Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip: Survey Savvy

Lately I've had the need to create some surveys. As part of the Enrichment Committee, I took on the role of creating a survey to find out how students like to be rewarded for their achievements. As part of the ICT Committee, I'd like to know what aspects of "My Classes" teachers require support with. I decided to look online and consider my options.

Survey Monkey was a popular choice and came recommended from a number of my tweeps. I liked the look of it, but the free version did not meet my needs. It allows for 100 responses to the survey, and there are more than 100 students at my school. It also limits the number of questions to 10.

I stumbled across Tiger Survey through a Google search. It is completely free and has special features that cater to schools. I found it frustrating to set up the survey I was creating, but once created it was easy to use. Some aspects don't work the way they should, but for a free product, it's not all bad. You can choose to make the survey and results public or private and can also print a PDF hard copy for those who would prefer that option. I'd suggest creating a tiny url for the link to make it easier for classes/teachers to access the poll.

Vizu Poll is a simple survey tool for polling people on one particular question. The poll can then be added to a blog or other website.

These are just the few examples I came across in my search. Have you found something that works effectively to meet your survey needs? Please feel free to comment below.

Literacy Unit - Rowan of Rin #2

We are working through the book Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda. Last week we read chapters 3 and 4 and focused on characterisation in a novel. For an overview of activities in earlier chapters please use this link: Chapters 1 and 2.

Chapters 3 and 4 - Summary
The people of Rin decide that despite the lack of help from Sheba, a party must be formed to head up the mountain and get the stream flowing again. The strongest and bravest volunteer and all head home for the night to make preparations and get a good night's sleep. Rowan, however, is haunted by nightmares and awakes to discover that the stick thrown at him by Sheba, is in fact a map of the mountain. He rushes to show the villagers so that the party may take it on their journey. But, to everyone's dismay, the map can only be seen when in the hands of Rowan. Reluctantly the people agree that Rowan must join the party on the journey.

Activities

Code Breaker

• Look for possessive nouns in the text and explore the punctuation used with them.
• Look at proper nouns with particular attention to the different names used for the characters eg. Strong Jonn and Jonn of the Orchard.

Text Participant

• Create a sociogram that shows all the people of Rin, the role they play in the community and their connections to one another. (We made this one with Kidspiration. We changed the colour of the bubbles of the people going up the mountain. Students scanned through the book to find the details we needed.)

Text User

• Discuss how we make judgements of each others' character in real-life using appearance, conversation and actions.
• Discuss how this translates to a book and examine characterisation in terms of description, dialogue, actions and thoughts.

Text Analyst

• Group students to represent the members of the party going up the mountain.
• Groups scan through the book to find out what Emily Rodda revealed about their character. They create a wordle and a picture of their character.
• They make a short video interview - one person pretends to be the character, another the interviewer, and a third the camera person. The interviewer asks questions about how the character is feeling about the impending journey.

Update 2014: This year, as an alternative to the video, students wrote a diary entry from the perspective of their character outlining their feelings about the journey. We also wrote descriptions of the characters, including one or more sentences about who the character is, five or more sentences about the characteristics of that character, and closing with an evaluative statement about the character.

Here is the complete Rowan of Rin unit.

The Challenge of Planning and Programming

This year I haven't found the planning/programming side of things so easy. Having moved from Year 1 to Year 4 I've found myself struggling to modify my teaching strategies, plan for new learning, and read/research all at once. It has been a challenge, but I think I seem to be getting there now.

Writing a teaching program is quite a complex task requiring a number of higher-order thinking skills. Teachers need to:

• Analyse the guiding materials eg. National Statements, State Frameworks, School Curriculum.
  
• Design a format for the program that will make it a useful working document as well as meeting the needs of supervisors.
• Evaluate resources to use for teaching the content and providing learning experiences for students.
• Create lessons and activities that will engage students and meet the outcomes.
• Predict student needs and difficulties in order to differentiate tasks.
• Devise assessment tasks to determine whether student outcomes were achieved.
• Compile succinct instructions to explain lessons effectively but using very few words.
  

These tasks require careful concentration and uninterrupted time. Trying to do this in a normal teaching day - lunch time or after school - is a challenge in itself! I find it best to do the programming at home or somewhere at school where my students won't be popping in.

When confronting programming, these are generally the steps I take:

1. Check out the unit of work - jot down any ideas that immediately come to mind
2. Grab some resources - flick through books, search online and find relevant lessons and activities that will help students to learn the material and meet the outcomes
   
3. Get creative - search more widely, think about people resources, movies, games, simulations etc that will engage students and provide for new learning opportunities.
4. Data input - start up a table in a word processing document and put in the required outcomes. Start structuring and ordering the ideas to progress learning of these concepts. (In my mind, this is the hardest part of the process).

Rarely do I have my program written up completely before I begin the teaching. Rarely do I teach exactly to the program. My program guides me, but if I find better ways to engage my students and achieve the required outcomes along the way, I see no problem with making these changes.

What do you consider to be the challenges of programming? What strategies do you use? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Friday Fun - 27/2/09

Fun This Week
This week we had minimal interruptions to normal teaching time. It was nice to have things running to schedule, but was by no means boring!

Alligator in the Classroom!
We have been encouraging students to take charge of their learning, exercise their brains and share their knowledge. One student was a great example of that this week. On the weekend she purchased a cracking egg toy with an 'alligator' inside. When put into water the alligator starts to grow and begins cracking out of its shell. She brought it into school to share the experience with us. Everyone is very excited to check it out in the morning to see how much it has grown.

Maths
We looked at different strategies for working out the five times tables. We talked about how it's easy to count by fives to work out the lower tables eg. 3 x 5. For the bigger numbers we tried multiplying by 10 and then halving the answer. For example: 8 x 5 becomes 8 x 10 (80) halved (40). I found that this is a good strategy in theory, but students need to be confident with doubling and halving larger numbers first.
We also worked with data collection and graphing this week. We explored different types of surveys and the types of information they are able to gather. We looked at how Venn diagrams can be used to collect and sort information. This first diagram shows student preferences when asked "Do you like going on the internet and/or playing computer games?"

This second diagram shows student preferences when asked "Do you like chocolate, strawberry, and/or plain milk?" Readers' Theatre
While some of our students were doing Fife and Drum lessons, the others did Readers' Theatre. Students read and performed "Spider Woman and the Gift of the Loom" from a resource book full of Readers' Theatre plays. We will be doing one each week in the hopes of improving student reading fluency and expression. I would like to see students performing radio plays at some stage, and would also like for students to write some scripts of their own.

Respect
We focused on 'respect' this week in our FRIENDS values program. We looked at examples of respect/disrespect in both a comic and a picture book ("Zen Ties" by John M. Muth). Students thought about why respect is important and wrote about how they show respect to others. We also performed roleplays where students responded to scenarios assertively, but not agressively.
SuperClubsPlus
We have been busy registering our students for SuperClubsPlus and some have been able to get on already and have a play. It's amazing to see how much they've been able to do at home without teacher instruction. They seem to be loving it so far and one student commented that it brings students together who wouldn't ordinarily talk at school.
On Friday we had a session with SCP in the computer lab. One of the year 5 students who really knows her way around SuperClubs came to talk to the group about what she's learned with it. She really inspired them and was a great support to them as they got started.

House Meetings
Our Swimming Carnival is only a couple of weeks away so students met in their house teams to elect house captains. The air was buzzing with excitement. It's always great to see how things like this bring students together and build school spirit.

Rowan of Rin
I will write a separate post about "Rowan of Rin" over the weekend.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This week's tip: Jing's the Thing

I've been meaning to learn how to capture a computer tutorial for quite some time, but thought it would be tricky so kept putting it off. Podcasting took me a while to get the hang of, so I figured I'd need to set aside some decent time to learn how to create a screencast. NOT SO! With Jing it is one of the easiest things you can do online.

Getting Started
Go to Jing and choose your system for download. It should start downloading immediately. Accept the terms of condition and install the program. It will also ask you to create an account with Jing online. This is as simple as providing your email address, username and a password. After this, I'd really recommend spending a couple of minutes at the Getting Started page. Usually I'm a 'trial and error' sort of person, but this time I took about 6 minutes to watch a couple of videos and actually knew what to do for a change! The whole process only took about 15 minutes!

Using Jing to Enhance Teaching
When I mentioned Jing to my tweeps (Twitter friends) some wrote back very excited about how they use Jing for teaching. @blenna uses it to create lesson plans. @crtwojtera uses it to capture wordles for her class blog. I used it to create a tutorial for students to use with our My Classes page. It's simple and easy to use and you have a number of options for how you save and/or share the file.

I plan to use Jing to create explanations for computer activities so that students can access them from home and continue their learning or explain it to their parents. I'm big on bridging the gap between home and school and providing students access to resources outside of school hours.

At the moment I'm still playing with Jing and getting used to recording myself as I do things on the computer. Check out my welcome post if you want to see a recent example.

How are you using Jing to address the challenges you face? How can you see it being implemented in the classroom? Please leave your ideas in the comments.