Day One: Walk the Talk Alfriston

I am teaching for 4 days at Alfriston School in South Auckland in a Year 5/6 class.
The school has just started on their e-Learning journey with 3 classrooms Yr 0-1, Yr 3-4, Yr 5-6 who have all been working with me this year.
This classroom is trialling tables instead of desks, and after a couple of weeks, students are not missing their desks at all. The school has purchased one high table, and one whiteboard table to test out in the room. I heard some students say today "I love working at these high tables!

I have made a wiki that is for the students to get their resources from and for teachers to see how I did the teaching. Wherever possible I will be using the SAMR model to show how I thought about 'Teacher Delivery' and 'Task Design'.

View Walk the Talk Wiki

Today I set up 2 Apple TVs, one on the big TV and one on the small TV (18"). These will become teaching and learning stations for the students.

This class has 9 Google Chromebooks, 8 windows computers, and I have brought in 4 iPads, a Samsung tablet and a Surface Pro.

Writing

I introduced them to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur by handing out copies of the story which they read in groups. It is also available for them on the wiki. I walked around and discussed the main points with the groups.

After a while I stopped them and showed them the Narrative Graphic Organiser. They could choose to do an Inspiration one on the iPads or use Google Docs on the computers.

Once the students had finished the Graphic Organiser, it was printed out and is now the structure for their narrative writing for the next day.

Reading

Today was all about introducing 2 groups of students to their Reading Task Google Doc. This involved them downloading it to their Google Drive, copying it, renaming it and moving it to the shared class folder so I could view it. They then had to do the same thing with their Vocab log and Chapter Title Assignment. This was quite time consuming and this is where 'Teacher Dashboard' would have come in handy.

Example of one group's Reading Task Doc

Maths
The students are working on Fractions, Percentages and Decimals at the moment and I have created a wiki page that leads to all of their resources. I am focussing this week on Fractions.
This page has the downloads they need for some games and their workshops that are completed with me or independently.

View Maths wiki page

They also have an Independent self pacing Maths Google Doc where they have to record what tasks have been completed.



I worked with one group today while the others worked through their tasks. We started the workshop Equivalent Fractions. We focussed on Slide 2 and looked at Equivalent Fractions.

We tried some examples using the app Explain Everything which was shown up on the screen at the Big TV learning station.

This was very successful, and the students eventually started racing the person who was completing the task on Explain Everything by writing the answers in their maths books.





Inquiry
I started the Inquiry topic today with a focus on Keywords. This is the presentation I am using.


And this is the SAMR model I am following. We completed the tasks in Substitution and Augmentation. The students used their topic books to record their keywords. Both TVs were used with iPads mirroring the story.

Observation Week Clevedon

The teachers are discovering that the Google Drive app is not perfect. You can't copy a document in Drive, students need to go to Chrome and open the desktop version. Students had problems signing in and you can't see the collaborators on your documents in real time, you have to tap sync to see what they have added. My suggestion is to use the Google Drive app for getting down ideas, editing,  and sharing. If the teachers want the students to do peer editing, it would be best to use the class laptops so that they can make full use of the commenting feature.

Students are making choices in what apps they use for their learning. One group of students were splitting words into syllables and several of them chose Notability, where they typed the words and use the pen tool to draw the lines. Others were writing in notes or writing in their books.

I liked this short maths starter called 10 pin bowling The students chose an app to record their answers and they had 5 minutes to get rid of all of the pins. Apps they could have used were Showme, Educreations, Screen Chomp or Notability.











The classroom wikis ( Rachael and Rebecca) are being referred to all of the time and resources are being added constantly for student use.

The teachers have been sharing PDF worksheets to Dropbox for the students to work from and students record their answers in their books. They could also import it to Notability and record their answers using the pencil or text tool.

The use of Evernote has started in one classroom where each student has a notebook where they save their research information. Students found out how to add graphics, type notes, add tags and they are going to learn how to use Evernote to reference their research.

To get to know the iPad one of the teachers has made up an iChallenge for both classes. Students had to fill in what they were able to do, they used the emoji symbols to record their answers. Following on from our discussion about monitoring the options students choose, Rachael is trialing this spreadsheet with a group to see if they can self manage themselves and their tasks. We look forward to the end of the term to evaluate how it worked.