Personalised/Independent Learning

I've been trialing with my Year 4/5 students independent learning. Many other teachers call this personalised learning, as I did too when I first started using the concept. I'm still not sure that independent or personalised are the best words to describe how this looks in my class. I'm still working on the ultimate name..... differentiated, specialised, customised, individualised..... self-directed, targeted....

At the moment, I'm running this time during my reading block. While I'm teaching my reading groups, the rest of the children are completing word study, handwriting, journal writing and blogging tasks. At the beginning of the week I present the children with a list of must-dos and can dos. I have found that many of the children in the class can successfully manage thier time and begin completing the can-do tasks. However, some don't even get half of their must-dos done because they don't yet have the concept of time-management.

The other problem I was having was that often things would crop up during the week and they would not be on the list, and by the following week the idea was 'out of date.' This was temporalily fixed by leaving space on the list for tasks to be added to. Or, school events and class tasks for specific students would crop up and by Friday there was not enough time for many of the tasks to be completed. This left the students feeling like they had underachieved and not rewarded for their hard work because they had not got to the can-do activities. What to do.?.?.?.

Fortunately, a very timely opportunity came up for me to go and listen to some interesting 10 minute presentations at a CAGE (gifted education) meeting. Here, I heard the amazing reports of year 2 students successfully completing daily timetables. These students were then spending time each Friday to reflect upon thier time coming up with a WOW factor, and a Hot Tip (next step). Then they would set a goal and write a letter home informing their parents of thier goal.

A year 3-4 teacher was doing something very similar with her students. Each day she presents must-dos and WILDs (What I'd Like to Do) to her students via Edmodo. The students were then able to upload their work the site and parents could access it via home as. This teacher also talked about James Nottingham's Learning Pit. Her class instead, had a Tightrope for Learning which was represented by a string across part of the room where each child had thier photo joined to a body. By pegging themselves upright the teacher could clearly see who was finding things too easy and could then approach the student to put them in the wobbling zone - pegged sideways. If the child was upside-down the teacher could clearly see they had fallen off, again, indicating to the teacher she needed to make time to catch up with that student. I love this idea and I think it would effectively within a classroom.

Next steps...

• Build in a Friday reflection and goal setting
• Utilise our school Ultranet site to present daily tasks
• Include more 'fun' personal experience can-dos

Inter-city Superclass (feat. e-buddies)

Tuakana Teina - Buddy Learning

Room # City1 – Room # City2

Communication Form: Skype

Purpose:

·         Work collaboratively with others (known and unknown)

·         Share work with a wider audience

·         Give feedback to refine and craft writing and reading skills

·         Develop oral communication and confidence

·         Develop confidence using e-learning tools

Buddy Writing
Monday – two students from each class write a journal (recount/personal retell) entry, recording and adhering to the class learning intention and success criteria.
Monday – Thursday – the student may rework and refine their writing independently, or with a buddy in their classroom.
Friday – the students need to make sure that Skype is set up and logged in, ready to make the call at 9.30am. One student from each school is “on camera” at a time, sharing their learning intention, success criteria and their piece of work. Then they request feedback from their buddy. Their buddy then repeats the process. The off-camera people then swap places and repeat.

The purpose of having the off-camera people is to provide support (technical and prompting) to their classmate if required.
 

EduCamp Dunners = AMAZINGNESS!

Wow! My mind has been blown. What a great day at EducampDunners 2012.

The days highlights for me:

• Meeting a new colleague from the Canterbury region and discovering EduCampChch is happening very soon!
• Gawker - classroom timelapse, great way to assess on-taskness, cliques, 'attractive' areas of the classroom
• Teach cybersmart instead of cybersafe
• Learning about Daily 5 and CAFE, some concepts worth adopting, in particular stamina and developing learning stamina + indepence aspects and children self-managing literacy times
• Sharing about inter-city ebuddies via skype and using writing as the vehicle (learning intentions and giving feedback), and later having a discussion with someone who admired the idea and referred to it as a long-distance super-classroom
• Talking about and seeing a flexible learning spaces within a classroom (I just love the concept of flexible learning spaces!)
• Touring classrooms and absorbing effective classroom practice - reflected by the actual classroom space and displays
• Catching up with a fellow colleague (now e-colleague), and planning our next steps for our e-buddy (skyping) classes

My do-able next steps:

• De-clutter the classroom and remove my desk space
• Create visual for "iPICK good fit books"
• Pitch some cost effective ideas and fundraising ideas to colleagues to up the digital learning opportunities and integration of e-learning
• "Gawk" into the classroom

My future dreams:

• Replace most of the childrens desks with tables and provide tote-tray type storage areas

Techonology in the classroom

I'm thinking about Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom and wondering if they are past their purpose? Is it possible that schools would be better spending their money on more smaller devices (laptops, tablets, netbooks) in the classroom and maybe a projector with a screen? This would allow for more children to be interacting more often with technology and learning tools and allow for more personalised learning.


The costs outlined below are what I could find on-line not inclusive of educational or multiple-buy discounts. The prices outlined are only an approximation (a wild guess, really!) by someone who has not had purchasing experience!

Potential Option 1:
1 Interactive Whiteboard                          $5000 +
                                                                  TOTAL = $5000 +

Potential Option 2:
Projector                                                   < $1500
8 classroom netbooks                                $400 x8
                                                                  TOTAL = $4700

Potential Option 3:
Projector                                                   <$1500
8 classroom tablets (ipad)                          $1000 x3
                                                                 TOTAL = $4500

Potetial Option 4:
Projector                                                    <$1500
5 classroom netbooks                                $400 x5
3 classroom tablets (ipad)                          $1000 x3
                                                                   TOTAL = $6500


So where does the money come from - the ultimate question!
Here's a fundraising idea that I think might just work. Ultimately, the teachers, along with the students and families are going to benefit from having the technology in the classroom. So why not have your teachers run a series of workshops on something they are good at, be it music, art, blogging, computing in general, sewing, creative writing, cooking, fitness circuits..... The list is endless.
If say each teacher ran three workshops over three weeks at $10 a head (per night) and got even just eight people to attend, that's $240 for each set of workshops. Say there are eight teachers (or teacher aides, caretakers, administration) participating - BOOM, there's nearly $2000. Imagine if you charged a little more, or got more people attending!

Jill Eggleton - Writing Course

For me, one of the biggest everyday occurences that I stuggle with is teaching writing. I'm forever looking for the best way! I don't know why writing is so challenging - but what I do know, is that I'm not the only person who finds it to be like this.
Is it because children work at such different paces? Is it because there are sooooo many different needs? Is it because it's not a black and white science? Is it that I havn't found/adapted/produced enough meaningful writing activities? Is it harder to teach writing in the senior school? (My theory to this one is yes.....) Or, is it just me?

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go to a writing conference by literacy guru Jill Eggleton. It was eyeopening and helpful in many ways. (Unfortunately, my biggest challenge has not been solved - I will continue to fight the groups/not groups, fixed/flexible groups, timing issue.) I had four major take-outs:

• quality not quantity, encourage short pieces of writing that can be well re-crafted (also, length puts a lot of children off)
• there is no good writing, only good re-crafting
• Writing is about a message - always positively feedback to this. Writing isn't spelling.
• You shouldn't DO writing. Instead, writing should have a meaningful context. Eg, "We are going to try and convince the principal that we should wear mufti, so to do this we need to use the structures and features of an exposition/persuasion." OR "We are going to be learning about the moon. In order to present our information, we need to know and use the features of report."

Where to from here?

• adpat my approach to writing to meet the above
• create a level 2/3 tick list of success criteria that each child can have in the back of thier book and tick off each time they achieve. Eg, I can write in compound sentences.