ejourney with technokids

I see…

The photo above is a stall of lollies!!! The Spanish love lollies and this stall was so colourful that it took my eye but I resisted temptation and did not buy any.

I hear….. bang, bang, fireworks, crackers, bang, crackers, crackers, bang!!!! It is a festival day, of St John the Baptist,  here today in Barclena so there is lots of entertainment, fireworks, bonfires etc I have jumped out of my skin so many times as people just throw crackers in the streets.

I smell…… only my poor old aching, tired and weary feet.

The markets are sensational. We are right near Las Ramblas in a small pension.

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.

What a weird heading, you might ask!!! However, one of our grade 5 boys needed to use the bathroom and duly sought permission to leave the classroom. After some time, he was back to tell me that there was a chicken hawk (a gosshawk) in the boys toilets. Santa leaves the strangest presents in the strangest places!!!

The big rescue operation went into action. Phone calls were made to local native bird keepers to get nets and other needed gear. However, one of our teachers who is a farmer and extremely fit and agile, reached up to the high ledge and caught the terrified bird. A bevy of excited students soon surrounded the teacher and bird. Finally the gosshawk was released into the great outdoors, unharmed after his indoor adventure.

The digital camera was at the ready, and took some photos which were duly resized and renamed to jpg to enable uploading online. Some of the photos have been added to this blog.

What a great day we had today! Even though we have used skype briefly with classes and a school from NZ, and our grade 5 teacher and our LOTE teacher use it,  our first big trial in the classroom for me came today when we introduced our classes to students in Korea.

Each class was as nervous as the other but some students were introduced, took the microphone and asked each other about their schools, homes and countries. We recorded the conversation with powergramo and the quality of the audio was superb. I am about to edit the 40 minute conversation and convert to an mp3 file and put it up on this blog (if I can get the technology to work) in the next few days.

Here are the comments from one of our year 7 students who was in the audience:-

Today I learnt that Korean students  live in the school dormitories,wake up at 7:00 and school starts at 8:00 and finishes at 5:00. There school is a scientific school. There age is around 14 to 18 years old. They only watch television at lunchtime for an hour, if they are lucky. Korean people are not good swimmers because there are not many swimming pools around.

Korea is the size of Victoria and Australia holds 25 million people and Korea holds 60 million. The students want to be university students. One of the Korean students thinks one of our girls is cute. 

When we were skyping them it was -6 degrees and snowing, and in Australia it was 32 degrees. In Korea they can drive when they’re 20 and in Australia we can drive at 18.

In Korea they live in apartments.

There English was pretty good.

I liked it because I could learn about different things in different schools and countries. But not only we could learn about Korea but we can learn about our own students.

We will have a go at skyping each other each day this week, but with different classes. Students no longer need to learn about other countries from textbooks but directly from students in their own countries.

This great little enhanced podcast shows what grade 6 students (12 year olds) can achieve when given the opportunity to design their own script and apply their knowledge gained on volcanoes and our local volcanic region. Students were responsible for developing their own scripts and the photos used were primarily taken on a school excursion to Mt Rouse.

Mt Rouse is a volcano in Penshurst, country Western Victoria, Australia and the region has applied for geopark status recently. We hope that this will help encourage tourism to our region.

Download Video: Posted by murch at TeacherTube.com.

Most students are now putting the final touches to their movies. Below you can view a movie about whales. Whales are special to us as we live 30 minutes drive from Warrnambool, which is referred to as the Southern Rights Whale Nursery. In winter these beautiful whales come to Warrnambool to have their young.

Download Video: Posted by murch at TeacherTube.com.

When I think back to my classroom teaching practice back in May and compare it to now, I think that I have come such a long way on this journey with web 2.0 and my students. Then I try to do something new or improve some task or outcome and I feel I am right back to the beginning.
Today, I tried too many things at once. We are sharing a voicethread with JoNelle in the USA with grade 3 and 4’s IT class. There have been a lot of problems with using the microphone and getting the audio to work. So today I tried again with 2 girls. We were actually able to upload their photos (which they had created in MS Paint) and saved as jpg, size 380. So that was one success. Then Sarah’s voice worked as I had switched to recording on my laptop where the settings must all have been okay. Another success! Along came the next student and it did not work again. After many frustrated efforts, we gave up and tried again after lunch. It was only then with Grace’s help that we worked out how to delete previous comments but in so doing we managed to delete Sarah’s (the one that worked). Again we wasted 20 mins but it was all to no avail. Tomorrow, with a fresh mind and a fresh day we will see if we can get it to work.
Then, two boys in year 7 completed their movies so they wasted 20 mins or so trying to get an edublog registered but having come home and thought about it in a much cooler, collected way, I think it was because they wanted to create their own but they need to select the option that allows them to be invited to a blog, which is mine.
So, in the last few minutes, I uploaded the one movie on dogfighting, created in Kahootz to teacher tube and will write another post trying to put it up on this blog. I will worry about the other students on Thursday, as I have them on Friday.
Technology is great when it works but oh so frustrating when it does not. On the weekend I joined another wonderful ning group at www.vidsnacks.ning.com I think this will just be the best type of site to work with and some of the teachers are already into all the things we are starting on.

the Dogfight

by Tim in year 7

Download Video: Posted by murch at TeacherTube.com.

I had my year 7 class this afternoon and they quite enthausiastically working away still on their digital stories. One of the boys is using Kahootz to illustrate a typical day for a student at our school, from getting out of bed, showering, eating breakfast, catching the bus and being a typical school student. It is great and he has put so much work into fine keypointing.
Another student who has been slow to start with his movie, decided to use Stop Motion Pro, but that tended to be a distraction to some of the other boys who then wanted to play with the lego. A big problem was that we could not find Stop Motion Pro on our computers. We only have a license for 7 of them but maybe the reghosting of the machines over the holidays failed to put this software on.
Two students started to make their finished products into movies. So next lesson, we will set up blogs at edublogs for each of those students and they can upload their movies to teachertube and then paste the code into their blogs. Their individual blogs will be linked to this one. It is all quite exciting!!

After, my absence from school and the inevitable jet lag that accompanies travel to the northern hemisphere, we are finally getting to the making of our digital stories for Gail Casey’s global project. To simplify things, I have decided to work with year 7s on this project. Some of the boys entered the kahootz competition by building an animated movie in Kahootz, an animation software developed by the Australian Childrens Television Association.
Tim was invited to the prizes ceremony in Melbourne as he was on of the top three students in the statewide secondary students’ expression.
He will make his expression into a movie as it was a story about dogfighting. This tells the story of planes who fought in world war II. Another boy made a Kahootz expression on soccer so he will also publish it into movie format to be uploaded onto our blog pages.At least we will have two completed soon. Most of the other students have decided on their topics and they will have about 2-3 weeks to complete them. Several different software types will be used, including MS Moviemaker, MS Photostory, Vegas Movie Studio and Kahootz. They will be encouraged to use voiceovers, background music and sound effects where possible to make the movies as interesting and entertaining as possible for their global audience. Unfortunately, our school year is closing in on us and our year 12 students spend their last day at school on Thursday, before they go on swat vac.

Students have been discussing possible topics as a theme to their digital videos. As we are sharing with other countries, some may choose to show a typical day in our school, our local area, features of our school, football etc.

Software types for presentation are also being looked. Possibilities include Kahootz, MS Photostory, Vegas Movie Studio, MS Moviemaker etc. We are using www.bubbl.us.com for brainstorming.

We have been a little slow to start, as I had one week’s long service leave. In that time and for the ensuing holiday break, I went with my husband to Europe. However, due to a health issue we were late back to school, so my classes have only started in earnest this week.