Reflection About Google Apps for Education - Term 3

So I started the year with a goal to use Google Apps for Education (Docs, Forms, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Blogger etc) as a platform for the delivery of on-line teaching and learning for the children in my class during 2014 to enhance collaboration, engagement and achievement in literacy.

Where am I at now?
This term students have continued to use documents for their own writing tasks as well as collaborating with others on shared projects. Each child has their own blog which is updated each week during reading and writing time depending on their groups task. 

I also wanted to include some of what we learnt in the Sheena Cameron professional development into what we do in class. She showed us the idea of the Word Wall. I decided to make a link on our 5F Blogger page to Padlets (an online way to make word walls). Here are some examples and another . I have found it to be a great way for children to quickly go onto our blog and add new words from the reading they are doing. It also works for Landscape Learning topics as new vocab they come across can be added and meanings can be added too. I have encouraged children to add to other children's words and meanings. I think the Padlet is a really easy way for children to share and discuss new words/vocab they come across and it is accessible when they need it at home or at school. 

The Literacy Shed

Sheena Cameron shared with us a wonderful website called The Literacy Shed. It is filled with thought provoking videos and bits and pieces that are really useful in the classroom.

My class really enjoyed exploring The Music Video Shed. 

We watched one video in particular and stopped at the places it indicated and had discussions. 

Zedd - Stache

The discussion we got from watching this music video was deep and rich. Including music videos in my literacy programme is really bridging the gap between home and school. Kids love music and we more often than not have music playing during our lessons daily. 

If you get time - check this website out. I have only just started so I am excited about what else my class and I will find.

Superheroes - The Script

My class and I are really enjoying this song at the moment. A few of my reading groups are working on making inferences at the moment so we have been doing a lot of activities that require to make inferences. 

Using music videos has been a really good way to explore this and the children are really engaged while doing so.

Visualising

After wonderful professional development with Sheena Cameron this term - I have felt a lot more inspired in my reading and writing programme. Above is a photo of a quick display my class and I put together about visualising technique.

I asked all children to draw a pair of shoes. Those were the instructions. The children wanted more clarification but for the purpose of the activity I didn't give them any more clues as to what to draw. 

At the end I asked all children to sit in a circle on the mat and show the pair of shoes they had drawn. I then asked them to make some observations about what they saw. I recorded their responses. 

In the end the children got the message that everyone visualises things differently even though they were asked to do that same thing. We related this to writing and reading and life in general.

This was a powerful and worthwhile activity!

Google Classroom

Exciting!!!!

GoNoodle

The other teacher I am trialling Google Apps for Education with is always coming across new and exciting on-line resources and this one is FANTASTIC! GoNoodle is a site you can sign up to to encourage your class to take brain breaks! There are dances, songs, activities, calm down breathing and more! The more brain breaks you take the more your character grows! The kids love it. This fits in really well with the P.D done at the start of the year - do don't get a numb bum - take a brain break with GoNoodle!

Digital Citizenship Parent Evening

At this weeks staff meeting we ran through the presentation/discussion that we will be doing with our school parents around digital citizenship. Since we have been having regular discussions with staff along with incorporating digital citizenship discussions into our everyday teaching practice we also think it is important to get our parents in on this too. This on-line world can be one that is tricky to understand for the non digital natives. We want to shed some light on it and get parents thinking about what the on-line world means for their children. We have made a presentation using the haikudeck tool on-line. The run through went well - we have a couple of changes to make but on the whole we had really great feedback.