Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip - Get Organised with Track Class
Pat Hensley from Successful Teaching mentioned Track Class last week. As I'm about to start a post-graduate course I thought it might help me to get my stuff sorted.
Track Class is a free online student organisation tool, but I can also see potential for teacher use.
Students (or teachers) can load their classes, upcoming assignments and exams. The calendar helps you to keep track of what is due and when it's due. There's also a section for notes and file storage.
I'm planning to use it for monitoring my studies, but am also considering using it for planning and monitoring student assessment throughout the term. Using a tool such as this could help to spread the assessment workload over the term. I imagine it could be helpful for high school students who teach several classes and need to keep track of which assessment to collect and on which dates.

If you have any other recommendations for useful student/teacher organisation tools, please add them in the comments.

The Blogger Behind This Blog #4

I'm not really sure why I do it to myself, but I often find myself cramming my life with a million and one extra commitments. I have some sort of goal that I am heading toward and I grab at anything I think will help me get there along the way. Living like this means that I continually experience huge amounts of learning and growth, but often feel as though I'm racing through life.

My current goal is to develop my skills as a leader. And it embarrasses me to say that. I feel like I'm big noting myself by aspiring to be a great leader. Somehow I've got it into my mind that leadership is an honour bestowed upon the worthy rather than a skill to be worked on and developed. Another image that comes to mind is that of the bossy-boots kid that wants to run the show and rule the game. I don't want to be that!

I'm about to begin post-graduate study in Educational Leadership to work toward the first half of my Masters degree. I'm also reflecting on my leadership skills using a new Leadership Framework developed by the Department of Education in my state. I'm beginning this journey with a degree of trepidation. There's a comfort in the known - I've been teaching for 8 years and have developed competence in this area. But leadership requires new skills and hard work. I may even make some mistakes! Learning is hard and it hurts sometimes - I just hope this won't hurt too much!

Here come some ramblings on my thoughts on leadership (prior to all the course material heading my way!) Feel free to leave now. :)

I'd like to be a leader who:

• has a strong understanding of the big picture
• provides a clear direction
  
• inspires and motivates
  
• brings out the best in others
• provides opportunities for growth
• supports and guides without 'bossing'
• sees things through to completion
• builds and/or maintains an effective learning community
• communicates effectively in a range of situations
• makes good use of available resources

While picking out a photo for this post, I found this one of some seedlings we were growing and it seemed a nice way of thinking of leadership. A good educational leader has a vision for the future, plants the seeds with staff and ensures they have the best resources and support for growth. He or she is alongside staff members helping them to become stronger and deepen their roots. And then I realised...that's what we teachers do - but with kids.

Those of you who have taken this journey before me, please feel free to share your story or leave your encouragement in the comments below!

Literacy Unit - Rowan of Rin #4

We are working through the book Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda. Last week we read chapters 7 and 8 and focused on plot development. For an overview of activities in earlier chapters please use these links:
Chapters 1 and 2
Chapters 3 and 4
Chapters 5 and 6

Chapters 7 and 8 Summary
Val makes it through the spiders but with a heavy heart, as already she misses Ellis (her brother) terribly. As they continue the journey, a second message appears on the map. After reading the verse, Bronden is chosen to lead the party as they head through a misty swamp. The mist has ways of fooling the members of the party. They think they see their loved ones and hear them calling to them for help. This draws people off the path into the muddy sludge that pulls them down. One after another they are fooled by these voices and need rescuing. Bronden's courage is broken when she is fooled by the voices, so she and Val return to Rin. The remaining party tie themselves together with rope and feel their way through the swamp with a wooden pole. The party is now down to only four: Strong Jonn, Marlie, Allun and Rowan.

Activities
Code Breaker:

• Look at sentence length and punctuation with particular attention to the use of commas. Discuss how this changes in high energy action scenes.
• Practice fluent reading of chapter 8 with greater expression in high energy scenes.

Text Participant:

• Again, in their groups, students make videos of character responses to the events of chapters 7 and 8. The Ellis group creates their own story for Ellis' journey back to Rin and create interview questions that allow Ellis to share his feelings of this experience.

Text User

• Explore plot development in a narrative and the use of a high energy scene followed by recovery scene. Look at the features of each.

(Please Note: This week I have provided fewer activities as we had many disruptions to our classroom routines and could not fit in the full literacy program.)

Here is the complete Rowan of Rin unit.

Friday Fun - 13/3/09

As I pointed out to the parents of my students, this week was a "hold your hat and enjoy the ride" sort of week. Monday was out due to a public holiday. My teaching partner, Jonno, and about a fifth of the Year 4s were out on Thursday for a rugby day and Friday was our swimming carnival. We had a bit of teaching in the middle there, but had to pack a lot into a few days!

I must say that Jonno was absolutely AWESOME this week. I was impressed with how calmly he pulled off all the sport organisation - and so professionally as well. The swimming carnival was a huge success and the kids had a fantastic day.

Fun this Week

Readers' Theatre
I spent Monday night making a quadruple batch of playdough. Hubby was confused: "Aren't you teaching Year 4 now?" I figured that even Year 4s like playdough now and then! Or at least the chance to express themselves creatively and explore ideas physically.
This week's readers' theatre was about B.W Hawkins and the Dinosaur Models which are displayed at the Crystal Palace Park in London. In line with the Art-full Pedagogies strategy from the Springboards into Literacy workshop I went to, I decided to give my students a chance to create their own playdough dinosaur sculptures before reading the script. Students worked in small groups to create their dinosaurs using playdough, match sticks, pasta and sequins.
Then, as students began practising the readers' theatre scripts, they had personal experience of what it's like to create dinosaur models and the text was far more real to them. Students put a lot of expression into their reading and were interested to see the process of B.W. Hawkins when making his models.

Assemblies
On Tuesday we had a special farewell assembly for our retiring PE teacher who has been in the school for 12 years. He has had a huge impact on his students over the years and has fed their enthusiasm for an active lifestyle. He will be greatly missed by the students, staff and wider school community.

We also had a visit from Stirling Mortlock, a well known local rugby union player. He spoke to students in grades 4-6 about Earth Hour and discussed the importance of looking after our planet every hour, every day - not just for Earth Hour. When we got back to class students began creating their own posters to remind people of appliances that use electricity and provide tips for reducing electricity consumption.

Class Meeting
We had a class meeting to discuss and complete a Biodiversity survey for the school's Student Representative Council (SRC). Students considered the areas of the school grounds they like, dislike and use. They listed the types of wildlife they have seen within the school grounds. They then considered changes they would like made in order to improve the appearance of the school grounds and the opportunities for biodiversity. The SRC is collecting this data from all classes, staff members and families in the school community.

Visitors
We had a number of visitors in our school this week. Some teachers from the UK visited to see our school and the programs we run. My teaching intern also visited to meet students and get a greater sense of the classroom organisation. She will be beginning her 8-week internship at the end of March.

Maths
This week we looked at lines and angles in our maths lessons. I was surprised by how interested and enthusiastic the students were when it came to learning about angles. The questions students were asking showed great depth of thinking. It's disappointing that we could spend so little time on it due to all the interruptions. I look forward to exploring it further later in the year.

Will You Be Funky 4-Eva? Quiz
As mentioned above, Jonno took some of our kids (and some Year 5/6s) to a rugby day on Thursday. For a bit of fun and relationship building, I designed a trivia quiz (in PowerPoint) for part of that day. Students got into mixed groups of six and created names for their teams. Questions came from a mix of subject areas and some included photos or videos. Each team was given three coloured match sticks that they could trade in - one for a dictionary, one for a calculator and one for a computer - to help them with a question. Every fifth question was a "Who Am I?" followed by a team challenge. The challenges we got to were:

• perform a nursery rhyme
• present a tongue twister
• build a sculpture or building with no more than 20 pieces of lego

It was a lot of fun and gave students opportunities to shine both academically, dramatically and technologically.

Swimming Carnival
The carnival was a lot of fun. Students competed in races (including a 'boat race' with rubber tyres) and then played in the pool. They even had some time on a water slide. We were all exhausted by the end of it, but the kids also had a disco at night. (I admit - I skipped out on that one).

Rowan of Rin
For details of our Literacy Unit on Rowan of Rin, click here.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This week's tip: Embedding your Photos with Ease

I've been using Blogger for a few years now (including my first blog New York, New York) and while I love it most of the time, I find it very frustrating when I want to add more than one picture. All the formatting gets messed up and I spend a good half-hour just trying to get the pictures to work for me.

On the weekend I wanted to upload photos taken at the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Australia, and rather than go through the struggle again, I decided to give Flickr the chance to solve all my problems! I uploaded my photos to my Flickr account and stored them all in the same set.

To embed the photos as a slideshow:

1. Click on the set.
2. View photos as slideshow by clicking the little slideshow image
3. After viewing the show, click the share option that comes up when you move your mouse over the picture OR While viewing, click the share option that comes up in the top right-hand corner when you move your mouse there.
4. Copy the embed code and insert it into the html for your blog or website.

I was really happy with how easily this could be done and with how nicely it presents on the page. (I also like what I did with Jing today - check out those cool red arrows!)

Thanks for popping by today!