Today Marie’s class took their novel blog posts and organised them in Inspiration.  Only a few of the students completed this task but Marie was most impressed with the work.  The students planned their essay without even being aware of it.  I am meeting with English staff on Wednesday to plan how we might use blogs in 2007

I passed on an interesting link to Bec last week (http://www.mcvideogame.com/) that I thought she might use with her Year 10 S&E class. Bec has taken the idea and developed it. She is using the game as a stimulus to explore the various aspects of business. Students initially play the game on the IWB to discover and solve the problems as a group. From there they continue to play the game to investigate the intricacies of the business ecosystem. They will be expressing their discoveries in the form of a a poster presentation.

The IWB session went well. Some students (especially boys) were very into using the IWB. Most students engaged in trying to determine the best system to create profit for the business.  I have some concerns that some students may have felt bad because they didn’t get a chance.  I may set up the eBeam in the computer lab so some students can experiment that way as well as using the lab computers.

Jeff was away today.   John and Chris covered his class.  I had the opportunity to show them blogging in
the classroom and let them read the student feedback sheets.  We also discussed the amount of
commenting that is appropriate.  John raised the point that its very important to comment on the low
achieving students.

I was amazed at how much work some of the students had done.  Some had done little to none in the first two sessions but had put in some significant effort the last two sessions.

Marie’s class is steadily working.  Some students have completed all of the of the tasks. Marie brought up some good points about student responses being personal.
We discussed that next year student blog user names might be chosen by the students and
kept confidential from other students unless  the students themselves reveal their user name.

Bec has expressed some interest in using IWB and laptops with business simulation game – http://www.mcvideogame.com/ to engage her Year 10s in her current economics program. We are meeting next week Tuesday Block 4.

Jason and I discussed use of the Caravan animation materials. He is keen to use the storyboards. I printed them out two to a page today and we discussed prining them on A3 paper to save paper. Jason will have students work in pairs to storyboard the Caravan animation. Upon completion of the storyboarding we are planning on having the students record voices or voice over into the animation using iMovie. I found a script that will convert text to mp3 for hearing impaired student in the class. – http://www.manythings.org/mac/

I am continuing to work with English staff and the year 10s. Jeff has had the students comment on each other’s blogs which is great. Jeff has found it difficult to find time to comment on student blogs. We discussed at length problems that could arise from only commenting on a few blogs. I am concerned about the parent that presents the question of why one student gets help but not the other. Jeff also expressed concern. Perhaps blogs are not a good idea for such large classes. We are going to investigate the topic further next week.

Marie’s class is going great. They have finished the character descriptions and are moving on to point of view. We have discussed using inspiration for the students to outline an essay. Marie really liked what she saw in Inspiration. The plan is Friday finish point of view and setting. Next week to move on to Inspiration planning of the essay. Marie’s goal is to write one comment per student. She is also concerned about the time element with comments.

VYEW

I have been asked to give a little presentation on blogging.  I am trying out a new piece of collaborative software called VYEW.  It describes itself as Vyew 2.0: Always-On Collaboration and Free Web Conferencing.  I learned about it via the Teach42 blog by Steve Dembo.

Steve was one of the presenters from K-12 Online Conference.  I found that this conference had some great presentations and some good ideas.  All the material is still out there.  Most of the presentations were done done via little web movies that you could download and watch when every you had time.

Blog Aggregators

Lets start today by setting up a blog aggregator.  You can use it to hold the blogs you are interested in.  That way you don’t need to go to each blog.  You just go to your aggregator.  You can use Bloglines or NetVibes.  I am going to suggest NetVibes as it has lots of other fun things that you can do with it.

Let’s Get Started

After you set up your account, please join my Vyew Session at http://vyew.com/room/825593.

I used the IWB to help the Year 11 students revise.  I find it especially useful for stepping through the algorithm of a program.  I have one student at the board acting as the program counter/ instruction register and another acting as the ALU/ control unit (although I didn’t use these terms with them because they haven’t yet learned them- they will in 2007) .  The rest of the students tell the board writers what to do so everyone is involved in the revision.   It was interesting because the most twitchy student who generally
can’t concentrate while I am speaking was very involved in the revision if he was the one writing at the board.
Several students were very self concious at the IWB but most enjoyed having a try on it.

Jeff’s class came in on Friday.  We gave them minimal instructions on the Character Analysis.  That did not work too well.  I then went around to each student in the class and showed them how to copy and paste from the English Blog to theirs and update.  Students got stuck on what to write.  Perhaps there needed to be more discussion of what would go into a character description in the regular classroom before the blog.

Marie brought her class and for the first time.  I went through the rules and logging one.  Two students seemed to keep getting logged off Wordpress.  I later asked Kevin to delete their profile to see if that helps.  It was a lot of talk and demo from me (using the projector) which is always hard.  I was concerned because some students were off task.  However, later after talking to Marie she felt that the students were generally more productive and engaged. We have a follow up meeting tomorrow.

Nat’s class is done for the year so I am going to do a paper feedback sheet to determine the impact if any of the blogging.

Sarah and Olaf have both installed all of the IWB software, GridPic and Geogebra.   They have also connected to the IWB to fix the driver problem.  Ricada and Shawn have installed all software but have not yet connected to the board.

Next step – get a trial with IWB and Year 10 students.