14.9.12
Point England School was amazing.
Room 13, a Year 5 class, all had their own netbook. They started on the mat with the teacher revising recount writing. the children had a choice of three topics - the rugby day that some of them had had on the previous Friday, the netball prizegiving some of them had gone to in the weekend or a speaker who had come to school. @ groups were sent to talk about their writing, then write. The other group remained with the teacher and the teacher went over features of good paragraph writing. After 20 minutes, they were all writing recounts. They were able to write straight onto a page in Drive, edit and proofread it, then post it with a picture onto their blog. Most of them got started straight away, but a couple were not able to connect immediately, so they created a document in Office Word which they would upload, or copy and paste to their Drive at a later time. When they had completed their writing, they moved to the class computers which were Apple (better movie maker programme) to work on their movies. One girl had set up a digital video camera and the children were coming to her so that she could record their statements about their learning.
During their writing, the teacher showed me their blogs and showed me how to set them up. Blogs don't belong to the student; they belong to the teacher. blog owners need to be 13 years old or older. The blog is known by the students' name, and students become the authors of the blog. The class also can have a blog to record what the class has been working on.
Since then, R5 and R4 students have been set up blogs and are beginning to post writing on them and a Room 4 class blog has been started..
The teacher sets the students' learning intentions, success criteria and tasks using Google Sites. In Google Sites, each subject is contained in labelled folders. The classroom timetable is shown there, the timetable for groups in each subject is included and the weekly planning in each subject. It does not need to be printed and is available at home and at school because it is all stored in the clouds.
In talking to one of the teachers about Chrome Books versus Netbooks, in my opinion, it is better to have Netbooks because on Netbooks one also has access to Office, in case the internet connection is slow or down. Chrome Books are purely Browsers, which means that Office cannot be loaded onto it.
In the late morning, I spent time in a Year 7/8 Maths class. The teacher taught groups while the rest of the class worked independently on the day's set tasks. Some were working on the Internet programme, Reading Eggs, where children sit a placement test, then work at the level which has been set for them, on Comprehension and Vocab activities, some worked on Maths Basic Facts in xtramaths.com where the children's progress is instantly recorded and available for teachers to see, and some worked on a very good Maths programme, Maths Whizz. The teacher showed me how he could monitor their progress as all their data is collated instantly and progress is recorded automatically. This programme runs alongside the teacher's maths programme. Maths Whizz and Reading Eggs cost the students; Xtra Maths is free.
Since then, I have signed up for a month's trial with reading Eggs. Our system is too slow for it at this stage. One open slows down all the others. Two open makes the system even slower, etc. Xtra Maths does not slow the system and the children in R4 are using it daily to speed up their Basic Facts.
Later, in the afternoon, we spoke to Dorothy, Manaikalani's Learning Facilitator, who is based at Point England school. She talked to us about making our own Home Page and cleared up a few of our questions, including how to use Google Forms. Her advice was to get a site manager to set up a page for us - either Spike at School, or a Cambridge Company at a charge of $500 per year. She thought $500 was expensive.
We came back with our heads full of new learning and introduced the rest of the teachers to setting up class blogs on Tuesday afternoon, and setting up Comprehension or Maths worksheets.
The students at Point England School begin to use ICT in their learning from Year 1. In Year 1 and 2, they learn to use Paint, a drawing tool, and they learn to save their work. Interesting that they learn to save, in that on Google Drive, work is automatically saved. it is something that the user does not have to worry about.