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Following my recent post, I’m now pleased that I received delivery of my new flip ultra video camera on Friday.
So why does this post have a picture of a USB flash drive? Because it has everything to do with what I’m now going to do with my flip ultra. The children in the class have speeches to present in the next couple of weeks (it’s an annual, whole-school initiative). Mine will be the first class where the students’ presentations are recorded (using the flip).
This will not only provide us with a record of the speech to support our assessment data, but I’ll also be sending home each child with their speech on a USB flash drive. The parents can then see exactly how their child went, and even copy the file to their home computer.
Now yes, I know, this could be very easily posted to the web in this Web 2.0 world. We could even provide password-restricted access to them if we wanted. We have given the parents some access to the Web 2.0 world this year, with our class’ homework blog, Travelling Trevor.
This project, however, may help to ease our parents in a little at a time rather than confront them in a huge way. The way I intend it at present, it’s all pretty easy and non-threatening – play it on your computer, praise your child, save a copy if you want, and send the stick back to school. Next term, I intend (with some colleagues from other grades who also attended the IWB conference), to prepare a much more technologically-rich learning unit with a digital portfolio as part of the deal.
So, for the rest of this term, I might work bit by bit to lead them up to that.
After a very busy and exhausting year, I felt the need to withdraw from all things school-related for a period of several weeks. The Christmas holidays have seen me do very little in relation to my classroom (the fact that there are over 235 edublog posts sitting in my reader at the moment are evidence of that), and how it is time to focus again.
There is plenty to focus on this year with a new challenge. After five years in Year 4 (trust me, I was ready to call it a day after four) I’m making the big move to a new grade, new classroom and new building as I begin teaching Year 1. This is the first time I’m teaching Stage 1 during my career, so it is bound to be a significant Learning Curve (where have I seen that phrase before?).
This week has seen me unpacking boxes, cleaning things and doing little organisational tasks that have normally never crossed my mind, like preparing pencil tins.
What I do look forward to is exploring ways that I can integrate technology effectively into the learning of our younger students. My first-hand experience meant that it was easy for me to work out what Stage 2/3 students were capable of doing and how technology could be embedded into their learning. Now, hopefully, I can do the same in Stage 1, and thus be of greater support as Learning Technology Coordinator to my Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 colleagues.
Well, we’ll see how we go… and I’ll try to catch up with posting some things that have grabbed my attention recently. I hope to post more succinctly and often in future. For now, I have a “Welcome to 1R” sign and a set of name labels to make.
Photo: Pencils by liasterkenburg
