Immersion Week

Our big theme this term is 'Dream It, Think It, Do It!' so KW and I designed a week of immersion which allowed our students to be involved in a range of ideas and topics to allow us to negotiate the learning path with our students.  In our school we work in pods - this year my pod of 4 classroom consists of 2 Year 2 classes, 1 Year 1 class and my own year 5/6 class.  KW and I planned a range of learning opportunities and also within our immersion week we held 4 sessions where each teacher from our pod took a different immersion session where we split our students up within the 4 groups.  Within this pod time we saw students take on game making, drama, modifying sports and hat creation challenges that saw them working within different aspects of creativity.

For the rest of the week KW and I planned immersion learning opportunities for our Year 2 and Year 5/6 students to be working alongside each other.  Each activity was carefully planned to allow students to work within 6 main dispositions to develop their understanding of 'Dream It, Think It, Do It!'  We identified 'flexibility, risk taking, creativity, thoughtfulness, thinking and challenge' as our key dispositions and these became our focus of conversations and reflections with the students throughout the week.

Our first challenge for the week was simple in spirit but provided a wealth of information for us, as teachers.  We collected as many boxes and bits that we could find.  Large, medium, small and more... we had them all!  From this we started with very little instructions... choose some boxes - create something!  This was to give us a range of information about our students! We were expecting some far our creations, but found we had very 'normal' creations - a house, a bus, a rocket ship.  It allowed us to see that risk-taking for our students is a key disposition.  So after a lot of discussion, we decided to set up a 'ninja cave' the next morning.  This was a huge hit for the students the next morning when they came in to find it - it ended up morphing throughout the weekend to become more and more challenging each morning.  It was through our 'ninja cave' that we were able to have an amazing conversation around risk-taking and what that entails.

We discussed what makes risk-taking harder and examined elements such as 'when people are watching' the risk level can go up.  Our principal arrived on the tail end of this conversation and was then invited to take the risk.  The kids were more than stoked to see their principal go through the 'Ninja cave' and supported him with a huge cheer and pakipaki at the end.

The biggest learning curve for most students was the concept of 'guerrilla knitting' or yarn bombing.  The idea being a semi-permanent form of street art that changes the street side from the drab into the colourful.  It's the concept of creativity for giving and thoughtfulness that we were working with through this learning experience.  So we headed out to our school fence with balls of wool and got to work to create our rather plain looking school fence into a work of art.  The students worked in pairs - 1 Year 5 or 6 student with 1 Year 2 student and began with small hearts.  However, students soon wanted to try different patterns and designs and got more enthusiastic as they saw the fence take shape.  We ended up with some diamonds, larger hearts, S and L shapes.  Unfortunately time and weather was a factor for us and we have both spoken about heading out with our classes to work on these again.  The concept of their own creativity for giving was one that was talked about over and over again during the week.

The coolest element of this was the reaction they saw from their peers, teachers and families.  On Friday we arrived back to class to an awesome letter.  This letter now has pride of place in both our classrooms on our door - so everyone entering can read it!

These are just a selection of the learning experiences we developed as part of our immersion week with our students.  We also designed playgrounds, made marble runs and more.  It allowed the students a wide range of experiences and allowed us to see where our students interests and passions lay for our next steps of the negotiated learning path.  I really enjoyed collaborating and planning with KW and it allowed us to each draw on our own experiences and strengths.  I learnt a lot from working more closely with her and it was great being able to sit down at the end of each day and reflect on what we saw for each of our kids.

At the end of the week we used the Kath Murdoch 'Learning Wheel' as a reflection tool for the week to help us decide where our next steps were and the guerilla knitting was a firm favourite.  From our Learning Wheel reflections and conversations my class have chosen to go down the path of investigating 'how my creativity can benefit others'.  I'm really looking forward to seeing where we go with this!

RSS Feed on iPads

Over the last week I've been trialling a number of RSS apps for the iPad. My main aim with these was to load all the school blogs into a RSS reader so the kids could easily navigate, read and comment on the blogs from the iPads.

During a search of many different RSS reader apps I came across Pulse. The first time I downloaded Pulse (back when we first got the ipads) I couldn't get it to do what I wanted and so off the iPad it came! In the search for a reader this week I came across it again and decided to give it another go. With a bit more playing and time I got to edit the parts I needed and it works perfectly!

The layout is simple to use and is easily edited with 5 headings that you can add your blogs to.
Each heading can be edited to allow you to customise your RSS feed pages. At the moment our Pulse reader is set up with Junior, Middle, Senior, Other and Cool Blogs as page headings.

The thing that I loved the most about this is that it didn't need a google account or any other login for it to work. Just choose your heading, type in the website - pulse would search for it and then you would select the feed you wanted and it was added to your page... simple!

Another bonus is that it's very kid friendly as it shows thumbnails of images in blog posts along with text which is a major advantage compared to some of the more text based rss readers I found.

So now on each iPad we will be able to have a simple and effective way of accessing our school blogs as well as some great blogs for the kids to read and comment on.

Blogger in Draft: Template Designer

Blogger in Draft is a space where you can try out the new features of blogger before they are added to Blogger. It's a space where blogger can test and trial features with audience feedback and to work out any bugs there might be.

One feature that has been quite lacking in Blogger is the template section. Whenever you create a new blog the first thing a lot of people ask is "can I change this background thing!" So off you go to btemplate etc and find new templates.

But Blogger in Draft has just released a new blogger template designer, where you have the ability to easily design your own blogger template to the specifications that you want. It's quite simple to use and the navigation is really clear and easy to follow.


You have the ability to change nearly all of the bits and pieces in your template right through to text colour and background images. I like the ability to choose how many columns and gadget bars you want - often you find a great template but it's not got the gadget space you need or it's got too many! One thing I couldn't find was where I could change my post text colour... will have to keep tinkering.

My favourite thing about the template designer though is the ability to change the width of the post boxes and the gadbet bar. You can slide along and choose whether you want a wider or narrower box to post all your work into.


It's also good to see a variety of background images that are available for people to use. Blogger in Draft says that there are 15 new templates as part of this - which there are. But also remember that there are 4 actual templates and then a few versions of each one that make up the 15 new templates. It would also be really nice to see a more photography based template available as part of this. As a keen photographer there is a lack of fantastic photography based templates available freely - if this was a part of the template designer I would be a very happy blogger!

So, head to Blogger in Draft and have a go yourself - I just used one of my trial blogs that I try stuff out on, to have a go and play around. See for yourself what you think and let me know.

PicAp Example

PicApp - Images For Your Blog

Through the Google blog I came across the PicApp website. PicApp allows you to find thousands of images that you can easily add to your blog. The images are up to date and a good way to find images for current events. This could be a great site for students to find images that they can use when discussing current events.


Once you search you are given large thumbnails of the images on a single page. Once you click on the images a pop up window shows you a larger version with all the information, description, embed codes.
If you are a Wordpress user it gives you the direct code for your blog also.

The website is simple and the layout is clear, so easy for students to navigate.

Blogger Templates

One of the best sites I've found so far for Blogger templates has been 'BTemplates'. They have a massive range of templates that cover a range of styles.

Their sidebar navigation makes it simple to navigate through all of their templates by searching through layouts such as 1 to 4 column layouts through to searching by styles and colours. There are over a thousand templates here, I'm not guaranteeing that you'll find 1 you love as I often find myself contemplating between 2 or more!

ULearn '09 Reflection...

ULearn is a fantastic conference to go to... 1750 delegates from all over NZ, with a growing contingent from overseas who both present and attend. A huge variety of workshops, spotlights and keynotes to satisfy nearly every e-learning enthusiast!! It's definetly one conference to plan for in your diary each year!

Once again it has been and gone for another year. As I said earlier, this year I didn't get to attend any breakouts unfortunately but went down to hang out at the bloggers cafe with Dragon09 (my very first blogger/twitter friend!!) and see some of the amazing twitter and blogging people I get to collaborate with, learn from and talk to on a daily basis. My friend from Christchurch who attended ULearn for the first time was so amazed by the friendly atmosphere that greeted her from the bloggers cafe. She was most amazed at the fact I had met all these bubbly people through twitter and blogging... I am extremely lucky for the people who I am surrounded by! I was stoked to have the chance to meet Lilylauren and Chris Betcher for the first time, who were over from Australia, but unfortunately missed Helen!

This year I presented 2 sessions - I will post the presentations up in seperate posts. After a long haul of putting my presentations together and touching them up - I was stoked to present them in breakouts 6 and 7 to 2 groups of keen and interested teachers. A big thanks to those teachers in the graveyard Breakout 7 shift who participated in the session with enthusiasm. I was even more excited on reading the feedback forms and getting an overwhelming positive response to my sessions. I liked that fact that many of them thought that the workshops and content were "realistic" and "engaging" among many other adjectives within the written comments! The number scale is great, but the written feedback, whether postive or negative is worthwhile as I learn much more from this! It does make the hard work worth it, to know that your audience is leaving enthused, keen and with some new ideas! It was interesting to see how many people talked about the fact I seemed so passionate about what I was talking about - this I was very happy with!

One thing I was extremely careful with was trying to work closely to what I had placed as my abstract for the workshops. When I sent in my proposals these were to be 2 new workshops that I hadn't presented on, but had a HUGE passion and interest in. So I made sure that I worked closely to what I had written. Many people have previously complained of attending workshops that didn't match their abstracts - this is a huge disappointment for these people.

I think I am becoming more confident and relaxed with my presenting and my presentation style. I enjoy working with the keen groups of teachers who have chosen to attend the sessions. It was good to see also, that I sparked some teachers into sharing ideas and tools that they have used in the classroom and were willing to share these via my presentation wiki page with others from the session - great collaboration!! I think that the more I present and work in front of adults the more fluid I will become in the way I present and interact with my audience. I know this time around, I felt I was a lot more relaxed than I have been in other years. It's really not that long ago the idea of talking in front of a group of adults was an absolute no go for me!! But that being said, I look forward to having the chance to share with others in the future!

Image of the ULearn09 stands used under CC: coreednz

Interface Awards

This year's Interface awards finalists have been announced and it's a toughy!

Elm Park has done well in the two years the competition has been run. Last year Raenette was a finalist in the teacher section and this year we have Veronica who has been chosen as a finalist in the class blog section. Veronica's class - The Brainy Bunch are Year 1 students!! They create some fantastic pieces of work and prove that Juniors can do anything!!

Up against her are some big contenders such as Allanah K from Moturoa with their fabulous blog filled with lots of goodies. Please head along and vote for these 2 amazing blogs from 2 classes who have brilliant teachers.

So please head here and vote for these 2 amazing teachers!

Blogging... Basics & Beyond

In the holidays we had our eastnet Cluster Conference where teachers from across our cluster presented on a range of e-learning based topics. We also had the wonderful Rachel Boyd and Suzie Vesper as keynote speakers. The focus of our conference was on being Confident and Connected.

I presented one workshop about Blogging titled Blogging: Basic and Beyond. My focus for this 45 minute session was on the purpose and pedagogy of blogging as many people are developing blogs but are unsure of the "why". During creating this presentation I had some great support from my PLN who provided keywords and ideas. A big thanks in particular to pam_thompson, Keamac and dorothyjburt

The presentation is below:

Blogging: Basics & Beyond

View more presentations from hey.milly.