Moon Buggies

Moon Buggies in Room 17 on PhotoPeach

Moon Buggies - Can I be an 'experienced learner' ?

For the last 2 days the SuperSeventeens have been working hard to make moon buggies. This is a project that ties in with our context of Planet Earth and Beyond.

The students had a design brief to work to that included specifications for the size and features of the finished product. I initially thought that this would be a 1 day activity but in fact it has been one and half days already and we will work for another half day tomorrow before exhibiting our finished buggies (to our syndicate & buddy class).

For me this has been an interesting process, as a class we came up with the idea of creating a moon buggy, we collected the materials we would need and then I came up with the brief/specification.

The children have worked tirelessly to draw their designs and build their models. They continued to update/amend their drawings in tandem with creating their models.

I have spent my time assisting the children with tasks they wanted to perform, together we have learnt how to do things,how to use the glue gun without getting burnt, how to break off blades on the craft knife, how to fix toilet rolls on so that they don't fall off. We have discussed things but I haven't told the children what to do or how to do it. (Except when it was tidy up time of course).

It has been fantastic and I think that the quality of the buggies we have produced reflects the amount of thinking that has gone into them. Most of all I have enjoyed working alongside the children who have worked so well together, collaborating, sharing resources and materials in a mature way. The SuperSeventeens really are SUPER!

Creating thinkers

Saturday 11th September.

I had a difficult day yesterday, it was difficult because some money went missing from my classroom, it was tiring because we working on our contextual learning which involves, painting boxes, making and painting clay volcanoes; creating pictures on KidPix and researching and presenting facts. The structure of our context day follows our school Inquiry process but I still feel I have a long way to go before I can facilitate the children in being able to direct their own learning. I am still controlling how the children are working and what they are producing.

I have included a video that I found on Ewan MacIntosh's blog about teachers creating thinkers rather than creating students that don't know how to think but can instead only regurgitate facts.

TEDx Dubai 2009 - Ian Gilbert from Giorgio Ungania on Vimeo.

A good idea

Wednesday 8th September. It's been a little while since I posted to my blog, I was hoping to be like Ewan McIntosh and post everday - but never mind.

I have been struggling with how to use the computers in my room effectively for some time. The problem that I had was with juggling publishing during literacy time, with my tumble activities for maths and literacy (which both include computer time) but I also wanted to have the computers in use 100% of the time.

I have now decided to take any computer use off my tumbles and the children are getting strictly rostered time on the computers (20 minutes each) - If they have publishing to do, it needs to be done during their rostered computer time.

At the moment I am monitoring this very strictly (I have only started today) and I am using my mobile phone to time the students. I am hoping to gradually hand over control of this roster to the children. Today I allowed the children to access learning websites from our IGoogle page but some had circumvented this by using the school Intranet which has lots of game websites. I think I need to evaluate these before the children are allowed to use them. I will let you know how it goes.

What happened to the blogger?

Friday 3rd September - It has been a little while since I blogged but I am not going to make any excuses. I started the blog to post any ideas that I had or to ask for help with IT stuff.

I had a worrying experience this week when I cut & paste an image into Google images into my blog post, (it was an image of twinkling stars by the way). The image pasted into the blog with no problem but when I went back to look at it later on the image had been replaced with a message that says "You have been spanked - by using this image you are stealing someone else's bandwith", I am not sure why this happened but it frightened me a little bit.

I have also been reading Interface magazine and getting some information about creating E-Books, I was also interested in the information about using Google Apps particularly about creating a School Website using Google Sites http://www.lakeviewschool.info

Google Sites - Where to next?

Sunday 22nd August.
I have had some tuition from Tracey on how to add buttons (with links) to my Google Sites pages. I am still playing with my Google Site because I am not sure that I actually need an alternative to my Igoogle page. Google Sites is easy enough to set up (now I sort of know what I am doing) but is more time consuming than just adding URLs to an Igoogle page.

I am still mulling over how I will create pages for my students to use, that is what medium would be the best to use.

I have created a page on our cluster wiki that details this blog and also has some information about Ewan McIntosh's workshops at the NEALs Day.

My students are now using Spelling City as part of their homework and are getting the hang of emailing their certificates to our class email address instead of printing them out - Saving Trees has got to be a good thing!

What will be the next ICT initiative in Room 17?

Fantastic maths lesson with Google Earth

Thursday 19th August.

Today I decided to do my maths lesson a little differently.

The children worked in 4 groups to create an estimate of the distance they ran on their cross-country practice course - which we recorded on the board.

They then went out with metre measuring wheels to measure the distance.

We then used Google Earth to measure the distance

We then calculated how far we run in total (we do 3 laps)

Finally we compared this with the distance of the actual course

Amazing results - 2 groups measured 320m and 2 groups measured 340m. Google Earth gave a measurement of 332m. One of the children actually estimated the distance to be 332m (Freaky!). The actual course was 874m

Amazing thoughts - On Tuesday we had measured the Harbour Bridge on Google Earth and the children remembered the distance and made comparisons to our cross country course.