Toto steals the show in our musical The Wizard of Oz

Click on the arrow to hear what Toto the puppy has to say about her acting experience in our musical The Wizard of Oz. This was made using a free Web 2.0 programme called Blabberize.

Using Wallwisher - an online notice board!

I had a lot of fun trying out Wallwisher.com with my classes today. Wallwisher is an online notice board where everyone can contribute at the same time. First I started with the Grade 2s and asked them to write down what they remembered about their weather theme. Next I asked the Grade 6Bs to write some story starters. The Grade 3's recalled interesting things they have learnt about dinosaurs. After that I asked the Grade 6Gs to write down some of their memories of the world cup. Oooh, I love exploring with Web 2.0!

Here are the links to the walls:
Weather (Grade 2): http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/fiona-weather
Storystarters (Grade 6) http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/fiona-6Bstorystarter
Dinosaurs (Grade 3): http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/grade3ginosaurs
Refections of the Fifa Soccer World Cup (Grade 6): http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/fiona-6Gcountries

Skyping with Bob Greenberg from the USA

Today I had a Skype video chat with one of my PLN (Personal Learning Network) colleagues from the USA. His name is Bob Greenberg. He likes to interview teachers from around the workld for his ONE World: Ready. Set, Skype series. What he does is he takes snippets of what they say and makes an ONLINE VIDEO with these snippets. Here are the links to his Parts 1 - 3 videos:
Part 1 http://got.im/KAy
Part 2 http://got.im/nBy
Part 3 http://got.im/Nxz
He is currently busy Part 4. He wanted to ask me especially about the Soccer World Cup that was hosted in South Africa this year. What an amazing, happy and unforgettable time for us in South Africa that was. Internal problems faded into the background and we became 'one nation'. Our infrastructure was vastly improved - our roads, stations and airports especially. If you are wondering what Bob saw on the Skype screen...this is it!

Developing a PLN (Personal Learning Network)

One of the things that I ABSOLUTELY LOVE about social networking is my PLN (Personal Learning Network). PLNs are all about using Web2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook groups and online tutorials etc. to create connections and extend our learning. We end up learning together and it is SUCH an empowering feeling. My PLN comes in the form of networked colleagues, virtual friends, blogs I look up all the time, my twitter network and endless tutorials, to name a few. Of course my Google Reader RSS keeps it all together for me. Every day I embrace a new member. For example, I have only just discovered Mark Barnes’ LearnitN5 channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/LearnitN5

Richard Byrne from Teaching with Technology has provided a great online tutorial on developing a Personal Learning Network. Here it is:

Constructing a PLN

View more presentations from Richard Byrne.

I love being part of the global community – how else would I keep up with the growth in technology?

School Tube video

Have you ever thought of joining School Tube? It is a video sharing site mainly for school educational purposes, launched in 2007. What I like about it is that everything that is submitted is moderated by other teachers before being acepted. Every day I receive an email notification about the ‘video of the day’. (Unfortunately I rarely have the time to look at them!) Well, we are ‘twinned’ with a school in the Wirral in England, Great Meols Primary. They sent us, by post, a dvd of some poems that they had written about the Wirral and expressed in performances. I asked them if I could put this on to School Tube which I had just joined and they agreed. Here is their video.



The link to this video is http://www.schooltube.com/video/0b802cc5e385fdad0f20/Great-Meols-Primary-The-Wirrell

Working with Glogsters

The Grade 7s are experimenting with glogsters which are online posters. We are reseaching the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010 and putting the information on a glogster. It is a lot of fun creating with them. Unfortunately our Internet connection is very slow when working with large classes, and we are taking a while to complete the glogs. If you are interesting in trying out glogsters with your class, you can go to Glogster.edu (http://edu.glogster.com/product-informations/), choose the basic free option and they will email you 100 glog addresses to use with your class. Here is Kayla's glog.

The Deputy Minister of International Relations visits our school

Well, Friday 13th August was an exciting day for us. Earlier in the year, during the time of the Haiti earthquake, we wanted to do something for Haiti but didn't quite know how to make a difference. Our librarian had the great idea of letting the children perhaps come to school in their casual clothes during the month of February, and each day they did this they could make a donation to the Haiti fund. The children loved this idea! We raised R40,000. We didn't quite know how to get this money to Haiti, but the government came to our aid and the Deputy Minister and her entourage came to the school to collect the donation.


It was very exciting for us. These are some extracts from the TV newscasts of the event.

Great Meol's Primary in England - our twinning partner

We belong to an organisation called Afritwin and we have been partnered with a school in England - Great Meols Primary. We are in the process of sending them newsletters. Here is our Grade 1 newsletter

This is our Grade 2 newsletter

Our Grade 5 newsletter follows:

Our Winter Olympics project 2010

The Grade 6s participated in an online project about the Winter Olympics held in Canada earlier this year   (2010). 56 schools from around the world participated in the project and uploaded their information to a wiki set up by a teacher in Canada. The name of the wiki is 2010 Olympics, and it can be found at http://2010olympics.wikispaces.com/
To find Fish Hoek Primary's section, follow these instructions:

1. Open the wiki address namely http://2010olympics.wikispaces.com/

2. Click on Participating Schools in the navigation bar on the left.
http://2010olympics.wikispaces.com/Participating+Schools

3. Find South Africa/Fish Hoek Primary School and click on the link.
http://2010olympics.wikispaces.com/Fish+Hoek+Primary+School%2C+Fish+Hoek%2C+Cape+Town%2C+South+Africa

4. You will see our home page with all its information as well as the three links to the rest of our project.

All the Grade 6s participated but only the work of one class has been uploaded. The classes were each divided into seven groups for the project, and each group had a section of research to complete. Here is a photo of the class.



In the project our first page was called Winter Olympics History. In this section we researched the history of the Winter Olympics, created a quizz about the Winter Olympics and researched the sport competed in at the Winter Olympics.

The next section was called Sports of the Winter Olympics where we researched the three athletes that represented South Africa namely Peter Scott (Winter Olympics - Alpine skiing), Oliver Klass (Winter Olympics cross-country skiing) and Bruce Warren (Winter Paralympics - 5 alpine disciplines (Slalom, Giant Slalom, Super Combined, Super G and Downhill).

The third section of the project was called Countries of the Winter Olympics where we presented a quizz on South Africa. We also had fun exploring Big Huge Labs where we created mosaic photos.

Our school joins the Thinkquest portal

The Grade 4s, 5s, 6s and 7s at our school have joined the wonderful, safe Thinkquest portal where they will each have their own little website to use for school projects. Oracle Education, the software company that has created Thinkquest is the second biggest in the world (second only to Microsoft). We are hoping to join in some projects with schools in other parts of the country and the world using this portal. If you go to http://www.thinkquest.com you can find out about Thinkquest and the amazing competition they hold every year. Last year they added a projects competition to their list. The children had to beplaced in groups of six to enter projects in the competition. Last year a primary school from East London in South Africa who combined with a primary school in Port Elizabeth won the world title with their project called 'Tour of a Lifetime'. Two teachers and six students travelled to San Franciso for a week with six parents (one parent belonging to each child). The six children and the two teachers each won an Apple laptop and lots of money for the chool. We are hoping to enter teams from Fish Hoek Primary this year!

Last Saturday I presented a Thinkquest workshop to teachers from schools around Cape Town who want to enter the competition this year! One teacher even flew all the way from Port Elizabeth to attend the workshop. Here is a crazy pic of some of us at the workshop.

Our principal, Mr Don, retires

At the end of our first term 2010 our Principal, Mr Stuart Don, retired. He was a young boy at our school and then spent his whole teaching life at the school, first as a teacher, then a deputy principal, and finally as principal for many years. He was given a tremendous send-off by staff, parents and pupils as he was a highly-respected principal. My task as the computer teacher was to create a PowerPoint presentation for Mr Don's farewell party. I have uploaded it here using authorstream which converts PowerPoint for web use. What I didn't think about was the use of fonts. When you transfer PowerPoint you have to beware of using fancy fonts - they often reflect with incorrect capitalisation and size! Oh well...

MR DON'S FAREWELL

See more presentations by fionabeal | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

Innovative Teacher's workshop

I had such a lovely weekend (at the end of March) presenting the Microsoft Innovative Teachers' course to a group of wonderfully enthusiastic teachers. Wow! The 2010 course has been updated by two local 2008 Innovative Teacher winners and we enjoyed the new approach. If any South African teachers are reading this post, why don’t you consider entering the competition and developing your project this term? Entries have to be in by the end of the June holidays. All you need to do is take something you already do in your classroom, make it innovative and add some form of technology to it. For more information go to: http://www.schoolnet.org.za/itf/index.htm

There is also an online workshop to help you tweak your ideas: http://www.schoolnet.org.za/innovation/index.htm

Grade 2 Theunissen takes part in the weather project with Switzerland

Here is Maggie’s Grade 2s in Swizerland skyping with Alaska, New Jersey in the USA, Cape Town and Bangkok in Thailand. In this voicethread you can see photos of scenes in the different countries, along with our own Grade 2T and scenes in Cape Town. Can you find the photo of Miss Theunissen’s class? We would like to say thank you again to Maggie in Switzerland for sending these on to us. Next term we hope to add our comments to the voicethreads.

http://voicethread.com/share/953807/

Miss Southern's Grade 2 class also skypes with a Grade 2 class inSwitzerland

Maggie from Swizerland has sent us another voicethread after skyping with our Miss Southerm’s Grade 2 class. Yippee! (All three of our Grade 2s skyped with different Grade 2s in Switzerland). In this voicethread you can see the Grade2s in Switzerland skyping with Grade 2s in Madrid in Spain, Melbourne in Australia, Vancouver Island in Canada , and our Own Grade 2Southern in Cape Town. You will see a photo of Miss Southern’s class in this voicethread.


http://voicethread.com/share/953920/

Grade 2McQueen takes part in a weather project with Switzerland.

Our three Grade 2 classes have been on a Skype weather project with three Grade 2 classes at the International School of Zug and Luzern in Switzerland. This was a first for us - skyping with another school, asking questions and sharing photographs, and it was a wonderful experience. I must thank Maggie Hos-McGrane, the computer integration teacher from Switzerland, for including us in this project. Maggie has put together three Voicethreads about the project. Here is the first one. This voicethread was done after skyping with Alaska, Honolulu in Hawaii, Florida in the USA, Tanzania in Africa and our own Grade 2 McQueen in Cape Town. There are quite a few photos of our school in this Voicethread as well as a photo of Miss McQueen's class.

http://voicethread.com/?#q.b953700.i5104391

Our Grade 5 Monster Project

This year Mrs Beagley's class is involved in a global literacy and technology project called 'The Monster Project' (with Mrs Beal in the computer handling the computer technology side). Are you wondering what the 'Monster Project' is all about? Well, 38 classes from around the world are collaborating in building monsters, reading and writing monster stories, telling monster jokes and more. Each class had to write in with a photo and a brief description about themselves. This is what we wrote about Grade 5B



This Monster Project is the brainchild of Mr Smith in the USA. Mr Smith sent all the participants the link to a talk by Dr Sruart Brown, a researcher on the importance of play and fun in childhood.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

This is how the project works. A monster is divided up into 38 parts and all the participating classes take one part. We have the earings! Each class comes up with 8 - 12 adjectives of how their adopted part should look. This is how Grade 5B described the earings.



Then the children in the class design a monster according to the specifications of all the other classes! In November all 38 classes around the world will vote on who has kept the closest to the descriptions in all the parts.

Here you can see the beginning of the project where everybody in Grade 5B is thinking!



They start to design a monster according to the descriptions given. Mrs Beagley will select one of these designs.




The monster is coming on! Eyeballs, tails and ears!






On Tuesday 40 teachers who are country winners in the Innovative Teacher Competition (finals are being held in Cape Town) are visiting our school for two hours. We will show them the monster and tell them about the project!To find out more about this project visit the Monster project website.
http://www.smithclass.org/proj/Monsters/index.htm

Latest picture of the monster.

Our Bonding through Blogging Project 2010

We are very excited about the collaboration that is happening (and is about to happen) as a result of our blogging project. (2010)

1. Steenberg Primary in Cape Town wants to start blogging
http://gr7steenberg.edublogs.org

Mrs Glenda Samuels and I met to discuss this. She asked me to help her class make blogs. I also went to her school to teach her class about blogs (see slideshow above). This was so.o.o.o exciting. They are also conducting our Senior Citizens Project and are busy interviewing members of their community using the same interview questions that we used. They have been writing comments in our blogs. Best of all – they have invited our 4/5B class to a special tea at their school at the end of the term as part of the project. Thank you Mrs Samuels!

And here is a slideshow about their senior citizen tea to which they invited us.

2. Sue Wyatt from Australia invited us to participate in her 'Bringing us Together' blog:http://studentfriends.edublogs.org




“G’day Mrs Beal and her computer classes,
………………… The teachers are administrators of the blog and they can add students in as authors or editors if they want to write a post. Each fortnight (two weeks) a new class takes control of the blog. We have classes from Canada, USA, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina who regularly write in the blog. Do you and your classes want to be in charge starting Sunday 17th May? You could write a post about your grandparents and ask the students to write comments and posts. The URL for the blog is http://studentfriends.edublogs.org

We took up this challenge – thank you Sue!

3. Mr Mundorf’s Grade 5's at Tommie Barfield Elementary School in Marco Island, Florida USA: http://jmundorf.edublogs.org



Mr Mundorf’s Grade 5 class have interviewed senior citizens and have written very informative comments in our blogs, with each of his students being linked to one of ours. This has been great! Mr Mundorf has since emailed to suggest that we collaborate on another project in the new year in August. Thank you very much Mr Mundorf! We would love that.

4. Mr Tockstein’s Grade 5 class in the USA.http://tville5.edublogs.org/

Mr Tockstein first sent me an email saying, “ Hi Fiona, We have been out of school for two days because of a bad storm, but we started working on the grandparent project today. The class will start posting them next Monday. I only have sixteen students, but I could have some of them post twice so all of your kids would have something to read. Thank you for the chance to connect with your class. My students are really excited about interviewing their grandparents tonight”.



This class has conducted their interviews asking the same questions as we did and have written very interesting comments in our blogs. We have appreciated this so much, Mr Tockstein. Thank you!

Mr Tockstein sent another email to say, “My kids had a good time interviewing their grandparents and we really enjoyed reading and discussing the interviews that your kids did. Thanks for inviting us to share. Our school year ends next week, but if you would like to do a cooperative project with my next year's class I would love to. I believe our summer break is over on August 13. Anyway, thanks again. Scott Tockstein”

We definitely would like to take up this opportunity Mr Tockstein. Thank you!

5. Mr Millward's classes in Canada
http://millwardb.edublogs.org

We received a lovely comment from Mr Millward in our blog.
“Dear grade 4/5, I am an ex-pat who is now living in London, Ontario, Canada. In fact, I was born in Cape Town. I was so happy to find your blog through Edublogs and I will definitely add your class blog to my class’s blog roll. I just started blogging with my grade 7/8 class and they absolutely love it. I am hopeful that we may be able to connect more frequently. Keep up the good work! My class blog can be found at http://millwardb.edublogs.org
Mr Millward has written in many of the learners blogs himself and some of his students have written too.


Mr Millward has written again and suggested some joint learning opportunities.
“Hi Mrs. B. Thanks for writing back. You are really doing a wonderful job with your students. Boy! it is a far cry from my days at school. Nevertheless, we are charged with expanding their horizons and to make them realize that their classroom has essentially become a global classrooom. I have added your class blog as a link on my class blog as I would like to maintain contact with your class. If possible, I would like to explore joint learning opportunities between our two classes. What do you think?”

I notice that Mr Millward enjoys creative writing and so do I…..so this is very exciting for us. Thank you Mr Millward – we will definitely maintain contact.

6. Miss Ale's Grade 6 in Argentina
http://yearsixale.blogspot.com/


Miss Ale has left comments on our blog. She introduced us to Etherpad and we have been writing some collaborative stories in class using Etherpad. Very exciting! She says:
“Hello Fiona, This is Miss Ale from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thank you for visiting our class blog and leaving us some comments. …… Concerning the collaborative project using Etherpad, it would be fantastic! I have already been thinking about some ideas which I would like to share with you. Do you have any email address where I can contact you? Thank you! We’ll keep in touch. Miss Ale.

This is very exciting indeed and we look forward to working with you on some projects, Miss Ale. Thank you!

7. Mrs Shulman's Gr 2 blog in the USA
http://www.classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=226543

Mrs Shulman first wrote in our blog as follows.
“Hello Mrs. Beagley and students! I am a second grade teacher in Illinois, USA, and my students have their own blogs, too. Many of them are visiting your blog today to read about what you are doing at your school, and to share comments with your students. One of our second graders studied the country of South Africa earlier in the year, and we were very excited to find your blog! We would love if your students could visit our blog and leave some comments. We’ll read your blog again soon!”

They have been writing comments in our blogs. Thank you for this Mrs Shulman.

8. Dutch Nek School in USAThis Grade 3 class doesn’t (yet) have a blog but they have been writing in our comment boxes which has been very exciting for us. Thank you!

9. We've had another wonderful comment on our blog from Beiruit. Perhaps this could lead to another collaboration:
Hello Mrs. Fiona,
Thank you for leaving your kind comment on my ACS Beirut blog. You have been doing a wonderful job with your students, connecting with other people in the world. I am especially impressed by your project for senior citizens. I am vice-president for an NGO “Kibarouna”, which means “Senior Citizens” in Arabic. Your work is inspiring, and I appreciate if you can share with me some of the activities that your students enjoyed with seniors so I can start implementing a similar project at the American Community School at Beirut (Elementary and Early Years).
I appreciate your contribution,
Evienoula K El Assad
Arabic Coordinator
N-G5
American Community School at Beirut
Wow....well, all I can say is – blogging really enables one to reach out and touch the world!

An inspiring day at the RASA Conference

Last Saturday I attended the RASA (Reading Association of South Africa) Conference for teachers which was held at the University of Cape Town. I presented a session entitled “Blogging and social networks as an inspirational tool for teachers”. There were some excellent sessions. I especially enjoyed the report back from Dr Ursula Hoadley on “Current processes of curriculum review; issues identified for language learning”. I loved Lesley Beak’s session on writing for children, and the cherry on the top was Steve Vosloo from the Shuttleworth Foundation’s presentation on fiction writing using cell phones. Wow! I will give a more detailed report back of that in another post.

Microsoft OneNote is tops!

Recently I facilitated a Microsoft OneNote course in our school computer lab. for teachers from schools around Cape Town. I suddenly realised what a fantastic programme OneNote is – it definitely has the potential to keep the disorganized person right on track. It just shows – often you have to teach something before you appreciate how valuable it is. I am definitely going to use OneNote more in projects and record-keeping at school and for personal use at home.

Classroom blogs

Last year only one class in our school had a classroom blog and it was the most exciting experience ever! This year we are moving towards Grade blogs. It is a real teamwork affair. The computer monitors collect the information and photos from the teachers and upload tothe blogs. So far we have four blogs that are more or less up to date.

http://grade5fishhoekprimary.blogspot.com

http://grade1fishhoekprimary.edublogs.org

http://grade4fishhoekprimary.blogspot.com

http://fishhoekprimarysport.spaces.live.com/