Rotorua Lakes Cluster's blogs
Yesterday Deborah Epp, one of the Project Directors for our cluster and I attended the Regional ICTPD meeting organised by Diane Mills at Fraser High School in Hamilton. It was great to see Phil Buchanan and Amy from Rangitahi College in our cluster.
Chrissie Butler talked about the importance of having access to tools that put special education students on a level playing field with their peers. She showed some inspirational videos and explained some of the Ministry’s umbrella terms - here are my notes.
Janelle Riki shared her experiences of being a Maori student, another statistic who did not do well at school because she was not expected to do well. Janelle is now completing her Masters. She talked about the deficit theorising model we often use with students rather than the potential model.
Dave Winter talked about Hedon and the Connected Cluster, a Hamilton area initiative to ensure a continued high level of professional development in eLearning and the ability to access things like ultrafast broadband using the economies of scale.
Warren Hall explained the Network 4 Learning in a very clear manner. I also got some pointers on the wireless network we should be installing - which was reassuring!
To finish the day, we shared our experiences of being in and ICTPD cluster with those schools in or contemplating the Blended Elearning contract. Notes
It was a great day, with thoughtful, clear speakers. They challenged our thinking for how we use elearning in the future to support student learning. And it was great to meet names from the VLN and twitter in person!
On Monday 3 September, teachers from our Rotorua Lakes Cluster schools, met for a joint staff meeting after school at Rotorua Lakes High School.
As our focus this year is to see the integration of e_technologies in our classrooms, we thought it was about time we got our teachers to share what they were using to reinforce and motivate learning with their students.
Speakers and Applications
Dr Angela Sharples from RLHS shared the site, www.brainpop.com. Brainpop is an animated
site which covers much of the curriculum at a range of levels. It includes videos, puzzles, quizzes and facilitated question answering service. There is a cost for a school although some content is free.
About: http://www.brainpop.com/about/about/
Example: How cameras work - http://www.brainpop.com/technology/scienceandindustry/cameras/
Free stuff:
Comes as a phone/ipad app.
Jenny Hartigan from RLHS shared Quizlet.
Quizlet is a site that allows you to enter your own content and then create games, quizzes and flash cards to help learn it.
About: http://quizlet.com/features/
Example: http://quizlet.com/13648715/chemical-symbols-flash-cards/
Comes as a phone/ipad app
Rose Henry from Whangamarino Primary, shared the site http://pizap.com/, a photo editing site. She demonstrated how she could add a character from one photo, e.g. Jonah Lomu., and add hime to another photo, such as a school sports game. She used these new mashed images created by students, to stimulate creative writing.
Help: http://pizap.com/help.php
Miriata Oranje from Whangamarino Primary introduced
Wordle and Tagxedo, two sites that “turn words - famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes - into visually stunning word clouds.”
Miriata uses these word clouds to stimulate writing at all levels, right from new entrants. They can provide a vocabulary pool that can support the writer.
Annemarie Hyde talked about the use of Blogger at Mokoia Intermediate. The school is concentrating on writing this year, and is supporting teachers to use class blogs. Several teachers have blogging as their teacher inquiry. Annemarie showcased the blog from Puarenga 4 - http://mokoiaint-mrsbocock.blogspot.co.nz/
- to show how students were excited by seeing readers leave comments and appear on their cluster maps. Besides the class page, each student has their own page to post writing and video.
Annemarie then talked about Twitter as a professional learning tool.
She uses it to connect to other teachers in New Zealand and around the world. It can be used like texting, for finding out news and for professional learning anywhere and anytime.
Shaun English from RLHS shared a tool for downloading Youtube videos so that they are available when teachers need them.
“I recommend using Firefox to download and save video. Fast video download for Firefox can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-video-download-with-searc/. Open this up in Firefox and it should install for you by clicking on the ‘+add to Firefox’.
My other choice is http://www.flashvideodownloader.org/. There is an addin for Firefox, Opera and IE. Again, I only use the Firefox one. This one downloads any flash files including videos and games.
Internet explorer has its own problems with video download. After trying it this is not bad: www.ant.com/video-downloader/internet-explorer but it does have a toolbar that gets added on.
Google Chrome has made downloading Youtube videos difficult - they actually block video downloaders addins from downloading from Youtube. Why wouldn't they? They do own youtube.
Note: If you are installing programmes or addons on to your computer please be conscious of what you are installing. With fast video downloader for Firefox addon, (the first link above) it is added to Firefox as soon as you click the addon button. Then you have to restart Firefox.
On restarting Firefox FVD opens a page and asks you to install another programme. You do not need to do this.”
Ann Eastcott showed us two applications.
The first is http://www.spellingcity.com/. It allows you toadd your own vocabulary lists then applies them to a range of activities to assist learning and make it more fun. Printable worksheets are included.
Ann ended the session with http://www.diigo.com/, a site for bookmarking and curating material from the web using tags, highlighting and stickies. It’s one of the tools worth looking at rather than using bookmarks on your email or browser.
Loving this! Sore eyes from staring at laptop the only down side.
Ann has a cold so we were able to collaborate but I could sit out of breathing reach - lol!
WONDERFUL to the see Bruce, our lead principaL, get on to the doc to fill in the budgeting information.
You'll see that tonight I've uploaded the template as a Google Doc as per trevor's advice. I've sent links to principals and lead teachers and the idea is that we see what each other writes.
Trevor too, is able to see our progress and give us advice as we work.
I've made pages for each of the goals as per the variation which went in with Milestone 4. You'll see that I've added subpages with evidence which matches the success criteria for each goal.
make sure you ead Goal 5. It outlines the main focus for the next two milestones. Our main focus this time is cybersafety and digital citizenship.
Meetings Term 2 Week 6
- 3 May 10am - Action Planning
- 29 May 2012 – maybe a cluster trip to Kutarere School – Whakatane-Opotiki - using
- Storybird - http://www.elearning.tki.org.nz/Teaching/Tools/Storybird
Other digital story writing tools:
- http://www.elearning.tki.org.nz/Teaching/Tools/Blogs
- http://web.me.com/khoneycuttessdack/kevinhoneycutt.org/Tools.html
- http://myths.e2bn.org/story_creator/
Put our milestone 5 template on a Google doc for collaboration - Annemarie to do this asap.
/pg/pages/view/554626/mokoia-intermediate-our-assembly-on-facebook
I've uploaded our assembly slides to our Goal 1 page. Check it out!
Finally completed the draft and I've posted it off to Anne S - phew! Thanks to Ann E who allowed us to use her journey as the example in the reflective summary. This is now posted as a resource.
I am saving my own school's resources to my school's sub-group; that is, to Mokoia Intermediate. There will be links in the Milestone to these resources. I will either have links or resources on the Rotorua Lakes Cluster wiki too - http://rotorua-lakes-cluster.wikispaces.com/ - as we've had that on the go before the VLN became the big cheese!
