terms. Students are each given a box and sort themselves in order from smallest volume to largest volume.
Main Activity: In groups of four, students use informal units to compare the volume of their boxes and to check whether they ordered themselves correctly.
Debrief: Discuss student findings from their measurements. What did they find easy/difficult about this task?
Energiser: Beginning with the largest boxes, students add their box to a 'box sculpture' in the middle of the circle. Try to add all boxes without the tower falling.
Check Out: My name is... and one thing I learnt about volume today is...

My Reflections - This lesson didn't go as well as I would have liked. It was difficult for students to measure the volume of the boxes as the units didn't fit nicely, and they all tried to measure their boxes at once which meant there weren't enough resources. It did lead us to a discussion about the value of having formal units and a systematic way of calculating volume. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I only taught my Maths class once this week, and my relief teachers chose to 'leave volume to [me]', I didn't get to explore the whole length x width x breadth idea with them. I'll have to make some time for that next week. We didn't get to the tower building energiser either due to time constraints. I guess it's just one of those lessons that held a lot of promise, but didn't quite make the cut.

Movie Maker
In lab time students had the opportunity to create their own school movies using a bunch of photos and videos that have been captured recently. This week the focus was on using the Movie Maker storyboard to sequence images and add transitions and titles. In our next session I will teach students how to include audio files and alter the length of time their photos are displayed. I was impressed by how quickly students picked up on the skills - some took it even further than I demonstrated. It emphasized two things: how easy Movie Maker is to learn, and how quick digital natives can transfer skills from one program to the next.

Cooperative Reading Groups
Cooperative reading went really well this week. Students are becoming more familiar with the way it works and are focused on the tasks they need to complete. I find it really exciting to see that my students are all working on different tasks and at different paces with minimal assistance from me. I have the enjoyable job of shoulder hovering as they work and giving them tips for how they can stretch their skills further.
Before Tuesday's Group Discussion time I played video snippets from the group I sat in on the week before. This allowed me to give students some more direction in the way these groups should function. I sat in on another group this week and enjoyed hearing students discussing their books and the connections they have with each other, with movies they've seen and also with events in real life.

Puppy
On Friday we had a special visit from the puppy of one of my students. We made a circle on the floor and Bruno (?) went from person to person to 'say hello'. He was very cute and it was nice to watch students interacting with him. Some of the kids worked out that he was more likely to come to them if they tapped the floor and called his name. Others discovered that he liked having his belly scratched. It was just a short visit, but it's always nice to have an animal in the classroom for students to interact with.

Survey
The staff of my school are in the process of defining how we approach student enrichment. Our Enrichment Committee feels that all students have the potential to be gifted and talented in one way or another, and we feel that teachers should work to identify each student's potential and provide opportunities through which students can grow. Part of this involves understanding how students like to be acknowledged for their achievements. We are conducting a survey across the school to gather this information. I created a survey using Tiger Survey and the Year 4 Students completed it in about five minutes during lab time on Friday. (You can see a PDF print version here.) I'm going to get some computers set up for it in Year 3 next week so that students can take their turn at some point during the week. The most popular options in Year 4 were "a class reward - class party/free time etc", and "opportunities to learn about things you're interested in". The least popular was "teacher contacting your parents to let them know what you're good at". Fascinating!

The Year To Come - 2009

I am excited at the prospect of a new year and have already been busy thinking, dreaming and planning what 2009 will hold.

At school I will be teaching year 4 with a male teacher who I've worked well with in the past. Our Integrated Inquiry units will include the topics:

Personal Relationships - including a novel study of "Rowan of Rin" by Emily Rodda, nature conservation at a local ridge, and hopefully the development of a class blog. Through this unit students will learn about building and maintaining positive relationships; and roles and responsibilities within a community.

Australian History - including a focus on Aboriginal history prior to British colonisation and then the different challenges faced by settlers up until the time of federation. Through this unit I would like to see students developing timelines with Dipity and trying out video casts to explain Australian history.

Textiles and Design - looking at fabrics and their uses, exploring different techniques with textiles, and creating their own designs to suit a particular purpose. I would like to see children working in team project groups to liaise with others, determine needs and wants, and produce products to meet communicated needs eg. costumes for school dance performance, craft items for school fete and commemorative t-shirt for year co-hort.

The Solar System - including an understanding of apparent size/distance, gravitational pull, current information from space exploration and the causes of changes to the surface of the Earth or atmosphere. There are numerous interesting and useful websites to support this unit of work.

At school I will also be working on our Student Enrichment Policy - trying to link up, document and promote all the great things the school does to enrich student learning and growth. I am excited by this prospect because I really do feel the school does this so well.
I've also expressed an interest in helping the school find and purchase a class set of laptop computers. Given that we now have wireless internet access, I can't wait to get the students started on laptops!

In my 'computer world', I hope to connect more with my personal learning network - testing out my webcam and exploring "Flash Meetings". I want to do some more podcasting, for Link 4 Learning, but also consider its future direction. I've recently taken on a Blog Carnival, so hopefully will be able to maintain this throughout the year (the first edition will be out on Jan 7). I'm keen to get my Delicious accounts working for me even more than they are currently. And, I'm sure I'll be surprised by a number of other opportunities that will pop up.

On the home front, there will probably be renovations, and hopefully a 30th Birthday overseas trip for my husband. He wants to see the Northern Lights and also drive on the German Autobahn. With all of this, it will come down to how much we can save up and what we decide to prioritize! Speaking of prioritizing, I'd like to get back into my running - probably early morning, or home from work in the afternoons.

All in all, it's looking like a great year.