This week was a little dificult to get back into the flow of classroom work as I had spent the greater part of last week with students on the successful Tasmania trip.
With my students…
years 9/10 completed a post on the trip to Tasmania and commenced putting their choice of photos into a digital movie. Most images required resizing using irfanview. Movie clips had been taken with my flip video but as we have an earlier version of both MS Moviemaker and Sony Vegas, I had to put them through my laptop to convert to useable mpg files. These were placed on the student drive for ready access. The latter part of the week involved exams.
discovered the need for blog etiquette when some terms used in a comment by a student caused offence to our global partners.
Years 7 and 8 students completed live blogging with me on their use of social networking and online technology. They attempted to find connect with fellow global student bloggers by writing comments on other student blogs and replying to any who commented on theirs, by email.
Year 6 continue to work on their digital movie “A typical day in our school” for sharing on a ning site with schools in France and USA.
So proud of the way our global project with MrKp and KimCofino and their students developed on moving on together where students from UK, Australia and Thailand all spoke about what they are looking forward to, what they are nervous about, yet what they all ctually have in common on a voicethread. Take time to listen to it. It an easybut effective collaborative project. Thanks @MrKp for setting it up.
Getting staff on board web2.0
tried to comment on most of our staff’s blogs
For WIWOW (walk in walk out Wednesday) started our science lab assistant off with blogging and other staff present, converted powerpoint presentations to slideshare for embedding in their blog. Our internet access was woeful so it impeded much advancement.
Presented at a Grass ICT Day at Casterton on “what is a blog?’ and ran several workshops on blogging and MS Photostory. However, I did go home rather disquietened realising how many staff still lack computer confidence and online usage.
Student blog post of the week
….goes to leecie in year 10. Leecie took a turn to write the post prompt for collaboration nation and received more than 65 comments in reply to “what activities are you involved in after school?”
Blog post of the week
I have followed with interest the comment challenge and was disappointed that I could not participate in it due to technological difficulties. However dswaters has summarised the challenge with some really interesting reading. So, if you are into blogging, or even if you are not, check it out!!
registered for bubbl.us in order to brainstorm their ideas re their digital story. They may choose their software type eg vegas movie studio, photostory or kahootz.
Year 6
commenced commenting on their partner’s tales
Commenced a bubbl.us account and brainstormed their approach to producing a video on a ‘typical day in our school’ for comparison with a school in France and England.
Wrote a post on what they are ‘looking forward to’ and ‘what they are nervous about’ upon leaving primary school and entering secondary school
commenced our contribution to the collaborative voicethread shared with a school in England
Year 12 students
were studying virtual teamwork so they were used as the sounding board in the Flat Horizons project, which involved wikis.
Skippy, a grade 6 student was so excited to be asked (via a comment) for her blog to be showcased on the Victorian Education Department’s website.
Student blog of the week goes to tadfish a student in year 8.
Getting staff on board web2.0
A prep/one class blog (love the comments that have started) and a grade 4/5 blog has now commenced
One of our PE teachers who was uncertain about the use of web2.0 in his classes has purchased a flip video camera to film student’s sporting techniques for quick replay on a monitor and consequent reflection.
My involvement
Used 2 days of Teacher Professional Leave to attend a SLAV conference at Telstra Dome, featuring Will Richardson as the keynote speaker. On Tues, Jess McCulloch, Faye Matters and I visited Coburg senior secondary College, a new school replacing one that was closed by our education department. This school has been especially set up with technology, selected students and staff, and a different approach to learning. This meant that I missed some of my classes.
Attended an online session on conversations with Marco Torres and learned about his great work with his students and multi media.
Presented a short session on ‘my flat classroom’, to an innovations showcase on virtual classrooms.
Other sessions included:-
Session 1: 11.25 am
– Carole McCulloch – e-learning consultan
– Anne Mirtschin – Hawkesdale P-12 College
– Caryl Oliver – m-learning consultant (VIC)
• Session 2: 12.25 pm
– Alex Hayes – e-learning consultant (NSW)
– Lilian Austin – Latrobe University (Bundoora)
– Caroline Walta – Latrobe University (Shepparton)
Getting staff on board web2.0
A prep/one class blog (love the comments that have started) and a grade 4/5 blog has now commenced
One of our PE teachers who was uncertain about the use of web2.0 in his classes has purchased a flip video camera to film student’s sporting techniques for quick replay on a monitor and consequent reflection.
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.
Hmmm….. The warts will show up big time, this week!
Student Achievements
…the warts
One of our most prolific bloggers in grade 6, accidentally (I still dont know how) deleted his blog
logged in to the http://ms1001tales.wikispaces.com site to only find that another of our grade 6 boys had managed to edit the ‘gorgeous’ front page and put his personal photo and ‘about me’ page on there. Horror of all horrors!!! A quick ‘edit this page’ deleted his ‘about me’ page, but I quickly emailed Jeff Whipple to ask him to restore the original front page. It is now as it was!!! Whew!
attempted the impossible with grade 4 and 5 students and failed miserably, despite having the help of two year 9 students and a student teacher. Tried to finally enrol remaining students onto the 1001tales wiki, asked them to place comments on to the Thai student blogs and required a post of them. One boy ended up under the table!!! And it seemed as though out of this class of 28, I had 20 students hot on my heels requesting help. The wiki enrolments were fraught with problems too. Next week, will be a much simpler task. Groan!!!! Not such digital natives after all!!
Anzac day public holiday, a strike half day and a teacher professional learning day, meant I missed my 9/10 classes and the posts for collaboration nation will have to wait until next week.
…..and all
year 8s were successful in commenting on student posts from Costa Rica, and again I heard squeals of excitement from students when they got their first comment back
year 7 students were settled into their blog tasks, which allowed me to commence their ‘camp in a sentence’ into a voicethread. Will finish next week, and each student will embed the VT into their blog post.
Grade 6s wrote a post on Anzac Day
Heather Blakey managed to rescue the deleted blog!! Thanks a heap Heather.
Personal achievements
Jess and I used Thursday as a TPL (Teacher Professional Leave Day) to reflect on our accomplishments at laying the eplanks in a virtual classroom floor and to plan our future directions. Added to our wiki on eplanks re our achievements. Discussed how we could get more staff on board web2.0, and proceeded to interview a secondary English teacher and podcast her opinions and comments, and then enrolled her for a blog, much to her excitement. All steps taken will be podcast and available soon.
worked with some individual primary school staff helping them with blogging mechanics
‘Walk in walk out Wed’ = first session. Two staff attended but we worked together on their needs (email problems, music grabbing for network use etc), and placed work on our intranet. A very productive session!
enrolled for the after school online session with Marcus Torres in May. (He is visiting Australia)
took part in the online session with Oz/NZ teachers using flashmeeting.
Student blog of the week
Goes to teddaoo, a year 8 student, who has worked so hard at establishing a social network. She has made so many comments on other global student blogs, and the red dots are finally appearing on her cluster map! She has also completed all tasks that have been set her.
Have not attempted my google reader so my favourite blog post of the week will have to wait
As it has been some time since I completed a post with this title, I shall reflect back over the last few weeks. Student achievements
Year 9/10 commenced cross blogging with a school in Conncecticut, USA. The first post was written by me, seeking answers to – What is unique about your school and what is the best thing about living where you do? Students in both countries answered the questions in their personal blog, copied it and pasted it into a comment on my blog (I got 69 comments!!) Many further questions arose from this exercise, so they were then given as comments on PBogush’s Collaboration Nation blog for his students to answer further.
Still attempting to enrol all my grade 4-7 students on the 1001 tales global project wiki. I have had endless problems with what should be a simple exercise. Most students have completed their stories.
Primary students are creating their avatars and uploading them onto their blogs. Personal pursuits
Taught a class of students in New Brunswick, Canada, from the comfort of my own home
Participated in an online Aussie teachers get together Sunday evening nb few people look like their photos or avatars. Guess we all try and put on our best face. This was a live video conference meeting, greeting and talking.
Enjoyed using slideshare to upload ppt presentations.
Attended the first birthday party for classroom20 and offered to be a host to greet newcomers to the site.
Attended a familiarisation session at Deakin uni for an upcoming conference – “Challenge and change: Re-imagining your role in the digital age!”
3 hrs online training using elluminate as a presenter
Presented an online session “We have a very big backyard”, using elluminate, for
Knowledge Bank online. Despite several technical glitches,this took place Tue afternoon after school
Parents as partners
During parent teacher interviews, parents were shown their student’s blogs. As the day progressed students brought in their parents to show off their blogs. Parents became voluntarily involved proofreading, helping their students add to their work and offering ideas for improvement. Getting staff on board web2.0
The teaching and learning session after school, discussed incorporating blogging and other web2.0 tools into specialist subjects areas. Other Notable events Heather Blakey returned to our school for a day this week to work primarily with the other staff who are now interested in blogging. As a result, grade 6 have a class page, as well as personal blogs. Student blog of the week.
This blog is belongs to a grade 6 student, who uses her blog voluntarily as a journal. There are pages for her school stories and school work and an avatar and voki have been successfully completed. Well done Skippy!
It is just on 7 months ago, the students and I, under Heather Blakey’s tutelage, commenced our classroom backyard blog.
Yesterday, I was priveleged to present an online in-service to interested staff in Victoria. Elluminate was the software used, and this allowed audio interaction, application sharing and other collaborative work. My presentation, outlining our journey with blogging, commencing with our classroom backyard blog is shared with you in the slideshare below.
Please note that some schools may have the slideshare site blocked.
(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!
Grade 6 students are completing their digital story using MS Photostory on their global project “From Me to You”. Will save as email size for embedding in their blog.
Year 8 completing posts on their paintings of their house and uploading their artwork image. A digital camera has was used to take a photos of their painting, saved as jpg, size 380deg.
From my perspective:-
First post with teacher direction for student’s posts. Will use this as much as possible now.
Personal PD at SLAV (Victorian schools Library teachers Association) on Monday, Mar 3rd, for library technicians where Faye and I presented on our backyard blog, how we started and how to use the basic features of wordpress. Listened to two great speakers on “finding the needle in the haystack when searching online for specific item or topic” and another on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (abc) and some of their online resources for classroom and school use.
Used elluminate with Dr Ric Canale and Dr Pam McIntyre from the University of Melbourne, to interview 8 students and 4 staff for a survey on “online communities”. Our interactive white board and library were used for the actual interviews.
Student blog of the week goes to flurogreen. This year 9 girl, despite being involved in a lot of extra curricula activities and missing quite a number of my classes, has added a lot of posts and pages to her blog in her own time (and this, without having internet access at home). She has also uploaded her digital movies from last year onto a separate page about our local town, Hawkesdale and added a page for Chinese.  Her avatar is appropriate to her user name.
My favourite blog post of the week is from a person I follow and admire very much - Lizbdavis. I met her on classroom20.com and follow her on twitter and the work she has shared with colleagues is nothing short of amazing. The title of the post is ‘Understanding your 21st century teenager‘
This week we have no school on Monday, as Victorians celebrate labour day.
workshops on blogging and MS Photostory. However, I did go home rather disquietened realising how many staff still lack computer confidence and online usage.
hard at establishing a social network. She has made so many comments on other global student blogs, and the red dots are finally appearing on her cluster map! She has also completed all tasks that have been set her.
(A New Brunswick student asking me a question via skype.)
