Partnerships in Learning

This year there are a number of kids interested in exploring Sustainability. It was a great co-incidence that this happened to be the theme for this year's Science Talent Search.

I immersed the children in texts and stories about sustainability. I got out batteries, wires and lightbulbs to explore circuits and asked the children if they knew other ways to make energy. Together we found texts about Solar power and wind power.

Children have designed and built models of Sustainable Cities using Minecraft and Eden. Now that they Olympics are on, some of them are designing Sustainable Stadiums using the same Apps. There have been lots of "WOW!" noises heard when the kids plug the iPads into the screen so we can get a tour.

There were a group of children hooked on the idea of Sustainable Housing. They have built models out of all sorts of things. One child decided to include a human powered pulley system for a lift in her house, another couple decided to have a go at making mudbricks, which they researched themselves and others built several models of houses out of different materials until they found one that worked.
This same group of children organised their own excursions to Reverse Garbage and a farm that somebody's relatives lived on. One girl built a model of her farm where she hooked up the drinking water for the animals' troughs to a huge water tank and used the manure for fertiliser on the garden. Another student wanted to make the idea of picking up rubbish fun and invented a bird rubbish collector.

These kids are only 8-10 years of age!

Not all of the children could finish their models, but they could all explain and justify the choices they have made so I know that they are very clear about what they have learned and in some cases, where they want to head next. They have collaborated and negotiated their way around acquiring materials with minimal cost. They have gone and accessed libraries, consulted experts, organised excursions, created, constructed and modified designs and interpreted information from websites. Along the way they have been able to use the language of Maths and Science to process what they have learned. They have found out about circuits and electrons. They are aware of why we need to look at our lifestyles and our homes. How rich is that?

We chose a few projects to enter in the Science Talent Search and some parents came up with the idea of looking for a category to enter the children's work in for the Whittlesea Show later on this year. One of the best pieces of feedback I got was from a parent who was telling us how they got out a torch one night to show how the eaves on a house work. They had a great Learning Conversation with their child about how the Sun is lower in the sky during Winter and higher in Summer. He was amazed at the understanding his child had of the world around them and their curiosity about it. "Projects make fantastic learning." Not only has it been great for the children's learning at school, it has been great for being able to build partnerships with parents as well.

The children are still interested in Sustainability. There is a boy who has his heart set on building a solar powered robot, some children who want to advise the principal on how we can design the next stage of the building program and a few more speculating about whether we should investigate getting solar panels on the roof. A groups of kids are keen to recycle our scrap paper by making new paper and addressing the issue of reducing waste.

This could be going for quite a while yet!

Some examples of the work the kids have done is seen here.

 

Who says kids can't organise their own learning?

I'd like to share a bit of a story with you from my Maths workshop yesterday morning...

I have a year 3/4 homegroup this year. We've spent a lot of time talking about making choices to further learning and consolidate skills. We have talked about working with strengths and suggested many ways to consolidate and practice number facts and skills over and over again. Sometimes it has become tiresome because it's felt like nothing is sinking in.

We were working with table facts and their relationship to division. I showed the kids who already know their number facts an App called Trichotomy on iPad, which goes through problem solving using greater than, less than and equal to. For the rest of the children I said I'd run a focus group for anyone who needed help and set up the expectation that by the end of the session - everybody would have worked with "flipping" at least 5 facts.

Here are some of the spontaneous things that happened. I didn't plan for them to happen, but they did;

- Two children who didn't want  < and > explained to them, figured out what these signs meant and how to apply them through playing with the iPad App using trial and error. "Don't worry - I figured it out through making some mistakes - I get it now, I am getting them right, see?"

- Two children disappeared, saying something about photocopiers and returned five minutes later with table fact worksheets they'd photocopied from a book brought in from home. They then 'roved' around the Village to see who else wanted a worksheet to use. (And they had a variety to choose from, though I have a feeling that they hadn't planned for things to turn out that way). Great use of intitiative and resources.

- Another child asked if he could help his friend who is struggling with learning his table facts to work on some strategies for learning 7 and 9 times tables. His 'student' then shared these strategies with the group at the end of the session. Fantastic collaboration.

- I worked with some children on the table facts of their choice, using concrete materials. These were all children who had identified that the concept of relating times tables and division was an area they wanted to work on during conferencing. By the time they got it, some of the other children had reached an impasse and were asking for help. "Don't worry, I'll teach them" they all said and one by one, they got up and left to tutor somebody else.

And guess what? I actually got to sit back for a moment, observe them all collaborate with each other! I actually had a moment to (wait for it...) BREATHE and take it all in. No arguments, no complaints, no need for redirecting kids back on task, just engagement and purposeful learning.

Wow! It's moments like these that make all of the modelling, purposeful conversations and strategic planning worth it.

Who still says kids can't organise their own learning? I say they can, but we need to model how to 'walk the talk' and give them opportunities to put it into practice. Even the kids we know will struggle with it.

Sharing Learning with parents online

This year our school has been looking at ways to share conferencing documentation and Learning Stories with our parents in a way that is sustainable, accessible, yet private and allows for interaction between parents, children and staff.

How can we do this in a 21st Century/Contemporary way??

BLOG IT!

We have created a private blog for each student using blogger. We have allowed students and other staff to be co-contributors and have made the http address 'unguessable' so people cannot access blogs that are not shared with them willy nilly.

It's been time consuming to create and set up the blogs, yet we hope that now that they are up and running, they will be easy to maintain. This has been a huge learning curve not only for the children, but for the staff and students.

We have also created a Google Site where students and parents can access planners, home learning and village bulletins so that they can stay informed anywhere, anytime.

It will be interesting to see what sort of feedback we get from our families and how to communicate with those families who cannot access the internet easily.

Fingers crossed this works!

Planning and Working as a Village

Since my last post on this topic we have changed our whole village planner to make it more user friendly. Using Google Presentations to plan was ok visually, but...
1. It was problematic when 2 people were editing a slide at the same time
2. You had to scroll through the whole presentation to get where you wanted
3. You couldn't edit it from iPad

So this term we are trialling using Google Spreadsheets to plan as a Village - why?
1. More than one person can be editing the same sheet at the same time.
2. We have one day per sheet so everyone can select the day they need straight away
3. You can edit cells in the spreadsheet from iPad!

So far we have found the planner to be user friendly. We have linked it to a my classes page and embedded it in a google site created for our village.

Now we have a lot of children who plan their day before they get to school and families and staff can see what is happening in our village at any time. Feedback from parents so far is positive - they can see what work is being done at school and they feel that their children are empowered because they know what will be happening each day and when they will be responsible for being self directed.

Here is what it looks like:

My Mantras About Learning

This week I have been fortunate to work with my team and an Educational Expert from New Zealand who is our school's critical friend.

We've begun the process of articulating our Vision and Beliefs about Teaching and Learning and how we will make it all happen in each part of the school.

It's given me an opportunity to reflect upon these points which I need to remember and have faith in when the going gets tough:

- approach everything in a variety of ways because everyone learns differently
- celebrate and share the wins
- when you introduce a challenge you need to introduce adequate support
- we are all learners
- positive relationships are really powerful

What do you value about teaching & learning?



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Working as One Village - Nuts and Bolts

New school year, new Village, new team and new challenges to provide the best education we can - I love new begginings! They are full of promise and appeal to my sense of adventure and big picture thinking.

Last year I was lucky enough to have a fantastic planning buddy to work with in my 'year' level. By the end of the year, we were using one visual timetable in one Studio to map out the week for the children so they could plan their day. We pooled our resources and ran workshops and focus groups with children from both homegroups according to need and when it came to reporting, we moderated and discussed every child when it came to allocating marks and writing comments. We could be honest and open with questioning each other and evaluating our strengths and weaknesses. We made a great team!

This year my 'buddy' and I are in the same village (building), but working with different year levels. We have two new people on our team and are aiming to continue to work together to pool resources and teach to needs of all children in our care (years 3-6). Fortunately our new team members are willing to follow our lead and take on the challenge of working as one team, one village.

We are in a learning space that doesn't have an interactive whiteboard, or TV screen or enormous 'traditional' whiteboards so we had to re-think how we could do a visual timetable displaying all of the Learning Advisors timetables for the day.

Fortunately we are working in the school's resource ares/mulitpurpose space while we wait for our new village to be built. This space happens to have a large data projector and screen so we have a great reason to try something a little different...

We use Google Apps for Education at our school, which enables spreadsheets, word documents and slideshows to be created online and edited simultaneously by more than one person. Some staff in our Village work part time, so we needed to think provide a template that enabled them to add their plan of action at a time convenient to them, in a location accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

Our working answer at this time is to use a slideshow each week with a table where every member on staff has their own column to work in for the days they are allocated to our Village.

I chose to use a slideshow presentation format becuase we only need to create one per week and we can show one slide at a time, which means it's not visually overwhelming for the children when they see it on the big screen. As you can see from the image below, each day has 2 slides (morning and afternoon). I added speaker notes with instructions for people who need to revise how to edit the presentations.

The presentation is shared with staff only at this stage and is locked down so only staff members can edit it. Once we have refined the document and are happy with it, we can share the document with the children as "viewers only" so that the children with iPads can access the document electronically as a digital taskboard of sorts and will not have to rely on the large screen all of the time.

It will be interesting to see how it will look once people begin to edit the presentation and add their focus gorups and workshops in, however, the important point here is that we are endeavouring to work as one team right from the word go and develop a culture of teamwork and collaboration in our Village among children and adults. 

I'll keep you posted and let you know how it goes!

The "H" word

The "H" word - Homework or as we call it at my school, Home Learning has been the source of many moans and groans from parent, child and teacher alike over the years.

What should it look like?
What is it for?
How do you record it?
How do you monitor it?
How do you get kids to do it?

The past few months has seen our school developing and refining the concept of Home Learning with staff, parents and students. Here is a summary of some of the things that we have trialled and developed with our year 4-6 students.

When we talk about Home Learning we are trying to stick to these principles:
- Home Learning extends upon what has been started at school (researching, finishing off work, developing a passion/interest, visiting a tourist attraction, going to the library, talking to experts in families/local community)
- Home Learning is a chance to consolidate skills and facts in a variety of ways (eg: Mathletics, gaming apps on iPad, shopping, cooking etc)
- Home Learning should be planned by the student rather than imposed
- Home Learning needs to be manageable and accessible

How do you do this in a contemporary or 21st Century fashion?
Blog it of course!

As a team of educators, we have set up a home learning blog and linked it to the school website.

We have discovered the convenience of posting to blogs using an email address and have set one up for our home learning blog. The blog has been set up so that there are 3 staff members who are contributors - this way we can play around with the design of the blog as the need arises.

So what about the kids?
Every Monday and Thursday we use our year 4-6 meeting/planning time as a chance for students to email posts to the home learning blog listing their home learning for the next few days.
They also talk about their home learning with a partner and comment on each others previous posts to give each other feedback about home learning.

The advantages:
- Parents can visit the blog to view their child's posts
- Students can email their home learning posts to their parents at the same time they email to the blog
- As educators, Learning Advisors can read through the comments and posts to quickly ascertain who is managing their home learning and who is not
- The students are accountable to each other and can help each other to refine and be realistic about how much learning they can do at home

It will take some time for the children to get into the habit of posting and commenting on the Home Learning blog without being directed to do so. It can take a while for the posts to appear on the blog as well, and the children have learned how important it is to have an appropriate title for their post so that it is easy for others to comment on.

In the long term we hope to see parents starting to follow our blog and making comments when they can. As Learning Advisors we also need to take a few moments to comment on some posts to encourage the children to keep going with it. It would also be great to see photographs of Home Learning starting to appear.

Isn't it amazing what can be done with technology?
What will this evolve to next?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad