Friday, April 24, 2009

21st century Literacy Programme

Regular readers of this blog will recognise the theme of this workshop from the 'blurb' below.
As with the morning session, this presentation is scheduled to post when the workshop starts and is intended to be the handout for the links mentioned throughout....

Workshop Outline:
"Dorothy will introduce the literacy cycles teachers are developing in the Manaiakalani cluster which are designed to give students an engaging and exciting 21st century eLearning experience but ensure that the foundations of literacy achievement are strongly developed. This is an evidence-based approach that allows students to experience technologies such as podcasting, movie making, animation, voicethread, animoto, blogging etc but still measures their literacy progress with asTTle, PROBE, NCEA etc. This workshop will provide you with a range of examples to analyse and offer you the opportunity to develop an eLearning Literacy Cycle to use with your own students. Your students will love it!"

Here are some of the links used during this session:
Background to the concept of Literacy Cycles
The Cluster website
A page of links to the projects' student blogs
Schools involved
Year One projects here and here
Year Two project
Year Three project
Year Four project
Year Six projects here and here
Intermediate projects here and here
College projects
A short term project " A Matou Mihi"

Steps to designing a literacy cycle:
  1. Bullet point the generic process you usually go through with students in your literacy session (eg the writing process)
  2. Identify the digital 'Hook' that spins YOUR wheels, and you know your students will be delighted with
  3. Simplify the process for students to create their outcomes.
  4. Publish this in a Web 2 environment eg a Blog
Further thoughts:
The easy part for you should be the literacy - after all you have been teaching in this way for years haven't you?
The challenge for you or your students may be around the technology. The keep it simple policy works best when starting out.
Publishing online will require you setting up a blog (or some other space) if you don't already have this.
Establish routines for your literacy sessions eg include reading blog posts and writing comments in your group rotations/tumbles
Confirm school and class policies about use of the internet, publishing students online before you get started. It's better to know what you are working with from the outset.
Bring the parents onboard too!

Think about gathering evidence from the beginning. Gather some baseline data both from testing and a student survey.

Let me know what is working in your class!

Keynote : One School's Journey

I have the pleasure of presenting at the Nelson ICT Cluster's second annual conference today, April 24th 2009. This will be my second time there and it was such a well organised and fun conference last time that I said yes when Rachel invited me back again. Over the years I have tried a few different formats to share the notes and links from my presentations from paper handouts to wikis to Google sites to webpages. This time I am trying something a bit different for me, mostly because I want the sharing to be a two way thing. I'll give people easy access to my material and you give me back some of your thinking to add to what I have shared in the presentation in the comments below :) I have scheduled this post to publish at the same time I start my Keynote presentation, so if the KAREN network is up to it those of you with wireless should be able to explore some of these links during the session.....

The title I was given to speak to was "One School's Journey" with the explanation, "We are in the exit year of our cluster, so we'd like you to speak about the journey you've been on - where you've come from and where you're at".
The school journey spans my 18 years at Pt England School in Auckland including; being specialist ICT teacher from 1998 - 2003, Cluster facilitator for the Pt England ICTPD Cluster and currently facilitator for the Maniakalani EHSAS Cluster.
Following are some of the links I am speaking about:
Student presentation
(where we are at now)
Pedagogical Pathway
"Will this contribute to raising student achievement outcomes AND provide a 21st century education experience?".

Planning for the future
Staying together as a cluster: "Art Alive"

New Zealand Curriculum

Mr Winkle video
I hope that this has stimulated some useful ideas for you and informed your thinking!
And hi to everyone who was present today.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Online Conversations - unravelling the thread

Participating in a conversation online can quickly become a tangled skein - or a colourful tapestry - depending on the mood the reader is in. I became personally aware of this after my last post when some people commented on the post by leaving a comment in the traditional sense, some sent me their thoughts as public tweets or direct messages, I got a couple of emails, a couple of iChat conversations, a text, a phone call and even some face to face feedback. Oh, and someone notified me they had started a new thread on a Ning in response. Wouldn't it be more fun/enlightening if the whole conversation took place in the same place eg in the comments following?
Being old fashioned I was tempted to copy/paste the other feedback and ideas I had received into the comments under that post, but I was unsure of the netiquette surrounding this. Is that bad form if someone has texted/Facebooked/emailed or DMd? I would really like to know.
I do know that this is where Web 2 currently is at and hyperlinking rulz, but aren't we are all too busy to be trawling several online spaces to participate fully in a conversation?
If you have any ideas about this (or know the rules) please leave them below ;)