And here I am again...re-entering the blogosphere. I may bounce on impact with the atmosphere, so bear with me folks.
I was working with a teacher on her action research. She is looking at blogs and digital imagery with her junior syndicate. The issue she had was that she found it hard to keep her blog up to date, and said she would struggle to make a weekly post. I found this hard to swallow until I reflected that I have not made any posts this year! Oh the pot calling the kettle black...
So here I am grabbing a spare moment to share my week with you. I thought this would be a good way to share what I have been up to and hopefully you'll find something interesting in amongst it all.
Monday:
Audacity with year 3 students at St Mary's Kaikorai. Lovely bunch, full of enthusiasm! We decided that since this was a one off lesson we would do something that they could use in the classroom and carry on with themselves. We chose to make readers for the year one kids in the class next door. So they practiced their best speaking voices, learned how to record, cut, generate silence and export the finished product as an mp3.
Tuesday: In the morning, comic life with year 4 kids at Wakari school, then working with my
robocup team in the afternoon. They are a very keen, bright group and I hope we are on to a winner with our theme for this year's competition!
Wednesday: Spent some time at St Peter Chanel school, talking with their ICT lead teacher about action research, and audacity as an assessment tool. Great session and she was really enthused and ready to get stuck in to it! After lunch I was at Calton Hill school helping with their
school website. They are using the Edublogs platform to create and manage their site (thanks to Greg at
Outram School for his inspiration for this!), and are finding it really easy.
Thursday: Musselburgh school, talking Garageband with the music teacher. She had not had a chance to play with this tool and wanted to see how she could use it as part of her programme. Then talking blogging with the ICT Lead teacher. She is using Edublogs again for her classroom blog, and really enjoying it. She has a strong environmental focus on the blog (Musselburgh is an enviroschool), and the enviroschools facilitator just happened to pop in for a visit while we were chatting. We got to talking about my '
If I could change the world' project that I started in 2007. Lately we have got quite a few more members from around the world, and I was saying that we needed more NZ classes to join up. Hint hint....
The afternon was lost to a massive migraine....not pretty so I won't talk about it!
Friday: Had a super session with Opoho School teachers in the morning. They had taken a teacher only day to explore their english curriculum and I talked to them about ICT and literacy. I shared Suzie Vesper's
slideshare presentation (Thanks Suzie!) and they scribbled down ideas frantically all through the morning. We looked at a few things in depth such as
Voicethread and Youtube. Many of them were completely unaware of the usefulness of youtube channels despite being regular youtube users. Just goes to show that there are hidden depths to just about everything!
It's milestone time and all my spare moments have been used to oversee the creation of this document for our cluster. We use Google Docs to collaborate and it works really well (despite a few queries and worries over deleting other people stuff!).
I had an interesting conversation with Jill Hammonds, our National Facilitator about milestone reporting, and showing change in schools. I now have a rubric made up that I put at the top of the milestone to help guide schools in their reporting.
As I was driving to school this morning, I was thinking about change in schools and how it was like algae. Yes, algae.
Algae sits in spots around a body of water, and it is not until their is a change to the system that growth occurs (usually a rise in temperature). If you get the exact right change occurring then you experience an algae bloom...and the whole bay/stream/whatever gets covered in algae.
My point is that change usually happens in pockets in schools. There are teachers who pioneer change and run with it, teachers who come aboard slowly and those that struggle with ICT. This sometimes means it is hard for schools to report global change within their schools in milestones, and this leads to shallow reporting.
It is not until something happens to globally shift the mindset of teachers that an ICT algae bloom occurs, and an ICT contract does not guarantee change, just a hand in adjusting the environment to encourage change.
My question of the week is...what would trigger an ICT algae bloom in your school? Or have you had one and how did it occur?
