Transcript for A Peek for A Week - Inside a Kiwi junior Classroom

K12 ONLINE 2009

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE

A PEEK FOR A WEEK

INSIDE A KIWI JUNIOR CLASSROOM

BY RACHEL BOYD

Hi there and welcome to my keynote presentation

for the week in the classroom strand

for the k12 online conference 2009.

My name is Rachel Boyd and this presentation

is titled a "Peek for a Week, Inside a Kiwi Junior Classroom."

I am from Nelson, New Zealand

I teach a year two class of six and seven year olds.

I am also the e-learning leader at my school

and run professional development for our staff.

In this presentation, we will take a look at the blend of

21st century learning in my class of six and seven year olds.

and get up in our very "20th Century" inspired classroom during a week.

I hope you enjoy sharing in my class's

learning and find the presentation interesting

NOW, LET'S TAKE A PEEK INSIDE ROOM 9...

NELSON, NEW ZEALAND

A PEEK FOR A WEEK IN ROOM 9

Hi there, welcome to room 9 it's of a peek of what we are learning

about this week, our classroom routines

Oral language and we are looking at

Listening and

Speaking

This week we are also during narrative writing.

As well as reading

Maths

Inquiry Learning

Music we are looking at

singing.

For physical education we are looking at

Fitness

To top it all off, some Visual Art.

I hope you enjoy our

A PEEK FOR A WEEK IN ROOM 9

Just so you know throughout this presentation should you see the term WALT

This simply stands for "We are learning to"

ONLINE ORGANIZATION

My classroom 9 has two major online features

and they are basically digital students in their classroom.

The page your are looking at here is our class blog.

Simply it's our learning journey

All sorts of information that we share for our conversation

with the world, things we are learning about we invite obviously

a lot of feedback and have conversations in that area.

Our second online presence is our classroom wiki

which we call our classroom learning hub.

basically it's got every single link that my students

need to use throughout the day.

It's got lots of different buttons used for different purposes

and everything my students need to do

is only one click away.

Perfect when you've got six year olds aren't typing.

So, just start using our learning hub

as a collection of links that we can do

what we need to do on the internet quickly.

Another way we organize our digital content

for use every day in the classroom

Is through this page here.

This is actually our interactive whiteboard home page.

Similar concept to before. It's got links

everything that my class needs to use throughout the day.

Some of them are links to interactive whiteboard files,

and the recent links out to the internet.

We are at the stage now where the students are able to

very comfortably use the board and

even run the morning program.

CLASSROOM ROUTINES

Each student in the classroom has

responsibilities or classroom jobs they need to do every week.

Two of these jobs involve our class blog.

The first one is to check, the head counter

to see how many people have been visiting our class blog.

SHARE OUR CLASS BLOG FOR A REAL LIFE AUDIENCE

So, before school and also at the end of the day.

They need to log on to our learning hub and go and see what

the head counter shows and make this number on a poster.

and we also started to use the interactive whiteboard to display that as well.

Earlier this year another one of my students had invented a new classroom job.

And that is called the head counter calculation, believe it or not.

Quite simply we wanted to work out how many

people had visited overnight to our class blog

and also over the weekend we hadn't been at school.

So, that's another job we do every morning.

One of our other classroom routines involves

this www.wallwisher.com page.

Before students have any ideas for posts

and things we should be putting on our class blog. They can log on

through the wiki hub post a sticky note up

there and we check it when we are ready to put new content in.

to our class blog. That's a responsibility they do before school.

ORAL LANGUAGE

SPEAKING

LISTENING

We start each day in our classroom with some sort of Oral Language activity

be it listening or speaking.

Mondays and Wednesdays this is class news so students are sharing

about personal experience.

What's become quite popular now, which is fantastic for junior students

If the students have been doing something really really fun

in the weekend they email in their photographs of what they've been doing.

And we have those displayed over the interactive whiteboard

while they are speaking.

Each day we do an oral language listening task

involving the website tvnz news.

Basically it's New Zealand news online and

they have video excerpts of

just world wide news as well as New Zealand only news.

Each day we watch a video clip of a news article.

Before we watch we ask some questions about what we would like to be finding out.

Then we listen for during the article for information

about who, where, what, why, etc.

After wards, we answer our questions

or perhaps we go back through the video and pause it and review it.

and often we've got more questions. So, then we go

online and google the answer.

And see what more we can find about the at the moment.

WRITING

NARRATIVE WRITING

The past two weeks we've been learning to write narrative stories

they would had lot of independent experience

on how to structure these and what we need to include

to have a really good narrative story

This week we are actually working online with another class in New Zealand.

In Aukland up in the North island.

And we are using google docs to do our collaboration together.

As we only have three computers,

We've broken the class into 12 of two, three studnents

and three groups will write online daily with

with this other class in Auckland. We've done this for two weeks

now and it has been really fantastic.

Always frustrating at the start for the students because the story is taking shape

after wards we have been able to learn a lot from each other.

We also have the learning and teaching in the success criteria

up against what they are writing up. so they can always check their own task.

OUR PAPER KEYBOARDS

Our class also has a set of paper keyboards

Which we use when they are on the mat and I am doing modeling of the writing process.

And we just integrated them to our writing sessions

and we practice things like capital letters and post ups and things and

and even thought the students have gone back to books to work with pen and paper

it's still very useful experience and helps them to

gain a little more familiarity with the keyboard and the computer.

As well as our classroom blog we've also have a writing spot blog

This is a special place we want our audience

to notice our successes and not our mistakes.

room9writing2009.blogspot.com

It's a place where students can independently write without having

spelling or their grammar or any of their work corrected by the teacher.

The follow a visual help sheet like this one you see in here.

To make sure they get their post online themselves independently.

Writing blogspot blogs proved very popular with our students

I think they enjoyed the independence. But, also as the rest of the class was writing

in their books they get to write on the computer on the blog as well.

I still conference with them just like normal.

So, coming around and having their story and they still use

their word sources to spell right in our case to help them with their spelling.

HANDWRITING

LETTER FORMATION

Twice a week in the classroom we learn correct numeral and letter formation.

I model it on the interactive whiteboard

and the student come up individually and model it and we

just celebrate each others successes there.

For my more fluent hand writers

once a week they get to go online and practice their typing

instead of their handwriting.

They're the students that very very capable

they can form their letters and the numbers very very smoothly and correctly

and their favorite site we visit is dance mat typing. (www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing)

FITNESS

Throughout the day we use a variety of

youtube clips and videos

for our daily fitness.

These are simply to get us to join in to get us active

to get our brains moving again and get our bodies moving.

BE PHYSICALLY ACTIVE AND FIT

READING

We have five reading groups in the classroom.

Each day we follow the reading task board. So, each group knows

what the are up to.

While I am taking instructional guided reading groups,

The other students are involved in non computer based

and computer based activities. Some of these include

the listening post, alphabet and board games,

practicing their spelling and using spelling tiles or moving mini whiteboards.

And whole host of other things.

We use our three classroom computers extensively at reading time

Scheduling groups to have time play a variety of online games

to practice and reinforce their reading skills.

These games are bookmarked by delicious bookmarking

by our page which is easily accessible by clicking the link through

from our classroom learning hub wiki.

WWW.DELICIOUS.COM/ROOM9NELSONCENTRAL

All groups are with me during guided and the rest of the class doing either a reading activity

or playing a reading game online

We also have pairs of students using the interactive whiteboard

to play a reading game

These games are especially for use in the day of the week

and are reading relate to a class class need

or something we need to practice and reinforce in reading.

After morning tea each day the students have

have a browsing independent reading time when most read print based books

During this time each day, three groups of two students

get to do their reading online.

They can choose from a wide range of class blogs from

around New Zealand and the world to read

and to leave comments on. We also have visual help sheet

will assist them to leave comments, create links,

with other schools and communicate around the world.

Another popular online literacy based site that my class uses daily

is www.spellingcity.com

Spelling city allows to practice their own set of spelling words

that I have created online and I've found an engaging way.

CORRECTLY SPELL ESSENTIAL BASIC WORDS

MATHS

Just like in reading, we also follow a task board in maths

Students are grouped according to the addition and subtraction

strategy level they use.

CORRECTLY SOLVE ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION MATHS PROBLEM

While I take a group for lesson the other students either complete and independent maths task or

or play board or online maths games.

Once again we have a button on our learning hub wiki

links through to suitable maths games I've signed them out to literacy count

One of the more popular maths sites that my class

use is www.tutpup.com Everyone is signed up with their own user name

and password. As a teacher I can keep track of

their scores and they get to practice the addition

subtraction, multiplication, and division in an online environment.

(AND DID I MENTION IT'S COMPLETELY FREE!)

competing with students all over the world.

INQUIRY LEARNING

CLEAN STREAMS

Our inquiry topic has focused on list of clean streams.

Students received the task of an animated movie

in xtranormal to communicate the five features of healthy streams.

xtranormal is fantastic

for my students because if you can type you can make a movie.

We also used the magic can button to make movie making a bit simpler.

The results are fantastic

You can view them on our class blog and our writing blog

This week is also an exciting time for six of my

year two students because they are running

the weekly tech session or the "techi briki" we have with the teachers.

to teach them new technical skills, and new

ICT e-learning skills to use in their classroom.

So, this week's been quite exciting for those six students

as they ran the session on xtranormal.

and showed the teachers and treated them and taught

them to use their xtranormal and create their own movies.

NIBBLES EMAIL AND STORY

AFTER LUNCH EACH DAY

After lunch each day we have our nibbles time

This is a period of time when the students can finish any left over lunch.

they've got. And during this time we also read our emails.

WWW.GMAIL.COM

Our emails come mainly from comments that are from

our classroom and writing blog. What happens is, once

they are approved and moderated they get redirected to to our class email.

MAKE LINKS AND CONNECTIONS TO OTHER CLASSES.

We have email monitors and these two

students are responsible all week for

checking the email with the class and reading

the comments and sharing them with the class.

At this stage we also visit other schools

if they've left us a comment and visit their blog and leave them a comment as well.

We check all comments we receive from New Zealand and

plot them on our map, showing their name and location of the visitor.

LOCATE WHERE IN THE WORLD OUR ONLINE VISITORS

It's particularly exciting when we receive international comments

especially when the visitors leave their geographical location.

At this stage we then go on what we call the google air plane.

and go visit their home town and see where they are located in the world.

EARTH.GOOGLE.COM

in relation to us.

VISUAL ARTS

WITH A DIGITAL TWIST

This week in visual arts we are creating digi-art linked to our inquiry learning

CREATE A DIGITALLY ENHANCED ARTWORK

PLANNING OUR DIGI ART

TAKING THE DIGITAL PHOTOS

SKETCHING OUR ARTWORK FOREGROUNGS

CUTTING OUT THE DIGITAL PHOTOS

DOUBLE CHECKING EVERYTHING FITS

DYING THE BACKGROUND

THE COMPLETED DIGI ART!

THANKS FOR WATCHING

I hope you've enjoyed your "peek for a week" inside our classroom.

Hopefully, you've seen a slice of what is achievable

even with limited classroom computers

and a class of six year olds.

I firmly believe that technology

adds greatly to good classroom teaching

enriching, adding vibrancy

to the learning of our students.

It has been my absolute honor and pleasure

presenting in the k12 online conference

Ka kite ano

from New Zealand

Transcription: Jose Rodriguez