GAFE Summit 2012

During the holidays I had the opportunity to attend the Google Education Summit at Albany High School.  It was the first GAFE held in New Zealand and it was an awesome day of sharing and learning.  Albany High is an impressive school - that boasts amazing open learning spaces.

First session up I attended a session with Lenva Shearing looking at Teacher Dashboard created by Hapara.  It's an add on for Google Apps that allows you to manage your Google Apps environment easily.  Through the system it allows you to see work that students have completed and when.  It also allows for ease of accessing documents as the teacher rather than students having to share items or move things around.  There are some great features that help with the use of google docs such as the roll over feature - where you roll your mouse over an item to see a quick thumbnail of the document.  Simple by effective tools that help streamline the management of multiple documents in the classroom.
As part of the process Hapara help with set up - organising folders and more how you want them ready for your roll out.  The process allows for this to happen for one class or a whole school.  To find out more check out their website here.

Session 2 was the presentation of Helen King, an amazing teacher from Pt England School who uses movie making among other tools as strong hooks for her learners.  You can see examples of students work through their class blog PESKings.  It was awesome to see her passion for teaching and her students as she talked about her students and what they did in their class on a daily basis.  I was interested in hearing about the philosophy and ideas around their CyberSmart programme and the different elements that are contained inside this.  I always love the chance to explore other teachers classrooms and hear or talk to them about the things happening inside them.  It was an awesome opportunity to hear about daily life in Helen's class.

In session 3 we geared up with Google to look at training opportunities that Google presents to teachers and educators around the world.  We had a chance to talk to Wendy Gorton about resources, the Google Teacher Academy and more.  A highlight was finding out more about the Google Apps Training Centre where you can go through a series of online modules to become a Google whizz - would definitely help develop key knowledge around Google Apps and it's potential.  Another highlight was the Google Search Curriculum which provides opportunities for educators and students to learn more tips and tricks to become better researchers on the web.

The final session of the day was with Chris Bell looking at 25+ ways to use Google for blended and online learning.  A couple of my takeaways from this session was the snapshot button in Google Docs which allows you to insert images straight from your webcam.  Also the youtube editor which allows you to be able to record straight to youtube and then use the online editor to edit the video to be finished all online.  Also the youtube Schools site that is underway. A great tool that I'm keen have a go with the students - easily created, remixed and published online for sharing.

The day was also filled with lots of other great moments.  Presentations, Google Smackdown and the conversations with the amazing people that were at the day.  The general consensus was that it should definitely return on a yearly basis.

QR Codes

I've been talking a lot to one of our fantastic school librarians about utilising QR Codes in the school library.  We decided that my class would have a go at creating QR Code reviews for our junior students.  As each class has 2 iPad 2's in their class, we thought that they could bring them to the library and use them to listen to reviews and recommendations about books.

After a bit of research and the amazing twitterverse I came across a site called QR Voice - which allows you to create voice QR Codes from text.  The only drawback is that it only allows 100 characters! Eek! But this worked out to be quite a fun element to creating our QR Code recommendations.

The following is the step through of the session for developing these in your class.

Developing Voice QR Codes using QRVoice.net

Prior to the creating the QR Codes:

Session 1:
Spend some time together talking about QR Codes - have the students seen them before? Most of my students had seen them out and about but only 1-2 had knowledge of what they were for.  We talked about where we had seen them and then I showed the kids an example of what we were going to do.  This had them hooked in as they loved the QR Code scanning process.

Session 2:
The students self selected a text from our school library that they thought would be a great read for a Year 1/2 student.  This was done a week before the session.  This gave them time to read it in class and to a year 2/3 buddy throughout the week.  It helped them to be more familiar with the text - which is important.

Creating the QR Codes:

We came together around the data projector and went over what we know about QR Codes.  The kids were buddied up in pairs, selected by the teacher for a range of abilities.  Each part was broken up to allow the students to work through each element.  As groups of kids finished I ran quick workshops sharing the next stage.  This worked really well as it allowed us a group of finishers who became experts helping out other students etc.

Step 1 - Creating the recommendation/review

To create the review we encouraged kids to come up with 2-3 keywords from the story that explains the story and would make people want to read that story.  We talked a bit about who our audience was - 5/6 year olds and what would interest them.  We discussed genres and how that would help someone decide if it was a good book for them or not.  The key here is to also remember that QRVoice.net will only allow 100 characters to be used for the QR Code it creates.

An example is the book Boy by Roald Dahl
(This was the class example I used with my year 5/6 students.  My students all used picture books aimed at year 1 and 2 students)

Keywords were:
Funny - funny stories
Tricks - Roald Dahl played a lot of tricks
Autobiography - Roald Dahl as a kid

The next step was to then use these keywords to create 2 sentences that landed under 100 characters.  They would form at least 2 sentences that used the keywords and recommended the book.

Example:

This autobiography is a great read for those that like funny stories and great tricks.

A great read for those people who like funny books, tricks, practical jokes and more in this great read.

An autobiography that shares Roald Dahls funny childhood. Tricks, practical jokes and more.  It's a must read!

From here they then used the 100 characters template to see if it would fit in 100 characters or less.

Step 2: Creating the QR Code

I created a folder on our server that contained everything the students needed for this session.  This included:

- A html link to the QRVoice.net website
(To create this just click on the website address and drag it down to the desktop - it will give you an icon you can quickly click on to link to that website.)
- The 100 hundred characters template
- 100 hundred characters example
- QR Code Template
- Folder for finished QR Codes to go into

You could easily do all of this through google docs but for this session we used Pages as the placeholder for the QR codes.  It was easier to collate them all again at the end and print them.

Students went to QR Voice and typed in their recommendation.

When they were complete they clicked on the blue button to the side and their QR Code was created.

The students then took a screen shot of the QR Code ready for the next step.

The QR Code template was then opened up in Pages.  Students deleted the example QR Code and dropped their new QR Code in it's place.  They then updated the title of the book and reviewer.  Once this was complete the students used 'File' and 'Save As' to create their own saved QR Code into the finished folder.

To help step through this process I included the instructions again on the bottom of the QR Code template - this allowed the students another place to refer to when creating their codes.

An example of the template is below:

The kids then stuck them to the front of their books.  We have been using the class iPod and student devices to access the codes using QR Reader or i-nigma.  The kids have loved sharing their learning with each other and seeing the end product.

QRVoice is a great wee tool - the voice is a bit robotic but it's a bit of fun.  Our next step is to continue using them with our fotobabble book sells and book reviews on our class blogs and websites to share more reviews with our school.  I'm really keen to keep utilising voice and video with the QR Codes to allow access for a range of students across the school.

If you have any other questions please leave a comment and I will get back to you.

You are also able to download the 100 characters template here.

Web Wonders - uLearn

Web Wonders uLearn

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Goodbye Delicious - Hello Symbaloo!

With the change over of delicious and all the problems that have gone alongside it, it has seen me seek out new ways to share and display learning links for my students.  With the change over the kids were quick to point out that tags were missing and it was hard to find links that they knew where to find previously.

So this sent me on hours (yes, hours) long search to find something that would allow me to create several pages but also allow the students to have visuals of the links they are wanting to use.  I really wanted to switch to a more visual form of bookmarking rather than word tags after myself enjoying Pinterest - a visual bookmarking tool due to the ease of use and visual way of organising links.

I had a play around with the delicious stacks - which at first seemed very promising.  Apart from when I kept getting 500 gateway errors from them.  When stacks did work it would only allow me to stack together my first page of links but not access the other pages.  Fiddly and unfun. So, I gave up.  I moved on to trialling websites like favoritus, portaportal, sitemarks and more - all visual bookmarking sites that looked extremely good.  All of them had the same problem for me.  The lack in ability to be able to create a standalone web page that had seperate pages for my links. Painful.

Then I remembered a site that I had previously played with and put into my 'could be helpful' pile of links. Symbaloo.  It's a simple idea - you create webmixes or pages of links.  Each link is a little coloured icon that you can arrange across your webmix.  The webmix can be shared via email, kept private, shared with the world or embedded into webpages.  So this is the angle I have taken.  I am creating seperate pages for each subject and colour coding links with visuals also.  The students used it in the last 2 days of term and the votes were pretty clear - all but 4 students loved the new Symbaloo system because of the colours, images and how easy it was to find links.  The 4 students who didn't like it said that it was because they were used to delicious.  Though 1 student did say he might like Symbaloo more once 'he got used to it' - awesome!

The image from above is from my Daily 5 wiki for the students.  This is one area I have created Symbaloo link pages and it has now become the portal that they will use for links.  They can either go straight to the page or jump to it via the class blog.  You can view the website here.

The colour coding system is quite handy also.  I have a student who is new to my class from overseas and has minimal english.  The links in orange are specifically set up for her - the students were great at showing her that they were for her and the second time on the computer she seemed to understand that this was a great area for her to start.

The other thing about Symbaloo that was a bonus is that the interface works on iPads and iPod touches.  One of my students became a fantastic tester and tried it out.  Unfortunately only 2 of the above links would run on an iPod - this has meant that I've created other Symbaloo's that will contain mobile device friendly links!

The biggest drawback is the time that this takes compared to setting up links in delicious - with the delicious bookmarking paglets it is extremely easy to link and tag websites.  While Symbaloo isn't as easy to tag websites at the moment the visual elements and arrangements for the students makes it far outweigh the time it takes me to add links in!

The Awesome Highlighter

A funky wee tool that I've come across lately is 'The Awesome Highlighter'. It is a simple to use, great site to use during Inquiry/Reading etc where you want the kids to be able to highlight information on a web page. It allows you to do this all online via the 1 site!

Head to 'The Awesome Highlighter' website and all you have to do is enter the name of the page you are looking to be able to highlight online.Once you've clicked the 'Highlight Page' button you'll be taken to your webpage with a handy navigation bar up the top. This bar allows you to change to 1 of 4 colours when highlighting and leave notes.


Once you've finished you click 'Done' and it will give you a page with the key ideas highlighted. It also gives you a link back to the page so you can locate where the highlighted text came from.


It provides the opportunity for the students to be able to email straight to you or copy to place on a class blog etc for sharing. There are multiple ways that the tool could be used in class and is a great springboard for work with kids on newspaper articles etc to share key ideas/vocab and so much more.

Dropmocks

Courosa passed on this handy wee tool that you can use to create galleries of images by dragging and dropping into your browser. Dropmocks is extremely simple to use and allows you to create a url of your images to share with others.

You can sign in using your google account and keep your dropmocks together or edit them later on down the path.

Navigation of the screen is extremely simple and would be great for a quick way for students to put images into a slideshow and link to their blog post. Dropmocks gives you the ability to title your page of images and if the images are labelled before dropping it gives a list of the images that will allow the user to flick straight to them. This could also be a great tool to use for Visual Arts when introducing an artist model, for sharing examples of photography, artworks and so much more.

Check out the Dropmocks from the image above. Pretty simple and easy to use!

Eastnest Cluster Conference: Web Wonders

Web wonders

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Workshop 1 from the Eastnet Cluster Conference.

Jog The Web

At the ERA3 Conference Jackie shared the website Jog The Web.

It's quite a handy wee tool where you can gather up a range of websites with directives, guiding questions or cues for the students to think about as they view each website. The layout of the page is simple and makes it very easy for students to navigate.

At the top, left of the page in the dark grey box is the navigation box. To the right are the steps which is where you are able to place questions and directives for the people navigating the websites. Down the left hand blue side it lists all the website that are part of the 'jog'.

Here is an example pnelso created about Web 2.0 Tools For Kids.

Holiday Video's & Telescopic Text

Usual holiday stories.

Or maybe not.

After the holidays the kids are always keen to share their holiday happenings, but for a lot of them not so keen to do this in writing. For my writers at the moment, choosing one idea and working with it is a hard task... distractions galore and we end up sharing a million things in one story. So, these holidays we aimed to create a holiday video about one event that happened in the holiday.

We looked carefully at success criteria which included surface and deep features as well as context to get started. I pulled out 2 areas in each part that as a class we needed to concentrate on. For this piece of writing we talked a lot about the order of the event and describing the event using interesting words. These are two keys areas as writers we need to work on.

In class we call boring words - 'wicked words'. The students are working towards creating a working wall in the classroom where replacement words can be found to help them during writing. The students can go up to the wall and find for example, words to replace over-used words for example replacing 'said' with words like shouted, growled, grumbled and more. This wall is being built up as the year goes on and students are learning to identify words that they use a lot in their writing - these then become class 'wicked words'.

The best tool that I have used to date in writing this year has been telescopic text. It's an extremely simple site that allows you to expand your ideas from something simple into something elaborate. Using the telescopic text writing site students are able to change and expand their ideas by editing words to create a story which grows in concepts and length. Check out some examples that they created here.

Unfortunately, you cannot save these without taking a screen video via a separate program e.g. Jing, so we used a screen shot to record the first and last piece of telescopic text. I can't wait until the registration opens on the site. It was amazing to see the changes and editing to their writing that the students made along the way, so it would be good to be registered so you can save these and review this later.

The Sessions...

To start with we began with teacher modelling. I created my own holiday story that began quite simply with 'I went to the beach'. I then showed them how I could add descriptive words and how I had to think carefully about the order of events to expand my story into something amazing. We discussed the images that came to mind in the students because of the words I, the author, chose to use. The kids were buzzing!

Beginning writing...


(The grey text is where you click and the changes you made unfold - to be viewed)



Final piece of writing...










But of course, like all things... it's much more fun when you try for yourself. So off the students went in pairs to create their own telescopic text example using the write programme. They chose a simple sentence to explain their holiday - 'I went to the pools' etc They worked through adding different elements to their text so that it became more interesting and descriptive, moving text around and adding text in, so the order was correct. It was amazing to see the kids working with their buddies to edit and replace words along the way. The best part for them was folding the text back to their original, simple sentences and then watching click, by click, the changes they had made to create an amazing piece of text.

After several mistakes were made, we realised that we couldn't delete them. The really interesting thing for me was that after this was spoken about, the kids instantly began to check and re-check their words before they clicked to add the new ideas to their telescopic text example. They set their sights high and aimed for them, without anything needing to be said by me... brilliant stuff.

The kids spent 2 sessions working through their telescopic text examples before they went back to their original piece of writing to edit independently and then with a buddy. It was great to see a lot of changes made in their original piece due to the work we had created with telescopic text.

Today was the final stage - recording their video using photo booth to be uploaded to the blog. The learning objective of these lessons was not the video, but rather the way they were communicating and sequencing their written ideas for an audience. The video was a hook for getting the students to write and share their writing to a wider audience than myself.

It was really great to see the kids buzzing about their holiday video's rather than moaning about writing it!

Using Wordle

Today I used Wordle with my students during Oral Language in the morning. The students have just come back from a long weekend - 4 days, the lucky things!

Wordle is great for collating a group of words or piece of writing etc to see the frequency of different words. When the wordle is published the more frequent words are the biggest words.

During Oral Language I asked them to share, with a partner, two things that they did while on their long weekend. At the next instruction I asked them to boil their entire 4 days down to 2 words.

1 word to explain something that they did.
1 word to explain somewhere they went.

We then snaked through the classroom with each student sharing their two words from their weekend with the class as we typed them in. We created our wordle and then chose colours for it as a class and presented it on our class blog.

Click here to see our Wacky Weekend Wordle!