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Wednesday 10 December 2014

Tuning up for a Music Programme

From the beginning of 2015 I will be teaching music at Western Heights School.  This has been my hidden wish for a lifetime really.  Now it's going to happen.

Last week I visited Owairaka School.  Robyn McQueen runs the music programme there. She is an old friend and I will be working alongside her in my development of our Western Heights music-making.

I was standing around at the end of the class with my iPad just before the lunch time Marimba Band rehearsal. The Year six band members were away on a trip.  Gradually the players drifted in for their practice, unpacking instruments, picking up their beers and getting into the music. Their teacher was still walking her class back to their home-room.  Robyn returned to begin her rehearsal. I was so inspired by what I saw.

Expect to see our Western Heights kids working toward THIS from next year!  Look at the absolute concentration and collaboration going on.  If this is not the seeds of artists, creativity and learning I don't know what is.




Wednesday 5 November 2014

Assembling a Stadium Pitch

Here are the first of the kids' video projects to ask our principal and Board to build us a stadium.

They have worked hard within one day to learn three apps: Greenscreen, Garageband, and iMovie.





Room 16

Thursday 7 August 2014

Developing the Minecraft learning experience

This was a bit of an experiment when I started with Minecraft this semester.

I've had a Junior class today and it's been adapted to suit them.  The structure's still the same but there's been more scaffolding holding it all up.

Having the groups listed on the board with 5 year-olds doesn't necessarily translate into children understanding how to join a particular world.  (More on that later!)

The research activity: selecting a sports event from the Commonwealth Games then searching using keywords was centred around the small whiteboard and  a discussion of using special words "

Search words listed along with "save" words.
Groups are listed with children's
names and their iPad numbers. 
I also quickly wrote the group names on pieces of folded paper so that the children could easily identify which iPad they were to join once they had launched MinecraftPE. That helped.

 

 





Saturday 26 July 2014

Some learnings from the young

There's a few things I've learned in doing the Minecraft world with the kids.

Creating & Managing


  • Pre "spawn" (create) the world before your class begins
  • Create a FLAT world
  • Don't allow kids to create their own worlds
  • Name each class iPad/device  with the device identification number
  • Record on the board each world's name, host name, team members 
Tips for setting up the world. 







Today it was our turn to investigate a sports event currently happening at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.  The end goal is to create a Minecraft 3D model which can show off our research and observations skills.  



After forming into teams each of the children chose a particular sports event, so that the world would have a good variety.  Next we all researched the events' facilities, equipment and design. We discussed and agreed on which search words would get us the best images from the google search engine. 

We looked at a sample image for the sorts of details we were looking for.  The hard part was skimming and scanning lots of photos to find the best ones with good detail to include in our Minecraft world.  Then we all saved the photos to our camera rolls for later.



We haven't even got to Minecraft yet - or morning tea! Mr. Maindonald visited our class and showed us how to use Skitch to "mark up" (notate) our photos. Mr. McLay thought he would use our Skitch images to help the Middle School kids in their work tomorrow.



Then the leaders of each team launched their  Minecraft world which had been created beforehand. The team leaders became the "Hosts" of the game. The other team members joined their hosts and started working together to build the different stadium structures.  


This is when the fun work really begins. Everything from roads, bridges, first aid stations, to TV and media platforms. Basically all the things the groups had found in their research had to be included in their structures.  Each team has to work to a checklist that somehow keeps on growing. 

Have a look at whatRoom 25 has created so far. 


Thursday 24 July 2014

Winter - Let the Games Begin


We've begun the term in ICT with Games - in more ways than one - thanks to Mrs. Joanne Hodder's brainwave!

I needed something to get me cracking this winter term and I got it. So now I've really had to get to know Minecraft up close. After six months of  resisting what I thought would be a massive learning curve and lamely reassuring parents' misgivings about their kids' use of Minecraft, I'm really delighted to discover that as a learning and teaching tool, Minecraft is impressive. I've got it under my belt now thanks to Liam & McKenzie in Room 23.

Minecrafty
Joanne suggested I delve into an engineering focus within our school-wide theme of Transformation.  This simple idea has morphed into a collaborative, self-directed Inquiry: Research, design, construction of various event venues of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and also a refelection process in the form of an illustrated document.
I'll do this with all classes from Year 3  to Year 6 children over the next 6 weeks.

I'd seen Joanne's Room 14 cardboard model-making during the last Olympic Games and knew the kids LOVED the inquiry, group-work, construction and reflection. Initially, I imagined I'd do this using Sketchup (Google's 3D Modelling App I'd used on our PCs a couple of years ago). I quickly realised that this approach couldn't have worked with my full-immersion iPad programme. So Minecraft it became.

A fabulous learning & teaching tool.

The children were given their Learning Intention: To create an arena for your favourite Commonwealth Games event venue using Minecraft.

Each child chose their sport and group members. I assigned each group a default "world", a "host" (i.e. a mature student leader familiar with minecraft) to manage several children's construction projects within the "world".

The only stipulation being that no sporting events were to be duplicated within a world and no Minecraft weapons were to be drawn unless an animal indigenous to the group's world strayed onto the venue and endangered competitors, officials or media commentators.

The class was given a set of Success Criteria. And they were away.

This world (by Room 15 children)
shows 5 distinct event venues. 

The videos below show children taking us on a fly-by tour of what they have created.







Room 15 are Year 3 & 4 children.



A walkthrough of Room 21 children's world. Thanks to
Ethan
 (Host), Lech, Evan & Jamin



Emma (Room 21) building her stadium.


Finally, a note about the process Reflection Document I've used to get the children to reflect & guide this work. I've found it helps them to stay focused on the learning process. The reflection document completed on the iPad's Pages app is not a formative evaluation but it does help the child and teacher uncover areas for attention. Take a look at the sample reflection from two Year 5 kids.

Any suggestions for improving this template most welcome.

Keep your eyes on the class blogs to see their work.

Here's the planning I've put together around this unit.




Tuesday 25 March 2014

What to do when your network goes down during your Reading time...

Chris Grouen & I had planned for me to run the reading programme based on a survey of the school's blogs.

As chance would have it, the network went down half way through the exercise.  So I told the kids to put their newly acquired iPad Pages skills to work and whip up a document showing what they were reading at the moment.









Monday 24 March 2014

Stats on Blogs

I've been trying to find a way to weave in the Maths strand on Statistics with the uptake of class blogs across the entire school this year.

We haven't got the student accounts sorted yet so in the mean time this will help them identify different components of their class blogs and get them doing some comparative research with other classes in the school.

My plan for the next few weeks.  There may be a few tweaks needed in the plan... here goes.




Wednesday 12 March 2014

Working the iPads with Juniors

I've been working with the junior classes. Hefting 20 iPads around, drilling the 'safe handling' message to ensure these gadgets last a long time.

The children have been learning correct procedures for carring, filming, photographing and of course, sharing these valuable devices.

They have been learning to use Dropbox to retrieve photos from the school picnic at Cornwallis beach. They've made posters and have then stored them on Dropbox.

Here's a sample of the morning's 90 minutes' work with a short video below of the process for making these lovely images.  This is Room 12.









Wednesday 12 February 2014

Video Posts

The unit plan that produced some truly heart-warming stories of the children at our school.


My classes will be migratory for next few months. I have been travelling around the school with iPad trolley, router, switches, cables, speakers, AppleTV setting up each class to base myself a different classroom environment each day.


Inspired by a Keynote presentation Jaq Maindonald showed about herself in our Week One classes, I got the idea to do a similar thing using iMovie on an iPad.  It was my first exploration of the app.  I asked my family members to say something about me as they looked at the summer holiday pictures I dropped onto the time line.  I spoke to the camera in our lounge then added music.

Here's my starting point and the results of the childrens' efforts below it.
Here's what we produced to show just who the learners in Room 15 are.

We talked to our friends about ourselves, and then our class mates described who we were on these videoposts.   Here's the link to the planning and pedagogy behind this work.

Please leave your comments.