Collaborative Planning using Web 2.0

This year I am beginning in a new role as Curriculum Support Teacher at my school. I am very excited as I am absolutely passionate about curriculum and I love to share my enthusiasm with others and (hopefully) help them to ignite a passion for teaching and curriculum too.

I will have three days a week in my new role and two days a week in my Year 2 classroom - the best of both worlds!

This will mean that I will have to relinquish a lot of the responsibility for the classroom goings on. My new teaching partner is enthusiastic about coming on board so hopefully she will survive the first little part of the year while I am learning not to be such a control freak. After (more than) 10 years of being able to do my own thing, I am going to need to adjust to the idea of sharing. It will be good for me. ;-)

After the huge learning curve I experienced last year when my life was opened up to the world of blogging, twitter, pinterest, dropbox, evernote and other ways of reflecting on, organising and sharing my teaching experiences, I am keen to support other teachers at my school to take the plunge!

I have just set up a collaborative Pinterest Board for the Life Stages topic that we will likely be studying in first term. 

I invited my fellow Year 2 teachers but so far I haven't had any responses. (Most probably because they are enjoying the last moments of their holidays before we have to come back to work!) I am hoping that this will be a new way of sharing our ideas that will be quick, simple, fun and collaborative. I don't expect that any of us will be able to do even half of the activities that I have pinned already but Pinterest is a nice visual display of resources. The collaborative board will be kind of like a menu of ideas that people can pick and choose from, and if there is nothing there that they like, they don't need to choose any. Hopefully they will add to the ideas as well.

In the past we have shared links in emails but sometimes we get a lot of these types of emails from each other and it can take a while to check all the links and try to work out what idea on the page the other person thought was relevant. Often I get one of these emails and read the first part and think "I'll check this out later" and then bury it in my disorganised inbox, never to be seen again. 

I have tried searching my inbox (either using the approximate date, the person who I think I can remember that sent it to me, or a possible keyword) and this sometimes works but can be very time consuming. I am hoping Pinterest will open up a new and better way for us to collate our ideas so we can retrieve them easily when we need them.

My teaching team are wonderful, and even though they think I am a little crazy, they usually give things a go just to humour me.

If this works, I am hoping this will be an effective and time-efficient tool for supporting the curriculum in my school.

I am also in the process of setting up a blog for my new role that will be situated within the walled-garden of our LIFE Learning Management System. Hopefully using LIFE like this will help me to get used to it so I can apply it more effectively in my classroom as well.

My hope is that I can share information with my colleagues about curriculum matters in a way that is easy for them to access when they need to without overwhelming them with too many emails which may or may not be of interest to them.

I think this year is going to be full of challenges for me, learning to use these tools in new ways and supporting others in beginning a journey to more collaborative practice using Web 2.0.

What tools do you use for collaborative planning?

How do you share your ideas with your colleagues at your school?

Using iMovie on the iPads

Last term I set myself the challenge of getting my Year 2 students to the point where they could make their own iMovies using our school iPads.
Of course they managed it because seven-year-olds are more confident with new technology than we are!
Each student created a short iMovie about the life stages of an animal. Because we had been looking at Eric Carle books, we used painted paper collage to create the images and the students talked about the pictures. I was pleased with their oral explanations because I know if I had asked them to write it down, I wouldn't have seen so much detail from a lot of my students. Using iMovie gave even the reluctant writers a chance to engage with the Science curriculum.

So how do they learn to do it?
Firstly, I needed to become a bit more comfortable with using and teaching with the iPads myself and I wanted to enlist some helpers to work with my Year 2s at first, so during my non-contact time one Friday, I headed over to our Year 5 buddies and taught them how to use the iPads to make a short iMovie. I knew there were a few students in this class who had some basic skills already because they were in my class last year and we had used the iPads, as well as Garageband on the computers, so they had some background skills.
After this one lesson, the Year 5s had a practice on their own as well, working on their own project. This quick tutorial meant that another teacher now had a basic knowledge of how to do it and I had 28 Year 5s who knew more than I did already.
Next, I worked with my Year 2s in small groups of 8 with 4 iPads to share. I did this during our Literacy rotations. I spent 20 minutes with the groups working in pairs to take a photo of the partner and record them reading a page from a book. They got to learn a few basics of iMovie through this experience, as well as how to take a photo, and they also learnt that they needed to speak clearly and hold the iPad close enough to get a good recording.
(I'm not suggesting they were experts by the end of twenty minutes, but some of them were confident, and at least they all had a basic understanding of what iMovie does.)
Next we worked on our unit, learning about life stages and the students created pictures with their collage.
I took some photos of our seed growing experiment and loaded them onto each of the 10 iPads, ready for our buddy work.
The Year 5 buddies worked with my Year 2s to select and sequence the photos of the seeds, change the timings and record the Year 2 explanations of the stages of a seedling sprouting. The Year 5s knew more than me by now so my Year 2s had great teachers!
We viewed our seedling movies and discussed what we had learnt about making movies.
The final stage was the students creating their own iMovie about their chosen animal or plant.
I was lucky enough to have my prac teacher there on the day that we did it so she was able to work with individuals as they took turns with the iPads, and I taught the rest of the class.
Having Claire there to help was great because she was able to send all of the iMovies to DropBox for me so I could collect them in one place where I could access them. She also named all the files properly and kept check that we hadn't missed anyone.
I was very pleased with their efforts - we still have room for improvement, but I am amazed at what these kids can do with just a little bit of guidance.
This term we will use iMovie again, but I also want to try Sonic Pics to compare it to iMovie.

Creative Inspiration

I found a site with some great ideas for using basic software such as PowerPoint and Word to create student presentations beyond the basic flat, printed piece.
The website is called Print, Cut, Fold.
You can of course purchase their book and get many more ideas and templates but the few ideas they describe on their web page are enough inspiration to get started.
I am wondering how I can adapt some of these to make them simple enough for my Year 2s.
When I come up with something I will let you know.
I love their halo idea - it would work well with lifecycles. If we did this just using cardboard and not bothering with the computer side, it would be simpler, but I kind of like the idea of them creating something cool on the computers too.
I am working on a template for a lifecycle wheel and a folding concertina book too, but now this cool website has given me further inspiration. I might try one of their ideas too!

Science with Mealworms

We are having a lot of fun learning about growing and changing in our Science unit.
The unit is designed to support the Year 2 Science in the Australian Curriculum and so far my kids are loving it.
This week we read the book "Guess the Baby" and have started playing the game in our class.
We also had our buddies (Year 5s) come to help us to measure our height, weight and head circumference and compare these to our size when we were a baby.
We have started learning about mealworms and have made predictions about how we think they might grow and change.
Next week I plan to conduct some science experiments and introduce the concept of a fair test as well as the scientific process to the students.
To this end, I have created a series of experiment templates and put them together in a mini-unit available from my TPT site.

I have also made a PowerPoint presentation which can be used alone or in conjunction with the unit plan.
The PowerPoint introduces students to the idea of being a scientist and focusses on the idea of a fairtest.

I am really looking forward to doing some "hands-on science" with my students. I hope you find the PowerPoint and unit useful too.

My first Freebie! - Animal Match Cards

I spent all day making these Animal Matching Cards, after wasting about the same amount of time on Google trying to find some that someone else has made for me. No luck - so hopefully that means I have found a gap in the market and they will "sell like hotcakes". Given that they are being offered for free, that should help things along also! ;-)

I am going to use them to help build vocabulary and also for matching and sorting activities and card games.

Can you think of any other uses?

Please visit my TPT store and download them then let me know what you think.

Activities for Guess the Baby

I have made some activities to go with the “Guess the Baby” book. Since I plan to use this book in the same week that I will teach the ‘b’ sound, the first two activities are spelling or phonics focussed.

The third activity links to the Science unit we will be doing on growing and changing.

I have designed the activities to be multipurpose. This way they can be used as a quick activity or a longer one and the lesson can be adapted to meet the needs of the group.

The first activity is really a reading activity. The students drag hidden words onto the screen and read them. You could extend this activity by having students sounding out each word and then putting the sounds back together. The words could also be sorted into alphabetical order, or into groups such as according to the number of syllables.

The second activity focuses on the blends for ‘bl’ and ‘br’. A few of the questions could have more than one answer. This is an opportunity for discussion about having more than one right answer and also building vocabulary since some children may not know words such as “bloom” or “brow”.

The third activity is a sorting activity. There is opportunity for discussion about many of the points, eg: Are these statements true for everyone?

I can only attach the images at this stage since I haven’t set up a way of putting up the files yet. I am working on that next…

BTW... Do you like the pictures? I drew them myself using two different programs and going from one program to the other to get the right type of file. It was a pain but they are done and hopefully next time I will work out a few shortcuts so it won't be so fiddly.