Imagine the power and potential of a million
people all around the world connecting, collaborating, creating and celebrating
all that creativity inspires and invites. My classroom joined this growing
global community of creativity for the first time this year.I am an experienced primary teacher and
I.C.T P.D facilitator, and passionate about using eLearning tools the
classroom.I am always on the
lookout for authentic and engaging learning experiences to bring to my
classroom.
A colleague shared the annual ‘International Dot
Day’ (http://www.thedotclub.org/dotday/) with
me earlier this year.Immediately
I knew it would bring an opportunity to my children that would facilitate
creativity, collaboration and global connections. International Dot Day was
inspired by the book 'The Dot' by Peter Reynolds and is a global celebration of
creativity, courage and collaboration.The book shares the story of a girl who begins a journey of
self-discovery after a caring teacher challenges her to “make her mark.”
For art during Term 3 we focused on 'Making Your
Mark' with painting as our medium.We are lucky to have a very talented artist as a parent in our
classroom, Lisa Bowden.She came
in each week and shared her passion and expertise with the children.Peter Reynolds books ‘Sky Colour’, ‘Ish’
and ‘Dot Day’ inspired our painting throughout the term.
On Monday
15th September we marked 'International Dot Day' with a
day celebrating our creativity, courage and collaboration! I had the
support of the parents, which made it possible to have a range of engaging and
creative activities all based around ‘Marking Your Mark’. Lisa created the art
for a tea towel with the children with a ‘Love my ish’ focus, Carrie made an
amazing ‘Dot Day’ cake, Emma helped the children make fossils and all of the
parents sent dotty inspired food for our shared lunch.The children were also involved in
writing, sharing their thoughts in a collaborative Google Doc, making bubbles,
Morse Code, using the iPad Colar app, chalk dots outside and art.
I have recently discovered ‘Mystery Skype’ (https://education.skype.com/mysteryskype).This is a critical thinking
challenge that your class takes part in while Skyping with another class
somewhere else in the world. The goal is to guess the other school's location
(country, state, city, school name) before they guess yours.I had connected with a teacher in
Dallas, Texas through the website ‘Mystery Skype’ but we very quickly figured
out we were never at school at the same time.Solution, create a video during ‘Dot Day’ and send it to one
another with our ‘Dot Day’ learning and clues about where we are in the world.
The fact that NZ was the first have ‘Dot Day’ and our mystery class had their
‘Dot Day’ when we were asleep was a great learning opportunity for the
children.On the 16th
Sept there was a video waiting for us in the morning.The class loved watching the children, the similarities they
had in their ‘Dot Day’, the school environment and the connected learning we shared.
The future learning opportunities we could have with our new friends was
immediately evident.
As a passionate educator I want to ‘mark my
mark’ on every child in my care and provide them with a class they will
remember.Providing engaging
learning experiences, using the expertise of parents, integrating eLearning
tools and making connections with learners in a global setting, through days
like ‘Dot Day’, are what memories are made of in Rm 1.
At the commencement of our
Professional Learning around Maths part way through this year, the first aspects
we talked about were “rich tasks”, followed closely by references to online
links and integrating digital tools. Thanks to an enthusiastic facilitator, who
naturally incorporated the above into her own teaching and learning, and some
of us attending a Kath Murdoch “Learning to Learn” full day workshop, we were
better positioned to start integrating current inquiry based pedagogies and
e-learning into our Maths teaching and learning. This added some real
affirmation for natural integration rather than forced or add-on integration. Up
until then, many felt there just wasn’t space or time to implement the e-learning
and inquiry based pedagogies, which were being shared and modelled with them.
Now it was starting to be part and parcel of our whole staff professional
learning.
Rich tasks and multiple
approaches to other aspects of Maths provided opportunity to not only stretch
learning muscles and build rigour, but also to push the boundaries of both the
teachers’ mindsets and the children’s mindsets. It helped challenge assumptions
around children’s abilities and assumptions around teaching approaches at
different levels. These tasks need strategies and frameworks to be
modelled by children and/or teachers, so children have systems in place to
record their thinking. We needed to allow the children to trial their own first
then scaffold as required.
Below are some snapshots
of our teaching and learning around this. The inquiry based pedagogies and
learning to learn aspects shared here include (keeping in mind there are others
and we have only started our journey):
metacognition when explaining thinking
using prior knowledge and “if I know then I know”
transferring knowledge through parallel problems
posing learning intentions as questions rather than a
statement
working on and building on generic learning to learn skills such
as when using a split screen for learning intentions
using multiple representations/experiences around a concept
Maths doesn’t only take place at “Maths” time. “What is the
Maths in that?”
Using modelling books to construct, share and review learning
1. A rich task used across
the school.
For this task children were
asked to discover how many leaves would be needed per day for 12 caterpillars
if two caterpillars ate 5 leaves per day.
A year 2 child set out her
thinking processes with equipment and had her thinking recorded on fotobabble
A Year 5 child had her
thinking recorded for the same task on Explain Everything
2. A rich task specific to
higher Maths stages
For this task the children
were asked to ascertain how many boys and girls there were in a rafting team of
15 children, if there were 36 girls and 54 boys. Amongst the children there
were variations of three different approaches (or strategies) given. Here are
two examples captured on Explain Everything:
This Year 2 class
collaboratively completes a comprehensive newsboard every morning,
incorporating days of the week, Te Reo, weather, a Maths problem and spelling
related activities. This is a recording of a 6 year old explaining his thinking
of the problem: “There were 15 shoes outside the classroom. How many pairs is
that? How many children in the class?” The recording was taken sometime after
his initial response, so the fluency with which he expressed multiple
understandings (ie fractions, decimals, doubles, halves) hasn’t quite been
captured as it truly was.The
recording has been taken on AudioBoo
listen to ‘Maths rich task yr2’ on audioBoom: HERE
A few weeks later they
were given a parallel problem, related to pairs but connected to their current
Inquiry study.
4. Exploring Area in Geometry For this activity the
whole class was involved in physically working together to ascertain how many
children could sit on their mat area. The learning intention and their strategy
were recorded in their modelling book.
One child whose specific
strategy was recorded on a sticky note in the modelling book recorded her
thinking processes on Explain Everything
5. Maintenance and Revison There are multiple
examples and ways of doing this but I would just like to share one teacher’s
use of the online tool Kahoot for this. Kahoot: https://getkahoot.com/In Kahoot personalised quizzes can be
generated, selecting own choice of time frames, usually seconds, to complete a
question. Children work in pairs or groups with devices (ipads, netbooks,
laptops, class computer) to record their answers. It generates intense
competition and excitement as the programme gives instant updates of each
team’s progress. An unexpected outcome from this arose when some children went on
to create their own Kahoot quizzes related to their inquiries.
6.Trapdoor Functions and Prime Numbers We had a number of
learning intentions restructured as questions for our prime numbers study. One
of these was: “How do we use prime numbers in the real world?” Watch this Puppet
Pals presentation to find out:
7.Split Screen, multiple experiences, collaboration A year 0 class was working
on Time and on this particular day it was Days of the Week. Their learning
intention was displayed as a split screen. On the HOW side of the split screen,
the children collaborated on how, as a team, they would organise themselves to
move and stand in order with their respective day of week card. There were two
teams. Prior to this they had sung days of the week songs and following this
day’s session they would be recording their understandings on paper. (Multiple experiences).
An outline is captured on Pic Collage with the background
being their Book Week decorated classroom door.
A Note on APPS used. I have found that Explain Everything,
Puppet Pals, fotobabble, Pic Collage and audioboo have been excellent apps to
use for the purposes above. Explain Everything and Puppet Pals were exported as
videos to uTube, directly from the apps. Fotobabble and audioboo have their own
websites, which recordings are uploaded to.I find fotobabble more presentable, but audioboo can be used
for just audio (which was all it was when I first started using it a couple of
years ago) plus it has the added advantage now of a QR code already allocated
to your audioboo. The image on audioboo can be added, changed or removed at any
time. Both fotobabble and audioboo have embed codes, including one without java
script.
Many thanks to the teachers in the Junior,
Middle and Senior areas of our school, whose children contributed their
wonderful thinking to this blog post.
