Although our students only move on to secondary college in late January next year, transition programs and information evenings are being held now. Students in the northern hemisphere and parts of Asia move on soon. So, they have been asked
what are you looking forward to?
what are you nervous about?
moving on together….do we have much in common with the world?
Students from England, Bangkok and our school here in Australia, have written a post about it and answered the questions on a voice thread. Listen to their comments!!!
Thanks MrKp for setting up our voicethread and encouraging us to share with you.
Results from our online survey (using google forms) of three schools, each from different countries are now all in. The results from google spreadsheets is now exported to MS Excel and stored on the student drive. Follow the instructions below to show the results using a powerpoint presentation. Goto www.slideshare.net and register.
Follow directions to find the exported, raw data from the survey between, Denver, Hawkesdale and Nabblus.
Sort it
Calculate the average/household for each item.
Graph the results for each gadget
Insert appropriate headings
Grab a screenshot using printscreen, paste into MS Paint, crop and save as jpg.
Paste each graph onto a slide in MS Powerpoint.
Find a map for each of the cities and towns
Add to a powerpoint slides
Summarise and report on the findings
Upload your saved powerpoint file into slideshare
Embed in your blog
Check out the following student posts to see some great results flurogreen and leecie
Here is the live google form that Alison Saylor designed for us to fill in.
If you need help at embedding a live google form into a blog, read the great post by Tom Barrett.
experimented with live blogging and www.coveritlive.com with the year 9/10 students (thanks to Jess McCulloch for her help) This was in preparation for our live blogging linkup with CT, USA on Friday. Also had a trial run with CT
Friday……the BIG ONE!-the big highlight of the week. Linked to CT, USA using live blogging. Our yackpack link was blocked as was the live video of Mr PBogush, our highly skilled virtual teacher but the live blogging worked. Students loved the live blogging, collaboration and learning outcomes (See post)
As a result of the popularity of this session, I recieved a delightful email from one of his students, the next day, asking us whether we can do it again soon.
Still working on our camp in a sentence with year 7.
Grade 4/5 students received (much to their delight) another wonderful parcel of letters, a book on Canada and a new webkinz - a white polar bear called Diamond from their friends in Canada. We got to know this class through our cross posting blog on webkinz pets.
My experiences
attended an elluminate session, on Wed night, on the flat horizons project that my students and I will be involved in for global peer reviewing.
Commenced reflecting on the huge, educational possibilites that live blogging could be used for.
stood back in amazementand awe, in our live blogging session with CT and the sheer virtual ability of Paul Bogush, in disciplining, teaching and helping all his remote students.
applied for an emerging technologies grant, throught the Victorian Education Department, to create a flat classroom
ordered a flip video from USA through Australian ebay (Cannot wait until it comes!!!)
Student blog of the week …goes to a lad in grade 5. Congratulations jimmyg on the number of posts you have presented, both requested and voluntary ones. The images you have used adds to the overall presentation. Keep up the great work!
Favourite post of the week…..
Educating students to be more effective presenters (and teachers as well) My students still enjoy working with MS Powerpoint for its ease and simplicity of use. I liked this post for its suggestions on using it more effectively.
(A New Brunswick student asking me a question via skype.)
Time of lesson: New Brunswick 8:45am, Australia 9:45pm
Teachers involved:Jeff Whipple, Chad Ball and other interested Canadian staff; and me, Anne Mirtschin (Australia)
Venue:
Nashwaaksis Middle School / Devon Middle School School District 18 Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada and
the study, my home, Hawkesdale, Australia
Prior learning:
existing wiki, with resources set up by Chad Ball, the teacher in New Brunswick
questions posed by the students in reply to the message by Chad, posted on the facebook bulletin board.If any of you have a good question for our Australian webguest, please post it here. Add your name, write your question down and bring it tomorrow morning. You may have the chance to ask.See the questions.
lots of digital images of Australia put into 4 powerpoint presentations
wiki setup with MS Powerpoint presentations, using slideshare to embed them into the wiki.
internet access
nerves of steel!!
Lesson Plan:
Introduction: introduce myself and my country with a map of Australia.
Lesson: Walk through the slideshares on the wiki, indicating ‘next’ so Chad and his students can be viewing the same slide as me, as I talk to these students about our culture, country, town, school and farm, stopping for questions along the way.
Conclusion: Question time for staff and students.
Evaluation:
Self: There were many questions which is always a good indication. My voice broke up somewhat but overall skype and the line were okay. We dropped out once but were soon back online again. Such a powerful learning experience that textbooks can never give.
Jeff: kids loved it…isn’t skype wonderful kids couldn’t stop gabbing about presentation all day…so excited…you are so right about textbooks…primary sources are as close as our connections to the world…current, authentic. thanks sooo soooo much…the kids haven’t stopped talking about you, the learning, and your “funny” accent…
Chad: As it was still pretty early when we came online, the students were all pretty sleepy, but that didn’t stop them from talking about you all day! I would really like to see this communication continue, if you are interested. How many students have you got? Maybe we could do some type of e-penpal idea or something of that nature. I would love to have the kids share some of their teenage lives with each other.
Part of our ‘de-brief’ when we were done was to review some of the pics and video from your website. I also had the kids write a few quick notes to you.
It was incredible,
Its just so different from what is normal here. I probably would of never found any of that out if it wasn’t for that presentation!
That was soo cool! it was real awesome of the cool things i (and everyone) learned, I think i’m gonna do some research on more later…
i really liked the fact that we were actually talking to her. not just in email. i thought all the pictures she showed were pretty sweet. also, i thought it was cool how we are used to different surroundings and habbits.. yes, we dont say put your bookbag in the boot… i still find it awsome, though. i love australia so much! (not to mention thier accents!)
I thought that was so cool, for anyone who missed that, I wish that they could have seen it!
that was an EXCELENT, presentation. I LOVED IT.
it was very interesting, and i think that getting to learn chinese
is a very diffrent thing then what we learn here.
THANK-YOU SO MUCH. :
i dont really understand why they learn chinese… i dont really think that makes much sense
Hi Mrs. Mirtshin
We were just watching you video and we wanted to know what bubble taps were.
I really enjoyed seeing and listening to her.
I learned a lot of new things
i loved her accent. when she said RIGHT-O ! hahaha !
Hello again..
I jsut wanted to say thanks again for taking the time to talk to us abotu Australia. It was really interesting and i learned a lot!.
it was swet
her accent was cool, but the conection kept breaking up
but it was till sweet
thanks allot for sharing some of the intersting facts about were your from and for taking the time out of your day!!
I thought that it was great! And I love her accent. Plus, we got out of Math!!! It was really fun and I hope we can do it again.
Mrs.Mirtschin,
Thank you very much for taking your time to teach us about where you live. I thought i was really interesting to learn about how different it is from here.
thanks again !!
Awesome presentation and pics. I’m gonna look up some more stuff on Australia… We should have a field trip there lol it would be fun…
Yeah we thoguht the presentation was cool, and the web-cam thing was a really good idea. We both learned lot’s of new things about Austrailia.
thank you Mrs. Mirtschin, that was really cool… and i hope that someday i will come to australia, and now that i know a little bit about australia i will be able to understand things there even more.
for anyone who missed it, it was a very awsome presentation.
you should have been there.
Thank you for teachiing me lots of things that i didnt know about Australia.
P.S. I LOVE YOUR ACCENT!
Thank-you for teaching us stuff… PS. Kangaroos are cute!
Thank you for teaching me so much about your home, Australia. I learned a lot of really cool stuff, and I hope that some day I can go there to explore for myself.
jsut wanted to say thanks for talking with us today and taking the time to teach us more about australia. hope you have a grate day MATE, or nignt i dont know
I that it was to cool that we got to talk to you this morning
Thank you lots
hey mrs. mirtschin
thanks for teaching us about australia it was fun thanks again
Thank you Mrs. Mirtschin for teaching us alot about Australia and what it is like to go to school there and about the farms and the sheep and everything. I enjoyed listening to you talk and asking you questions thank you for your knowledge that you shared with us.
thank you i learned stuff that i dident know about befor
i really liked the presentation you gave!!! thanks bunches
good stuff, cool last name
That was really interesting! It was pretty wicked awesome in my words. -lh
i thought that was a really interesting presentation. i can’t believe you can EAT kangaroo! gross.— emma.
P.S- her accent is AWESOME.
Lucas: thanks for doing your awesome presentation! ps: i would like to try kangaroo
Stephen: thank you for taking your time to do that it was great!
Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed listening to your presentation. I thought it was very interesting and very well done !
Thank you so much for staying up late to talk to us. I thougth it was really fun and nice of you. Hopefuly we can do it again sometime!
Thank-you so much for staying up late and talking to us about Australia.! I learnt a lot just from that presentation. : ) . It made me want to take a trip to Australia! That would be pretty sweet .! Anyway, THANKS SO MUCHH! : )
Thank you for the grate moring here.
Thank you for geting ous out of the frst 2 class of the day!
Thank you!
I learned a bit from the presentation this mornig!
I wish I could visit Australia sometime!
The students are excited, I am nervous! Time to prepare my lessons for today and it is taking me quite a bit of thought and preparation.
Why would that make me decidedly nervous, you might ask? Well, I am in Australia and my students attend Nashwaaksis Middle School / Devon Middle School School District 18 Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. They are studying a unit on Oceana and about to study Australia and NZ. So, I will talk to them about life in Australia, our cultures, our school, my small rural town and the farm we live on.
Their teacher, Mr Chad Ball put up a bulletin message on his facebook page, seeking potential questions from the students and some of them follow. I think this would make an excellent exercise for my students to complete the answers to, on their individual posts.
Katie: What kind of animals do you have there? And how are they different from the ones in Canada?
Barret: This is my question, are the schools in districts like they are here? Is there early immersion there as well?
Caity: what are the two most commun languages used in Australia?
Craig: I think that it would be cool if we could possibly get a person inAustralia to do a live webcast in class.
Daniella: If you were in the outback is it true that there are houses out there that are under the ground???? If so how were they made?
Amanda: What sports do you play there? Any sports you do that are different from around the world? What are the most popular?
Megan: I was wondering whats so special about Australia ? Whats so special down there ? If you were walking down the street, what would people there be wearring ? ( shorts, jeans, hoodies, t-shirts ? ) What is your favorite thing about Australia ?
Adam: How many animals are indigenise to Australian?
Emily: How many years do you go to school before colledge or university?
Tyler: Can you sand surf in Australia? if so Have you?
Jane: Do they have all four seasons in Australia? And what are the differences between our seasons and theirs?
Katelyn: Are the foods in Australia the same as in Canada or do they eat weird things like ants ???
Lauren: umm… well i guess a good question might be… have you lived in australia all of your life?? If not, how long have you been there?? or maybe what school do you teach at there?? (just some ideas)
Cassie and Morgan: What do they wear? What type of food do they eat? Are there places that are better to live in than others, if so why? Are all of there catch phrases
“CROYKIE”? Does the Kangaroo population in the outback outmatch the human population?
Patrick: is there a different way of teaching in Australia,then there is here in Canada?
Laura: what are the common sports that they play in Australia.
Rene: do aussies have like pet sheep and stuff .. any different animals then cats or dogs…
Nicole: this will sound random, but like in the olden days families used to be huge (with a lot of people) and have lots of kids, now a days the families are smaller, so down in Australia are the families larger then our normal families?
Chantele: what language they speack most other then english, and what kind of cutlures?
Sarah: Why is their english so much different then ours, with words like ‘mate’ and stuff?
Stephen: Whats it like to have all those weird animals around?
Hannah: what knid of animals do you have there? are they all the same as here? are there school’s or just class room? what language do they speak there?
Gwen: What are some of the biggest cultural differences between our country and yours?? Or i it mostly the same?
Periods 3 and 3, my year 7 and 8 IT students filled in a simple online survey form re entertainment gadgets in their home. The teacher who had set it watched the results come in.
The extroadinary part of this statement is that my students are in SE Victoria in Australia and the teacher watching the details being entered immediately was in Florida. Alison instantly placed a comment on the google spreadsheet to say she could see it all as they completed it, even before half my students had hit submit. So, my students watching the output via a datashow could also be amazed at this immediate activity and watch their results appear on our shared google sheet.
Last year, I worked with Alison Saylor, on google spreadsheets. Prior to this we set up a “Guess where I am from” where students from each school, had to work out in 20 questions or less, using only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, where each school was.
This year, we will work together again, as both our IT classes are currently learning spreadsheets. Google has introduced this wonderful survey form, which can be set up and attached to a spreadsheet. The link to the form is given to potential respondents who fill them in and then submit the form. Hey presto!!! The answers are immediately added to the original spreadsheet.
So, using skype this morning Alison and I worked through the forms trying to determine an efficient and effective method of getting student responses form 4 or more possible schools in Florida, Hawkesdale, Palestine and England.
Alison set it up and as I had my classes almost immediately after offered to trial it. The link to the form was saved on a word document and saved on a public drive on our school network. My students then logged on and copied the url into their webpage. The form appeared and students had to ensure they filled in the Hawkesdale sections. They were asked how many TV sets, radios, cell phones (mobile phones), dedicated game stations, digital cameras etc exist in their households.
When all results are in, we will work with the figures, average them out and write up reports, summaries, comparisons and evaluations on their blogs. We think it will be interesting to compare across the globe.
Who do you think will have the highest household average for each item?
Today the students were going to have a guest teacher, Mr Jeff Whipple, outlining the nature of a wiki and explaining the nature of the 1001 flat tales global project. Grades 4 and 5 will work on the elementary wiki with China, Thailand, US, Canada etc whilst grade 6 will be involved in the middle school one. Jeff would use his laptop to demonstrate the wiki.
However this was no ordinary classroom as Jeff lives in Canada (read his blog for his version). He is the technology educational specialist for his school and is setting up the wiki for the project. With the help of our library  interactive white board, 50 odd students and half a dozen interested teachers watched with amazement, Jeff talk to us from his home, show us his pet cat, outline the project and then with the help of the SMART Technologies Bridgit tool on the IWB allowed us to view his laptop screen and walk through the wiki. His time was 10pm, ours was 12:00 midday. The weather was sunny and 25 deg C where we live, with students about to go to the pool for swimming classes. 15cm snow and -16deg C was the weather pattern where Jeff lives. Students are now fully motivated to start the project. Atlases came out and we found the city where Jeff lives. A great deal of geography was learned in 30 mins.!! Jeff was kind enough to come back to us 40 mins later to do a photo shoot for our local newspaper “The Warrnambool Standard”. The photographer and reporter had to make a 30 minute drive to our school.
How, did we get to know Jeff, you may well ask? Well, I was trying to sort out our “From Me to You” envelopes in the computer pod last week. My year 11 students were quietly and diligently completing accounting exs when I noticed my laptop flashing. Having forgotten that I was still logged into skype, I found someone was chatting to me.  My curiousity got the better of me. It was Jeff, introducing himself as he was setting up the wiki for the project. As we chatted, he offered to demo the wiki via skype to our classes. We took him up on that offer. My twitter network through Kim Cofino, from Bangkok, had alerted me to the existence of the project.
The second interesting event of the day, occurred prior to our skype session. I had spent several hours the night before working out a cyber safety lesson. Again, my twitter network came to the rescue with lots of interesting links, url’s, wikis and online videos. I had my year9/10s for a double class first thing this morning, but to my utter dismay, found the internet was down and all my lesson plans with it. Students started writing a post for their blogs whilst the principal and I tried to sort out the internet. Some time later, it was back on. Students quickly checked out their blogs and found they had comments on them, some from our staff, students but others from Holland and the US. Well………..that was it!!! My lesson plans never went into action. Instead, the students initiated their own learning. They wanted to email back the people who commented, some of whom were similar age students in the US. Then, they checked out those student blogs. Students who are often reluctant readers and writers were fully engaged reading the various posts. The boys even found a post on cricket by one of the US students. That encouraged them to wrote a post about the local cricket team they play for.
Next, they wanted to add a clustrmap to their blogs etc. The double was finished all too quickly. An authentic audience makes such powerful learning!!!
….and to top our day,our first two cards from the US schools in the “From me to you” project arrived. Excited students will open them tomorrow morning.
Last week, despite personal mental and physical exhaustion coping with first week back at school, one crashed computer lab and intermittent internet access, my students on Friday, set up their own blog space. We decided to enrol with global students, as our experience with edublogs did not work last year. (possibly our school’s tight security.) Following are the steps we took.
Pre-Learning activities
Viewed some online blog sites, including our own backyard site (where I would grab their writing and images and post them online myself) and discussed content and appearance.
One group was given the responsibility of commenting back on a youthradio blog that we will be involved with this year. I quickly checked content and spelling to ensure comments were suitable and discussed etiquette and the need for saying where they were from. (but no personal details!!)
Going online
Each student applied for a blog, checked their emails, activated the response, got their username and password) and then logged on.
Each student had to set a minimum of 5 goals for the year, three had to be school related and two could be personal. (a very interesting excersice and will summarize the results at some stage as it was a rather eye-opening one)
We kept the post simple except for some basic formatting and will look at presentation more fully next week (although the geeks were off and running and found that option early on.)
Students then created a cartoon to illustrate some portion of their blog. Most are still working on this and it does add interest to the post. They created the cartoon, made a screen dump and resized the image and saved it through MS Paint. Then uploaded it into their blog.
I am in the process of linking all their blogs to this blog and will ensure that I have administrative rights over their blogs.
As our students as a whole call themselves technokids, each year level has techno in front of it. Scroll down this blog and some year 9s and 10s (technoteens) Â have completed their first post. (eg Tarzy, Dhugsy) Even our challenging group of ex-year 9 boys were focused on the task and enjoyed the challenge.
Evaluation
All students, from the least to the most literate, completed 5 goals (only a few struggled to find 5)
Would have liked a little more depth to some of their goals and had to push them to explain some of their sporting goals.
They enjoyed making cartoons and enhancing the presentation
The geeks were off and running - discovering all sorts of areas of wordpress that took me months to find
The comments we made on youth radio ended up in Kevin’s spam box. They were quickly retrieved. Hint: email your host informing them that comments have been made.
Post lesson acitivity: will endeavour to reply to student posts with comments plus try and get form teachers to do so as well.
(A New Brunswick student asking me a question via skype.)
