Recent update
- Lead Teacher Day
- Te Reo Maori Week and Technology
- Presenting at Eastnet Cluster Expo 2009
- Lead Teacher Day
- Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create and Assess
- Exciting Learning Centres
- MeMe – 7 things about me
- I love Garageband
- Things for the reliever’s kit
- Resizing Embedded Glogster Pages
Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create and Assess
February 25th, 2009 by mrstetupu
http://handouts.wesfryer.com/powerfulblending
It’s hard to teach outside of our own learning. We can have a much more accute sense of our students voices when they are sharing online. It’s empowering to allow students to express themselves not just in front of the class, but also online.
www.chatzy.com (a site for creating chat rooms so students can share their voice)
There is a fear that when we allow our students to chat online they are prone to “predators”. In actual fact there are choices that are made which lead to the that point. In fact the same students that are at risk of these predators online are the same students that would be at risk face to face.
http://tinyurl.com (a site for making urls smaller)
Using Chatzy means that you can save and keep a record of all the conversations that take place. Then you can get more insight into what your students are really wanting to know about and what kinds of things they are thinking about.
We need to stop blaming the tool for what is done with it. You wouldn’t ban a kid from using a pencil if they did something inappropriate with it. It’s the same with a computer. You shouldn’t “ban” a student from using a computer because they do something inappropriate with it. We need to teach our students about being responsible citizens online.
Hyperlinked writing is a powerful thing. We have the opportunity to link to all sorts of media files and help to clarify meaning.
“The internet is a global stage”
We have all these different tools and choices that can cause us to become so overwhelmed, so where do we begin??? We need to recognise that people are in different places and at different stages in technology.
Social bookmarking is a very important ingredient to learning. Rather than saving websites in “my favourites” or “bookmarks” on your machine you can save it online using social bookmarking sites such as “del.icio.us” or http://diigo.com. (Notes on setting up delicious can be found at http://rachelboyd.wikispaces.com/delicious). It allows you to link to the ideas of others.
Posted in Uncategorized | tagged blendingI.T, learning@school, web2.0, wesfryer | | 0 Comments
Exciting Learning Centres
February 25th, 2009 by mrstetupu
Okay so I’m at “Learning at Schools” (an eLearning conference down in Rotorua) and my brain is swimming with lingering comments from different speakers. I’ve just finished a hands on session called “Exciting Learning Centres” which was really cool. It was supposed to be for PC users, but Nigel was very kind and let me bring my mac in…
Basically you create it using powerpoint or keynote. You can link the pages to each other and put in hyperlinks that lead to webpages. It’s cool because you can have it sitting on your classroom computers, or on your class knowledge net page, or school server. Then when students are sent to the computers as part of their Maths or Reading rotation they can just navigate through the powerpoint/keynote and click on the appropriate icon to take them directly to the website they are working on. No writing websites on the board or saving things on the “favourites” toolbar.
I’ve just finished making one about Ancient Egypt to use with my class for inquiry. It means I know they aren’t wasting time sifting through a tonne of sites looking for appropriate information. They can just sift through pre-approved wesites that I know will be able to answer their questions 
Posted in Uncategorized | tagged keynote, learning@school, learningcentres | | 1 Comments
MeMe – 7 things about me
February 24th, 2009 by mrstetupu
Okay so I have been tagged by Mandy (aka HeyMilly) and DigitalLearning to take on the challenge of writing 7 great things about myself MeMe – seven!!! Okay, so here goes…
1. I am an active Christian
I became a Christian when I was 15 years old and have been actively involved in church since. I currently attend a church called “His International Mission” in Glen Innes where my husband and I lead the music team. Things kind of spiraled out of control a bit for me when I became a teenager and finding faith in God helped me overcome some huge hurdles in my life and built character within me that made me who I am today – by no means perfect…. just a product of God’s grace
2. I am a self-proclaimed “cougar”
Yip – I am married to a man younger than me. I mean I’m no Demi Moore going for someone half my age, but my husband is a beautiful Cook Island man who is three years my junior. We met about 8 years ago at my church and were friends for a couple of years before we started dating. We have been married for 3 and a half years now and I still wake up every day and think “wow”. Strangely enough everyone always thinks he’s the older one out of the two of us… I justify it by saying it’s because I look younger…. which leads me to number 3…
3. I am a “coastie”
I was born in Gisborne and brought up in Tolaga Bay. A beautiful beach-side community about 45 mins north of Gisborne on the East Coast of the North Island. If you have never been there you need to go and visit! The beaches are amazing, the scenery is gorgeous and the people are wonderful. In fact if you do go down that way stop in at Uawa Foodmarket and ask for Aunty Dolly and tell her I said Hi! I loved growing up in this majority Maori community. I was exposed to Te Reo Maori from a young age and learnt a lot about Tikanga Maori. I lived on a farm and wore gumboots to school in the winter and bare feet to school in the summer. I got to climb trees, throw cow poo at my brothers and sisters, swim every day in the summer time and roam about the country-side. I was also flown out by helicopter during Cyclone Bola in 1988 and remember seeing families sitting on the roofs of their houses waiting to be rescued. Click on the picture below to take you to a website with stunning photos like this one called “davidwallphoto.com”.
4. I love music
I only wish I could be better at it! I have been singing since the day I was old enough to talk (and trust me I started talking young). I used to go to “Country and Western” club every Wednesday night with my older sister and a friend of my mum’s. We would always ask the band to sing songs that totally weren’t country, but being the great guys that they were they would use that Coastie talent to play along anyway. I still sing today and lead our church band with my husband. I love it! Unfortunately I’m not as talented when it comes to playing instruments. Twinkle twinkle little star and chopsticks are my piano hits and I can play drums on “World Tour Guitar Hero”…. if it’s set to beginner and I have a couple of go’s at the song. I play guitar for my kids at school and that’s about the extent of it!!!
5. I come from a big family
I have two brothers and two sisters. My mum comes from a family of 8 children and my dad comes from a family of 13 children (some are half brothers and sisters). During family Christmas’s on my mums side of the family all 8 families would rock up to my grandparent’s modest 3 bedroom home. Oh did I mention they had 23 grandchildren at the time too…. do the math!!! It was so much fun though – the rule was first in first served when it came to sleeping arrangements, and at night the hallway and lounge would be lined with kids. I remember one time my grandad found his side of the bed occupied and had the sleep in the last available spot – underneath the pool table!!! Apparently the bath tub had already been claimed!! As for my two brothers and sisters… well once we all had a friend or two over there was never a shortage of people to play with or things to do.
6. I am a doting aunty
Sorry to copy one of your ideas Mandy, but it’s gotta be said… I just adore my nephew Connor! He is the first and only grandchild on my side of the family and in the words of my sister “he’s perfect”. 9.8lbs at birth he is now 15 weeks old and a few hundred grams off being as heavy as a sack of potatoes! I mean… take a look at him…. do I even need to say any more???
7. I bake
Growing up I was the kid you hated to have in the kitchen. In fact I managed to set the oven on fire a couple of times trying to cook things. Thankfully that phase of my life wore off and now I’m actually pretty good at baking. The thing people seem to enjoy the most is my carrot cake – it seems pretty average to me, but everyone always seems to go on about how good it is. I love making birthday cakes particularly for kids birthday parties. I have made castles, motorbikes, fork hoists, cars and even Bob the Builder. Just please don’t ask me to make wedding cakes. I’ve made a few, but my husband will tell you that the stress that goes along with it is almost unbearable!
Phew!!! All done. Seven things about me… so now it’s my turn to tag people….
Linda
Catherine
Posted in Uncategorized | tagged MeMe | | 2 Comments
I love Garageband
February 24th, 2009 by mrstetupu
Okay, so we are getting ready for an up-coming Powhiri at our school and I have started teaching a few waiata to my kids. I didn’t have any of the songs on cd…. who needs a cd when you have a beat up old guitar with dents and scratches and you know how to play a “D”, “G”, “A” and “C”. Unfortunately not everyone in my school had access to a dented up guitar and I was heading off to Learning at Schools for 3 days…. enter Garageband.
My kids sat on the carpet in front of my laptop and I played guitar and we sang…..
And this is what we got
We transferred it onto our school server and within half an hour our entire school could use something that perviously only the students in my class had access to.
I love Garageband!
Posted in Uncategorized | | | 1 Comments
Things for the reliever’s kit
February 20th, 2009 by mrstetupu
Okay, so school is back and the list of things to get done is mounting up faster than you can say “results need to be entered by the end of week 5″. One of the things on “the list” for me has been getting my reliever’s kit organised. Fortunately sourcing Maths activities is easy thanks to a website I found:
http://www.homeschoolmath.net/worksheets/
It’s great because you just click on the Maths strand you want to create a worksheet for and then you can choose the number of problems to have on each page as well as the complexity.
It means one more thing on the list I can tick off!!!
Posted in Uncategorized | | | 0 Comments
