28.8.12

28/8/12
We, in Room 4, have been using Google Apps for Education for about a month now. It has been hard work to get it up and running. Thanks to Hapara, it is manageable. To begin with, the students in Room 4 were introduced to Drive and Docs and the documents which I loaded into their folders in Drive and Docs - a page of links, such as Basic Facts links they could click on both in class and at home to practise their Basic Facts , a page on which they could practise their spelling homework, and a piece of writing they could show their parents at home. With these documents, they also learned about their user name and password to get into their webpage and about the importance of signing out.
Next, I introduced them to creating their own document and sharing this with others in the class. The children took this on-board big time - it just goes to show how important sharing their learning is in motivating children - it gives them a purpose for creating. The children created maths problems for each other to solve, based around the current learning in our maths programme.
When Margaret Mahi died, we created powerpoints. The students had immediate access to the very good Christchurch Libraries website, which had a very good easy-to-read section on her life and her writing, with photos. Unfortunately, at that stage, I couldn't get the Google powerpoint to work, so they created their powerpoints on Powerpoint in Microsoft Office, and we learnt to upload it onto their sites, and convert it from a read-only, to a Google presentation which could be edited on-line.
During the Olympics, the students had access to up-to-date information which they could use to research aspects of the Olympic Games. Having 26 students and only 8 computers took a bit of organising - Teams of 3 were set up, each team having a student who is very able, a student is is moderately able and a student who needs a lot of help. As a team, the students work well together at accessing and reading information for their learning.
One downside is that only 8 students can research at a time; it takes quite a bit of organisation to maximise the use of the computers, as the children are in different groups according to the subject we are doing at the time eg when the class are in reading groups, one group can be researching while the other groups can be doing different reading work. That's good, but then we go onto Maths and the children are in different groups, so some children who have already been researching on-line may find themselves back on-line with their maths group working on a maths activity, then at writing time, the writing group they are in may be doing an on-line activity; on the other hand, other children may find themselves in groups that do not have computer time that day. Once the students have a computer each, this problem will not occur, as each child will be able to use the computer when it fits in with their learning, rather than when a computer is free to use.
We tried to create a graph on a Google document, using a table. We were not able to colour a column - the whole table coloured, so we made a graph using a table in Microsoft Office Word; however, when we uploaded it, the labels jumped around out of position. We will learn how to use a spreadsheet to make a graph during the Paralympics when we graph the results of the countries participating.
Two things I want to do next. Show the students' daily programme on their web pages. This will be possible when the children have a computer each - they can go into their webpage each morning and see their individual learning plan for the day, instead of having to wait for the teacher to get to their turn - less down-time. The other thing is to get a school front page like we had with spikeatschool. On this page, we could access classroom pages where examples of children's learning could be displayed and shared with others.