This week was another exciting one with the most significant event, being our virtual class with the 43 boys from Manila.
With the students..
- first up was the online connection with Manila, using DiscoverE as our virtual classroom, with Lorraine Leo from Boston and Geoff from Perth helping out. Students had prepared a ppt presentation of photos of our school, which they spoke to. Students really enjoy this type of interaction. It is a great confidence boost for them, and they take on the role of teacher, much of the time.
- commenced a trial unit of work for the VCAA on mobile phone ownership, using MS Excel with years 7,8 Basic spreadsheet functions were taught. However, I hope to incorporate as many web2.0 tools into the unit as possible. Students appeared quite interested in this and enjoy working with spreadsheets.
- Grades 4/5 students wrote a question for a post prompt and students commented on each others questions. Kids loved doing this and were quite happy to find at least 3 other’s questions and answer them as comments.
- Grade 6s worked with audacity to produce a podcast. This was a noisy classroom as they worked in groups of 3, but students were engaged. Had difficulty with the conversion to mp3 for one of the podcasts – only captured musical intro and not entire cast.
- enjoyed connecting with Lorraine Leo from Boston who has some amazing global connections
- co-presented with Jess at the Elmore Days conference for principals and leading teachers of our SW region. We spoke on the use of ICT in our classrooms with improved learning outcomes and engagement for students. This covered mobile technology, blogging, global projects and virtual classrooms.
Student blog of the week goes to steph in grade 5, who independently put up a post prompt asking the world “What is your favourite movie?” and the world replied with 17 comments.
This is a photo of one of the freshly painted games on our road loop around the school. There are many different games and I hope to get students to produce a powerpoint presentation, complete with descriptions of and instructions playing those games in the next few weeks.
This week the cold and frostiness of winter was tolerated with warm days until Saturday when bleak weather and rains chilled the bone, causing our canteen at the footy, to sell out of all hot foods by half time.
Comment of the week
“Play? I see this web2.0 as an absolute mud pit. Jump in, splash around, make a few mud cakes, get dirty and have fun. Thats my learning so far. I dont have deadlines to meet or bosses or potentially critical colleagues who don’t yet “get it” looking over my shoulder. I am thinking hard, “How am I going to bring the others along to get down and dirty in the web2.0 learning mud pit?” thank you robert in response to my post.
Blog post of the week
As I always enjoy the edublogs blog so this week my favourite post goes here as it explains the many categories of users when setting up and inviting other users into a blog.
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