Term 3 2008

Whew, it's a while since I've done one of these. Beginning of this term actually. During the term we have implemented KnowledgeNet as our intranet. I'll be doing some more PD on this early next term, but you should have logins for all your students now and should distribute these for next term.



Also on the PD agenda for next term is using PCSchool Spider to view class and student details, print of class lists, and mark the roll.



Meanwhile, here's some sites you may be interested in:

Book Wink - dedicated to inspiring children to read - uses video and podcasting

Whyville - social networking for primary age children in a safe environment.
Background for teachers

Terri Husted's Homepage - Maths for teachers

From Interface Magazine:

• Good idea #1 - Musical computers - Just like musical chairs except that you have to write and continue a story at each computer. Lesson Plan here.
  
• Good Idea #2 Colour coded grammar activity.

Virtual Body - good animated body part models. Smartboards?

Speaking of Smartboards, all smartboard computers will be upgraded to Notebook v10 in the next wee while. Notebook 10 has some new features which Aaron will be working with next term. New Features:

New Look
• improved user interface
• toolbar customization
• Welcome Center
Notebook Software File Creation and Delivery
• page grouping
• customizable themes
• Senteo™ software question insertion
• SMART Document Camera image insertion
• Magic Pen tool
• table integration
• active alignment
• object animation
• SMART recorder
• shape recognition tool
• color and gradient fill effects
• spell check
Other Tools and Features
• SMART Learning Marketplace access
• Online Essentials for Educators
• security features


http://www2.smarttech.com/kbdoc/118455




Or with the smartboard look at these space interactives.

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072482621/student_view0/interactives.html#

Phases of the moon:













Got some time during the holidays? Add effects to some of your digital photos here:



http://www.dumpr.net/















Who has a Facebook Page? From a survey of 31,000 Employers:

More than 1 in 5 employers said they found information on social networking sites about prospective employees

Top areas of concern:

• information about alcohol or drug use
• inappropriate photos of information
• poor communication skills
• bad mouthing former employers

Careful what you put on your facebook site!

Technology and Art

Is this Art?? This was created using a web based graphics editor ( http://fotoflexer.com/) by Vinay in 78T. He used the digital photo below as a base. Is this artistic? creative? or sneaky!? There are lots of ways of creatively altering digital photos. The darkroom of the past is What do you think Eve?

More for Smartboards

Great to see some of the maths basic facts games being used on smartboards around the place. I used the jetski race one with my maths class ( http://arcademicskillbuilders.com/games/jetski/jetski.html) -an excellent way to improve basic facts speed - Set up a hosted game and as well as competing against the computer, you could end up competing against some whizz kid from USA? China?

Try your smartboard with some of the activities below:

Geosense – pinpoint cities of the world. This is a challenging activity - good for able students

And from the same maker – a vocabulary game – try it in year 7 and 8 with able spellers. http://www.wordslide.net/

Or a simpler vocab game from Roy the Zebra:


Do you think you know the countries of the Middle East?? Try the map game from Rethinking Schools – fantastic for the Smartboard! It's harder than you would think.


Articles worth reading:

When Mum or Dad Asks To Be a Facebook 'Friend' Social networking and parents! A Washington Post article.

And the video selection for this week!
Some Brazilian Football Skills:

And the famous Bush Blair Duet:

ICT Learning Challenges #3 - Digital Photos

Using your Smartboard.

This teacher has used the record feature of the smartboard so that her children can create small videos of maths strategies - then posted them to Youtube. Could be a powerful tool for creating learning animations...... (If you can't see the embedded video, click here.)

What is this? (answer below)

Digital Photos.

Extract from the Infinite Thinking Machine Blog:
http://www.infinitethinking.org/2007/05/youve-got-to-see-it-to-learn-it.html

Marzano's (2001) strategies for increasing student achievement are important in Visalia (and in many other districts), so we discussed ways digital cameras (and Picasa) could be used to support several of these research-based strategies, including the following:

• Ask students to compare or classify images.
  
• Ask students to delete, edit, or re-order images to facilitate analysis of the information at a deep level.
  
• Create a slide show to recognize student effort, achievement, and mastery.
  
• Create a slide show to illustrate time-sequence, or cause-effect patterns.
  
• Use images to document individual and group accountability - or to facilitate group reflection.
  
• Use images to support “corrective” feedback. (The instant nature of digital
  images – and means of sharing digital images – can facilitate timely
  feedback.)
  
• Use images taken with your digital camera as cues and advance
  organizers.

In preparation for the workshop I also combed the web for inspirational ideas using digital cameras and Picasa in the classroom. I offered the participants a list of a dozen ideas:

1. Slideshows for Back to School Night or Open House
   
   
2. Slideshows of Performances, Celebrations, Assemblies, or Field Trips
   
   
3. Photo Yearbooks (For a school, a class, or a club!)
   
   
4. Photo Journalism, Documentaries, or Dramatizations
   
   
5. Time Lapsed Photography (Especially in science!)
   
   
6. Class Books (Think big books!)
   
   
7. Story Books (“Digital Story Telling”)
   
   
8. How-To Guides (Address non-fiction standards!)
   
   
9. Exercises in Classifying, Categorizing, or Compare and Contrast.
   
   
10. Photos as Anticipatory Sets, Writing Prompts, or Review
    
    
11. Document Learning (Great for parent conferences!)
    
    
12. Photo Portfolios (Can be used for student presentations, too!)
    

Other ideas for using digital photos in the classroom:

http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/digitalmedia.htm

100 ways to use digital cameras in the classroom (Scholastic)

10 Tips for Taking great photos

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And, sadly, for the conservation club:

10 animals that won't exist in 10 years

Answer:

ICT and Challenges #2

We can all take digital photos but everyone can benefit from editing photos before using them. Computers come with simple tools for photo editing, but Web 2.0 has meant you can now edit your photos online for free.


In the sites below you can resize, remove redeye, change the colour and add a huge number of other creative effects. Sometimes it's appropriate to edit them for effect. The photo at the top of the page has been cropped, recoloured and darkened to produce the effects shown. However, even if you only use the rotate, cropping and brighten tool, you'll end up with much better quality photos.


If you take digital photos and don't use an editor, you're only doing half the job.

Digital Photo editing:
http://pixenate.com/
http://pixer.us/
http://www.picnik.com/

How could you make digital photo editing a challenge for your learners? Powerpoint, Photostory 3 and Moviemaker are all tools which can be used for creating a photo story.

Photo stories are really powerful means of persuasion and Moviemaker and Photostory will let you add text, commentary, background music to your digital photos and produce the end result as a video. Have a look at the examples embedded in the 7N Blog and Performing Arts Blog


More on Searching

One of the major issues I have is kids searching for information using a search engine like Google and very general keywords - needle in a haystack stuff - 50 million hits - might as well drop them off outside the National Library on a Saturday evening for all the quality information they will find....

A solution: As well as teaching them to be discriminating and clever searchers, try this: A Google tool which will enable you as the teacher to select which websites Google searches. Got that?
Tell it which websites you want it to search! Easy to set up and place in your Class blog. Remember your class blog doesn't just have to be used for communicating with parents. Use it as a classroom tool as well.

Why wouldn't you do it????

Here's an example: I have put the panel below onto our Climate Change page and also onto the Wellesley Search Page. It will only search the websites on that page. I can continue to add or remove websites from the search engine as I need to. Is this useful? I'd call it essential!

Try it:


Create your own custom search engine here: http://www.google.com/coop/