Collaboration Without Boundaries

This morning I watched as we had a frenzie of fluffy white snow swirl around, which of course got my son all excited and abuzz! However this mini snowstorm only lasted a few minutes, and left no real visible traces on the ground. My son calmed down and life on a Saturday morning returned to normal, with a few occasional flurries continuing to swirl. This excitement and then calming made me think of the use of some of technologies in our classrooms. In the beginning, we had that excited buzz about using the smartboard, ipod and ipads. Everyone wanted to touch, use, engage with them. Now, they have become less of a buzz, and more about the tool we need in order to teach a lesson. A prime example is when I first started using a document camera in my classroom, students and I were so excited and put everything up to be looked at. A little while ago, it was out of use for a day or two. This caused me much stress, as it had become such a part of my lessons. It seemed life in the classroom was disrupted and once it was fixed, life returned to normal and our class seemed at peace again! As we move into engaging kids with our smartboards, ipod, and ipads we must remember the strategies used by colleagues prior to smartboard use so we have these “tools” in our pockets too!

What technologies are you depend on? Do you have a similar story?

Just my thoughts,
Christina

This week-end was one of those unforgettable moments. Turned on my computer to find the black screen staring back at me with nothing! To my dismay, my hard drive was not responding and my recovery disks were not loading! Talk about a stress, how would I blog, now I would have to work from my school desk instead of my mobile laptop! But worst of all I have to redo all 24 of my report cards because I did not back them up. As I sat thinking I began to realize how my students feel when they have worked so very hard at word processing some of their pieces of writing and by some touch of the keyboard it goes missing. Now of course, sometimes we are able to find their words using the undo key, but not always are things recoverable. So, my next lesson will be on saving to the shared drive so I can help my students avoid some of the frustrations I am currently feeling!
Learning patience and how to post on the iPad!
Christina

This past week was a very exciting time for me and my own professional learning.  In our class this week, we brought out our 3 class ipads, a few lap top computers, one  ipod and the live scribe pen all at once!  I was concerned, would students share without complaining, would those not using a piece of technology stay on task,  would everyone in our class be moving their learning forward? So what happened… complete class engagment!  Patterns were being explored with pattern blocks, and with the glowdraw app on the ipads.  Numbers were being written and recorded using various means of technology and reading was being practiced as students engaged with each other reading math story books, as well as reading the picture and label directions on various web sites.  My favourite moment was watching the live scribe pen in use.  How intriguing to see a young student so excited to write the numbers from one to ten, say them and then listen to themselves saying the numbers they had written!  There was no problem for this young student in learning to use the start and stop functions on the live scribe paper, nor was there a problem learning how to jump over (fast forward) the recordings so they could skip the recording of me giving directions and proceed right to listening to themselves!   For me,watching this student be so engaged in figuring things out, was priceless!  Not only did I get to see and hear what the child knew about numbers, I was able to listen to myself giving directions and reflect on how clear/unclear I was when instructing. Ahah… another use for the livescribe pen!  So what does this mean for next week?  It means I now need to learn how to download and post the contents of the pen, to our blog so others can see and hear also!  Happy learning everyone!  How are you learning about your method of delivery of instruction in your classroom?  Is this something we need to monitor if our students are learning?  

Happy livescribing!

Christina

The first full week of school has ended and after some busy days with class and grade re-organization, I find there is alot to reflect upon.  My grade 2 group of learners has become a grade 1/2 group of learners and with this I found myself not willing to begin using our  new technology week.  So the question to me, was Why?  I usually am more than willing to jump in with two feet and figure things out as we go along, but for some reason I am not quite ready to relinquish the reins of my new technology “tools”.  Although I am not too sure why, I am certain that some of it is that it’s hard not to be the “expert”, as many of the children have so much more experience with this technology than I have. The second reason, that came out of my reflections was that I wanted to be able to ensure ease of access to the apps that I wanted the children to use. I remembered a wonderful colleague, Mrs. Brown, expressing her love of a site where she was able to “Pin” other sites she liked with great ease.  This piqued my curiosity and when I read about a site called Pinterest on an apps recommendation list, I had a strong hunch this was the site Mrs. Brown loved. Thus,  I learned about Pinterest, a great site where students are able to click on a visual of a site that I have pinned to my board and they will be redirected safely to that site. I am hopeful that I will be able to link our ipads to this site so kids have ease of access to the pinboard that is created for them. 

A second method I learned on how to organize the apps for our classroom i-pad was simply to drag all of the apps I wanted the kids to use into folders of their own.  It is truely amazing how easy it was to google what I wanted, watch the 2minute video and then put what I learned into practice.  

Hope everyone has a good week, I know this is the week for me to”jump in” !