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
Lead Teacher Day
August 25th, 2009 by mrstetupu
So today has been action-packed and filled with useful bits of information.
We started off today looking at peer coaching which reminded me of the cool schools mediation programme. It’s a way of teachers working on improving their practice in a non-threatening way. Basically you choose someone you respect and trust to talk through areas you want to improve on personally. They come in and observe you teaching but don’t give judgements or advice – just the facts. It was actually quite tricky to not give advice…. until I read the help sheet Belinda had given us!
Next up was presentation zen. This session was quite cool and it would have been good to have had more time with this one. It was looking at powerful ways to give presentations. We really only took a look at the overall approach – not the specifics.
In the afternoon and after a yummy lunch (thanks mummy Karen) we had Fiona Grant come in and talk to us about digistore – it looks like there’s lots of upgrades coming up and at the moment it’s a bit tricky to navigate around. Oh I did fall across something cool though – free online Te Reo Maori course!!! Woo hoo!!!!
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Te Reo Maori Week and Technology
August 10th, 2009 by mrstetupu
As some of you would well know 2 weeks ago was Te Reo Maori week. To celebrate this my class put together a series of videos that were mini-lessons teaching basic Maori vocabulary. We set them up on the school server and each day every class played the same video at the same time and we learnt together. My students brainstormed the lessons, created follow-up worksheets and even created podcasts of some school journal stories to share with the rest of the school.
This was such a powerful exercise for my students. They were so proud of their efforts and enjoyed having control over the entire prcocess, from start to finish. Through the use of technology we were able to create a real community vibe within the school and even include our parents in the learning (we set the videos up in the library each morning so the wider school community could come and join in too).
A wiki has now been set up with all the materials we used during Te Reo Maori week so that what we have done can be shared with our much larger “global community”.
We also had an article published in the Howick and Pakuranga times talking about what we had done.
It’s been a crazy few weeks, but so worthwhile when I see the value it has had for my students.
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Presenting at Eastnet Cluster Expo 2009
August 3rd, 2009 by mrstetupu
Well what an experience! I ran my first real workshop during the holidays with an audience that chose to come and listen to me! I talked about glogster and animoto and how these online tools can be embeded into classroom practice. What’s great about these two sites is that they have special educational options now as well. If you want a classroom account for glogster you can go to glogster.com/edu. It will set you up with accounts for each child. They each have their own user name and password and can comment on each others work. As the teacher you have access to all of their accounts as soon as you log in, which is great. Animoto also has an educational package. If you fill in a simple bit of information they will email you back with an all-access pass which allows you to make full-length videos with you class for a year for free!
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