If you want to know come ask my class because they know!

My daughter Emma has visited my class to show them how to do poi and they were excited to hear that she has now bought fire poi. Unfortunately they are not something she can bring to school and demonstrate for several reasons – one being her university schedule and the other being that the best effect is at night time. So how is it that my class knows all about them?

I took photos of her preparation of the poi and her in action (and some video). Then I opened up a mimio notebook and started to put together a picture story.

I put one photo per page and included one of the videos towards the end.

Then in the morning during literacy time I threw this up on the screen for the class to see. As we viewed each page the students talked about what the picture showed and I wrote the steps on the page.

Once we had gone through all the pages I went back to the equipment page and the students went off to right their own versions.

While I think that some of the students would have written quite an adequate report if they’d just heard about fire poi, it was obvious that being able to show the graphics in this format and being able to brainstorm class answers helped all the students to come up with their own versions. Most students added in information that we hadn’t explicitly talked about. One boy even added a touch of humour to his instructions – his last instruction said “when the poi have cooled down put them on the deck and give your arms a rest” a clear reflection on comments made while watching the video. Other students used words like ‘flammable’ and ‘fuel’ which clearly showed they’d grasped some important facts and figured out the technical words to use.

While I could have shown the photos using iPhoto and the video using VLC it was a lot easier to do it with them embedded into a single mimio notebook.

This year, for the first time, I have students clamoring to share their mihi with others. Sometimes the Te Reo we learn becomes a rote kind of thing, especially if we’re not visiting a marae any time soon. This means that learning their mihi becomes just another thing to do.

So why the difference this year?

I had spoken with my friend Myles @ Melville Intermediate, Hamilton via Twitter and arranged to skype with a class at his school to share our mihi. Another friend, Claire, from a school in Dunedin got in on the act too. (We skype with them this week.) Suddenly there was an authentic reason to learn their mihi.

We used our school’s learning journey as the basis of our mihi and did lots of practise. My Maori students also were able to find out which iwi they belonged to with one discovering that she was a descendant of Te Rauparaha and then discovering that she and another student shared a connection with the Tainui waka. That was very exciting especially as we live in the area that Te Rauparaha lived. (Our mihi relates to Kapiti Island which was Te Rauparaha’s tribal stronghold.)

As our skype appointment drew close I asked for volunteers to share their mihi with the Hamilton class. Nearly 1/2 the students wanted to share so I had to divide them into two groups one for sharing with each school. Our skype session was fantastic and all those who shared are very proud of themselves.

Luke sharing his mihi (in the corner) with Melville students watching

We finished with a waiata – Ka Mate – appropriately written by Te Rauparaha! I used my RearSight gadget to quickly change the webcam view from front to back so the whole class could be seen while they sang/danced the waiata.

you can just see the RearSight attached to the macbook lid

We hope to skype with St Clair’s School in Dunedin this week and all those who shared last week want to share again along with those scheduled to share.

One side effect that I’ve noticed is that the students pronunciation has improved rapidly over the last couple of weeks – knowing you have an audience that’s not just your class really raises the standard for students (and teachers).

By that I mean learn it so that it becomes instinctive not just regurgitated stuff.

The title of this post is how long we’ve been at school this year and it doesn’t seem like a very long time at all. Yet when I reflect on all the learning that has happened so far I’m amazed.

I know that before school started this year most of my students hadn’t used Web2.0 tools at all. Most had been on computers to play games, some had use word processing software, and less than a handful had used/visited a blog or a wiki let alone actively engaged in either of those.

Not all of what we do is Web2.0 though. It’s just that we use Web2.0 to enhance our learning – and one of the early things I talk about with any class is that the best way I can be a great teacher is to be a learner alongside them so we learn together.

I’m aware that NZ teaching is a little different to other education systems (including the fact that I do all the teaching – there are no specialist teachers at our school) so I thought I’d give you a little idea on some of what we’ve done in our first four weeks at school. Our classroom is a little unusual in that it used to be the library and is not a standard box shaped room – this lends a real atmosphere to our class that other teachers are envious of.

We have a deck and steps out from one set of doors and it’s a handy place to work on warm afternoons when there’s a cool breeze.

I have bean bags and a couch which students can use when they are working – if they’d prefer to lie on the floor to work they can do that too.

I also like to provide games for them to play during maths time or other times when they’ve completed their work and let’s not forget the joy of reading!

At the moment we don’t have a school library to use (the librarian is unofficially part of our class for this term) and so we are walking up to the public library every second Friday to get class books out.

Of course we’ve done maths and we’ve been looking at statistics – every one can now ask survey questions, collect data, create a graph of that data and talk about what their results mean.

And we’ve been doing some testing traditionally done at the start of the year.

We’ve even found time to have some fun and social times such as our Te Moana whanau assemblies and our Bike to School day.

But how about some of the techie stuff? The Web2.0 stuff? We have a number of computers in our classroom – 4 of them actually belong to the school library so will be removed at the end of this term but that still leaves 9 computers with a possible 2 more coming from a parent. We run some on XP; one iBook (mine); an old Acer fitted out with Ubuntu (my daughters old laptop); and an older HP that I reformatted with Ubuntu too. Only 2 students had used an OS other than XP before the start of school – now all of them can quite happily work on any of the computers. As I tell the parents all that really matters is the browser (Firefox) that they’re using and that’s consistent over all the OS we use.

The students have been using edublogs for their ePortfolios. Some have already memorised their (randomly generated) passwords. A couple of parents have already got into the act to comment on their child’s blog.

Several of the students recorded themselves sharing their mihi (part of a formal greeting in Maori where you introduce yourself) and embedded them in their blogs.

Some have videoed themselves reading their stories to add to their posts.

We’ve used Google Wave and DropBox and the classwiki which is used to direct their learning. Next week we’re skyping into two classrooms – one in Dunedin and one in Hamilton to share some of our mihi and the following week we’re going to use Google wave to write some collaborative stories with a class in Dunedin and a class in Nelson.

Every student in the class is using all of this technology. They may not all have it at home but they have very quickly grasped hold of this new “stuff” and are using it daily. Each week I have a new student email monitor who checks the class email account – our management is using email for school daily notices and all comments on our class blog are sent to the class email (which I monitor very carefully – these are only 8 & 9 year olds after all).

We even have used technology for our art work – I’m more of a music person rather than a visual art person and I’m rather proud of the fact that we’ve produced two major pieces of art already (that really is amazing for me!). Our first piece was around symmetry and created using the digital camera.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dragonsinger

The second was using photos to enhance their art work. Students first planned their picture; then a buddy took a photo of them in their designated pose; then they cut out their photos and sketched their work and then coloured in their background and stuck the photo onto it. Pretty nifty work!

So back to my original question – how long does it take to learn “stuff”. It seems to me that our young people who are not intrenched in negative ideas (you know the ones I mean – “but 5 year olds can’t do that!” type) and who are willing to have a go are able to learn fast – if they are given the opportunity to do so.

I think our school sign says it all – Raumati Beach School – where we learn, play and make friends. It’s a fantastic learning environment for anyone willing to have a go – children and adults – and I love working in an environment where discovery and curiosity is a valued part of the curriculum.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dragonsinger

… actually it was Friday – day #3 of the 2010 school year. According to my planner Friday is ePortfolio posting day – and yesterday was my students (8 & 9 year olds) first introduction to their Edublogs ePortfolios.

The first few went ok – they had cheat sheets to refer to if they forgot what to do and their login/password information was on a laminated card for them. I had 5 students working at a time on the computers. (Although I could have had 13 working at the same time I wanted a smaller number in case I had to problem solve.)

The problems started when the second person onto the computer went to log in – instead of arriving at their own dashboard they arrived at the previous person’s dashboard. I switched them to a different browser and that worked ok for the first person but the same problem occurred in the second browser.

Oh No!

Then one of my students published his post and got a pop-up message about it being spam.

More Oh NO!

I quickly wrote a message in the box on the page explaining that this was an 8 year old making his very first post, submitted it and went to my laptop.

Here’s where Twitter comes in. I knew that Sue Waters – Edublog guru and Aussie superhero was on Twitter – we’ve chatted on and off over the past few years. I sent two Tweets out to her explaining the problems.

Within 30 minutes she’d responded with a solution for the first and fixed the second problem and even sent a message to my students explaining antisplog in kidspeak to them.

Without the ready access to Twitter and people/experts this problem would have taken quite some time to fix. One of the good things with Twitter is that I can have DM (direct messages) sent to my cell phone so I had a sound alert that she’d responded to my call for help.

A huge thanks to Sue for her help.

As an aside – my tweeted messages and the responses weren’t private/hidden from my students – they saw me send the tweet and they saw the responses. It’s things like this that show them responsible use of Twitter.

Maths

Literacy

Addition

eLearning

So I was excited to discover a new site (via a post from someone in my Feedly feed – can’t remember who unfortunately) – PDFmyURL.com. Sometimes you just want to save the whole page!

I tested it out on this blog post from a friend of mine – Phone a friend. It saved into 4 pages – here’s a snapshot of the first page.

By dragging the bookmarklet from the home page to your toolbar you can then just click on it whenever you’re at a page you want to save as a PDF file.

NOTE: Tested only on a Mac and with Firefox – I have no idea how this works with a Windows machine or other browsers. What DOESN’T work is trying to save secure pages – for instance trying to save this page as I was editing it resulted in the Edublogs login page showing.

I’ve created 3 private waves between my class and me.
1. How to use Google wave
2. Questions for me
3. Photography Task

#1 is obvious – it’s a wave showing things like formatting bar and reply button etc. #2 is for asking me questions about school work – I’ve used Edmodo in the past and will continue to but this is a way of also introducing wave to parents. #3 is for the students to let me know when they’ve finished a photography task so I can mark/assess/comment on it.

Most of us learn best by doing – this is a simple way to use Google Wave and to get the students used to the format of it.

This is a photo of how I hold the two (note that I use two hands but my 2nd hand was taking this photo!):

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dragonsinger

This is a photo I snapped (and used as part of my 365 Photo Challenge):

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dragonsinger

And this is the video that I shot at the same time:

43 seconds into the video is when I took the photo above.