Tech Tips Tuesday

The following post was previously posted in a discussion forum as part of my Graduate Certificate in Educational Leadership. The tools mentioned have been mentioned before, but this brings them all together in one place and puts them into perspective.

Education and schooling are in a state of constant change as they try to remain relevant to the needs of a changing world. Schooling of today should not look the same as schooling of 50 years ago, nor 20 years ago, nor even 10 years ago. The Internet has brought people together in ways that no one would have predicted possible. New applications for this technology are being created all the time as people invent and reinvent, build and extend on one another ideas. As minds around the world connect, this online collaboration is creating greater synergy and growth.

Web 2.0 allows people to become contributors of knowledge rather than simply consumers of knowledge. As a teaching professional, my world has been enriched through the development of an online Personal Learning Network (PLN). I maintain my own blog Teaching Challenges and read and comment on blogs of other education professionals. On the 7^th of every month I compile a Blog Carnival which outlines great posts submitted to me by educators from worldwide locations. I use Twitter to chat online with other teachers I’ve never met face to face. We talk about teaching and current educational decisions and practices. I also connect with a broad range of teachers through the OZ/NZ Educators Ning and Classroom 2.0. I can bookmark the links I find useful and share these with others using Delicious. At the same time, I can access the bookmarks that other educators have found useful and add these to my teaching toolkit. This sort of knowledge doesn’t fit nicely into a textbook but rather is created by individuals collaborating and sharing their knowledge, resources, experiences and ideas.

When away from my computer, I can use my iPhone to check my email, access the internet and complete the readings for this course. I can watch YouTube videos or TeacherTube videos and listen to podcasts. Every minute of every day I can be accessing information and developing my learning. Most of my learning in the past 6 months has taken place online through internet resources and the connections I’ve made with my PLN.

In terms of my students, developments in technology allow new opportunities for teaching and learning. Interactive Whiteboards are a useful tool for bringing computer applications into everyday use. Online Learning resources can be accessed and used in lessons. Kidspiration, Inspiration and Webspiration can be used to develop thinking and planning through graphic organisers. Students can become “Google Jockeys” researching relevant webpages for students to view during lessons. With My Classes (similar to Moodle but for younger students) I can post information for parents and students, provide games and resources for students to access at home, post photos and videos of student work and even provide homework tips using a webcam or Jing.

Teachers need to be aware of new learning technologies and be open to exploring new possibilities in their classrooms. Schools need to allocate appropriate funding to purchase resources that provide these opportunities to students.

To finish up, watch this video that gives a glimpse of the needs of our students both now and in the future.

6th Teaching K-6 Carnival

Welcome to the June edition of the Teaching K-6 Blog Carnival. The weather is getting colder now, here in Australia, and we're looking for opportunities to cuddle up by the heater with our laptops and search for some good reads. This month offers some great tips for those of us trying to make it through the cold of winter AND also for those in the Northern Hemisphere who are finishing off the school year and preparing for the summer months. This month we have a special category: "Taking it Home", for posts about extending learning into the home.

Brain Strain

As my regular readers are aware, I have been busy working on a Graduate Certificate in Educational Leadership. My contribution to the carnival this month is my post about the Microsoft Innovative Schools Conference that I attended in early May. Check out some of the links and watch some of the recordings - they're well worth it.

Taking it Home

For those in the Northern Hemisphere who are putting together Summer Packets of work for students to work through during the holidays, you might like to use the suggestions from Meaghan Montrose at TutorFi.com this month. They also make great homework supplements for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere.

• 5 Ways to Encourage Young Children to Read
• 10 Tips to Improve Your Math Skills Everyday
  

In her post Free Tutoring posted at Note from the Teacher, Erin shares tips for parents about ways they can support their children with learning at home. Erin provides practical examples that provide for a more consistent approach to consolidating new learning.

Gripes and Brags

Glowing Face Man presents Teaching With Pronouns posted at Awaken the Badass Within, saying, "An article about why you should make a conscious effort to use less pronouns when teaching."After reading this, I know I'll be paying more attention to my use of pronouns this week!

In the News

In "Hell is the classroom"nightwalker of My English Pages presents some strategies for creating a respectful classroom environment. He emphasises the need to have a preventative approach and outlines how this can be done by teaching with "love and logic".

This month Fiona Lohrenz presents the following two posts at Child Care Only to guide you through Child Care management:

• Guidelines For Preparing A Day Care Safety Statement
• Preparing For Day Care Toileting Accidents

Innovate - Beyond the Slate

At the Teacher's Desk Wm Chamberlain presents Allowing Students to Differentiate with Vocabulary Strategies. Here he and his students share strategies they find useful for learning vocabulary in reading. See how Wm Chamberlain differentiates to meet the needs and hear the students explain for themselves.

Myscha Theriault has got it right when she says that we need the right amount of spelling activities to provide students with variety but at the same time familiarity. This month she shares Spelling Activities: Twenty-Seven Ways to Practice in Style posted at The Lesson Machine Blogazine. She gets the balance right and her ideas can be applied in the classroom with minimal prior preparation.

Mathew Needleman presents Open House Parent Engagement Tips posted at Open Court Resources.com Blog. These tips will help you to think through the reasons parents come to Open House and consider the best way to hold their interest.

Look No Further

R. Garza presents "A remarkable collection of cutting edge resources for parents and teachers." with 41 Things To Do With Your Kids This Summer‎ posted at Educational Games for Children.

Why not submit your post for the next carnival?

The Teaching K-6 Carnival is posted monthly on the 7th. I am collecting submissions throughout the 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 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!

New Gold Mountain #2

This week my literacy class continued reading New Gold Mountain: The Diary of Shu Cheong by Christopher W. Cheng. This is an historical fiction which is part of the "My Australian Story" series. It tells the story of life on the goldfields at Lambing Flat, NSW in 1860-1861. Shu Cheong, a fictitious character travels to Australia to find gold to take back to his village. On the journey both his father and third uncle die, leaving Shu Cheong alone in a foreign country. The local Chinese Society arrange a foster parent (Uncle) for Shu Cheong.
Details of pages 1-30

Summary of Pages 30-70
In these pages we learn more about life on the goldfields and see an increase in the tension between the European and Chinese miners. After a confrontation with one of the Chinese miners who was mining in an abandoned European mine, the European miners drive the Chinese out and they are stranded in the bush, surviving on what plants and bugs they can find. On their return to the goldfields they need to purchase new tools and get themselves set up again. Life continues as normal until again they are forced from their tents.

Activities
Reading: The reading part of this unit is done in a variety of ways: teacher reading to the class, students reading to the class, students reading in pairs or independently. While students are reading, I sit alongside them and ask questions and/or make anecdotal notes about fluency/expression/self-correction etc.

Code Breaker: Continue to build the vocabulary chart and discuss new words as they are encountered in the text.

Text User: Consider first-person perspective in historical fiction. Students work in teams to collect information about convicts and their lives from books (20mins). Students sit in a big circle. Each contributes one fact they learnt from their research so that everyone can benefit from their knowledge. Students then begin writing a diary entry from the perspective of a convict.

Text Participant: Students write their names using Chinese script (see lesson here).

Text Analyst: Students discuss the bullying of the Chinese and consider how it would feel to be in their position. Students share own experiences of being burgled. Explain the difference that having insurance makes - in those days they lost everything and had to start from scratch (15 mins). Students then read factual recounts of the treatment of the Chinese on the goldfields. They highlight relevant passages and share this with the class in a discussion (25 mins). Students then work independently to write speeches from the perspective of a Chinese miner or European miner trying to convince the other European miners to stop harrassing the Chinese. Use Jenny Eather's Writing Fun page on Persuasive writing as a guide. On completion, students who wish to can present their speech to the class. (We recorded these with the Flip Mino to share on our My Classes page).
From a Quality Teaching Model perspective, this lesson was great for developing deep knowledge and deep understanding, using higher order thinking, allowing for substantive communication, and improving problematic knowledge through seeing things from the various perspectives.

Friday Fun - 5/6/09

This week Miss Eschauzier was teaching relief classes across the school, so I was back on board again. It was nice to be back again, but tiring at the same time. It's crazy how quickly you get out of the habit!

Fun This Week

Captain Lister Takes Us Back in Time
This week Captain Lister took us back to 1787 and the journey of the First Fleet. He explained how the Industrial Age influenced the lives of people, with machines taking over many people's jobs and people turning to crime in order to survive. He explained about the use of hulks on the River Thames to house the many criminals and Britain's need for a new place to send convicts as a result of the US War of Independence. Captain Lister went on to describe the journey and created discussion around the statistics of people aboard the First Fleet at the beginning and at the end. We finished with the arrival at Botany Bay and the significance of Australia Day.

Sketching the Golden Grove
On Monday afternoon Mr Tucker taught students about the ships of the First Fleet and worked with students to sketch the Golden Grove. He put the image up on the interactive whiteboard so that students could see it clearly to sketch it. You can see it, and the other ships of the First Fleet at the website of the First Fleet Fellowship.

Rounding Numbers
This week my class learnt how to round numbers to the nearest hundred. We used pretend cash register print-outs and students rounded dollar amounts in order to make an estimate. They then used calculators to find out the actual total and to work out the difference between the actual total and their estimate. We also spent some time doubling and halving numbers and students worked with a partner and a mini whiteboard to select numbers and double or halve them. Students who wanted a challenge chose two-digit numbers with each digit odd.

Frisbee Golf
Having played frisbee golf on camp, we set up a quick course for PE this week and students played in small teams. Not everyone got a turn this week because we had a lot of rain, but we hope to get back to it next week.

Indigenous People Group Projects
Students worked to finish their projects this week. As always when working digitally, there were issues with files being overwritten, people wanting to record audio at the last minute, photos with no credit given etc but I'm looking forward to taking a closer look at them and giving students opportunities to explore each others' work.

Fabulously Funny Fairytale Plays
This term students who are not part of the Fife and Drum Band have been learning and preparing plays. This week they worked on memorising their lines and organising themselves on a stage-sized space. We talked with each group about the props and costumes they will need.

Farewell Miss Eschauzier
Today was Miss Eschauzier's last day at our school, so we had a party to send her off. She has worked really hard with the students and has taught them a lot during her internship. They have become very fond of her and will miss her greatly. A couple of students put together a movie with photos and videos for Miss Eschauzier to take with her to remember her time with us. Other students created cards and brought small gifts. Students had the opportunity to tell Miss Eschauzier what they learnt from her and what they enjoyed about her. We then shared party food. We hope she comes back for a visit soon!

This week we my Literacy class read more of New Gold Mountain. You can read about it here.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip: Attempting to Implement the Quality Teaching Model with the Aid of ICT #1

One of my goals for this year is to find a way to use ICT as a tool with the Quality Teaching Model (currently being implemented in NSW and the ACT) to improve teaching and learning in the classroom. I do a lot of this automatically, but I want to be able to share these ideas with others. Of course, the success of the lesson is not solely dependent on the actual ICT, so it makes it a little hard to suggest that any one tool or strategy is good for any one of the elements of the Quality Teaching Model. I want to share this journey with you and help you to see that the ICT needs to be embedded in quality teaching and pedagogy and not just used as an add-on.

For example, today ICT wasn't the focus of my lesson, but was definitely a helpful tool in my preparation. My students and I have been reading "New Gold Mountain" by Christopher W Cheng, which is about a Chinese boy, Shu Cheong, who came to Australia to find gold during the goldrush. I want my students to connect with the story personally and to gain a greater respect for Chinese culture as a result. As Shu Cheong is learning to write English words in the book, I thought it might be helpful for students to try writing their names with Chinese characters. In preparation for today's lesson, I downloaded the following videos from You Tube and translated all my students' names into Chinese characters at Chinese Names.org. After reading and discussing a few pages together as a class, we watched the videos to see Chinese calligraphy being created by the experts.



While students were watching, I set out some black ink, brushes and paper on each of the desks. Students then attempted to write their names using the little name strips I'd prepared for them earlier. Also whilst reading, we did a Google search for Cai Shen in our attempt to find out more about one of the gods mentioned in the book. Throughout the book reference is given to Chinese religious beliefs so we wanted to know more in order to understand his perspective more fully.

Quality Teaching Model Coding
For this lesson I will only look at the Intellectual Quality dimension.
The videos helped to provide deep knowledge about the art of calligraphy and the style used by calligraphers. It didn't really provide detailed knowledge about the history of calligraphy, but it did allow students to see calligraphy in action.
Students haven't yet demonstrated a deep understanding of their experience with trying to write in another script. Further discussion would allow me to see whether this activity has helped them to identify with the experiences of the Shu Cheong in the book.
Our discussion during reading touched on metalanguage when we defined some words in the text. To improve this element further, I could have discussed the Chinese script and sought comparisons with the script we use for English (does anyone know what our script is called?).
The videos inspired substantive communication around calligraphy and it's use in both China and Japan. Students shared of their own experiences with calligraphy and together we discussed whether Chinese script should be written horizontally or vertically.
I don't feel that this lesson really allowed for higher order thinking. The lesson was generally teacher-directed and students didn't really ask or answer any questions that required higher order thinking.
The discussion around religious beliefs added a little to the provision for problematic knowledge - where ideas can be shared from a variety of viewpoints - but again, I feel that we explored the ideas of Chinese spirituality, but only touched on other religious viewpoints.

As I hope you can see, it's not the resources that you use that make it quality teaching or not, it's what you do with them and the thinking that results through discussion and careful questioning. I see that I have some work to do to further improve my teaching in these areas!