A visit from Eden College in Durban

Recently a school from Durban, Eden College, visited our school. They had come to Cape Town to present their play 'Streetwise" to schools around Cape Town. Our school is also 'big' on drama and they asked us if we would be willing to host their team for the week. Various teachers and parents each hosted a pair of their students. They put on two shows at our school, one for the Foundation Phase and one for the Intermediate/Senior Phase. These photos were taken on the last day of their visit when they were thanking all their hosts just after their last performance.

I love creativity!

I am passionate about integrating the curriculum with technology. And I love it when a teacher gives a suggestion for a computer lesson for me to do with her class and adds her own sprinkle of creativity to the lesson. Last week one of the Grade 5 teachers said her class had been on a wonderful outing to the Shark Centre, which they had really enjoyed. She wondered if they could write thank you letters on bluish sea-like backgrounds when they came to the computer lesson. And then, to top it all the class arrived wearing shark hats! Once again I couldn't resist taking a photo of them with their finished products!

Songsmith is a blast!

Songsmith is a fantastic programme from Microsoft. Its free - I think. It certainly was when I got it. I use it as a reward in computer lessons where students have been working really well. They love it. To work Songsmith, you think of your own words, decide on a drum beat, sing along and Songsmith creates a song for you. In this picture you can see a group working on a song. When I saw how much they were enjoying the programme I quickly grabbed my camera to take a shot! Microsoft Research has put a very helpful video demonstration of the programme on YouTube. I think this programme has great potential in a classroom. Groups could create words about something - Maths, grammar rules, information - and then set it to music.

Wikis are a fabulous classroom tool

One of the Thinkquest teams from my school did their project using a wiki. The whole thing about Thinkquest is that there has to be a real world problem to solve and you have to think of a good solution to the problem. The project needs to be not only internet research but also consulting experts, field trips, experiments, polls, journals, videos etc all put together with a lot of thinking involved. Too often a project is seen by students as internet or book research, cut and paste of information, and copying pictures. I like the Thinkquest approach. A wiki is a marvelous tool for a project. Actually, I think wikis are amazing - they are like website but without the HTML headache! You can upload documents to a wiki very easily. I notice that currently a lot of teachers have a classroom blog as well as a classroom wiki. What a great combination. Parents can get the regular update of the blogs but also the display of work that is uploaded to a wiki. This wiki can be viewed at http://futuresavers.wikispaces.com/

Introducing Adobe Youth Voices to my students

My Grade 6 Adobe Youth Voices group at school

At the end of last year I was very privileged to be part of an online Adobe Youth voices group of 22 teachers from around the world. This was facilitated by SchoolNet in South Africa. For three months we did an online course with weekly tasks and a lot of interaction as we learned how to use Adobe Photoshop Essentials and Adobe Premier for editing movies. A great part about this was that Adobe gave our school the software and licenses for 25 computers for free! Now my task is to pass this on to my students at school. The idea is for them to make movies about matters that need to be voiced. One thing that has amazed me is how digitally creative our young students are even at primary school level. They pick things up just like that. One of the groups made a very thought-provoking movie this term which is what Adobe Youth Voices encourages - giving the youth the voice to express real world problems. Here is a picture of this particular team adding narration to their movie.

Latest global newspaper between schools

One of the things I love about the Internet is being able to particpate in projects with other schools. One such school is a Grade 4 class at the Lafayette Regional School in the US where they have a global newspaper project that collects news from maybe 10 different schools around the world. They put it into newsletter format and create a PDF. Of course Fish Hoek Primary is one of the schools participating. I have taken this PDF and put it into http://www.youblisher.com for an e-book format - to get an embed code for my blog. Thank you to Garrett Ferguson and the Super Fantastic 21 (as he calles his class) from the US for involving us in this project.

If you click on the image below or this link ( http://www.youblisher.com/p/118644-Global-newspaper-March-2011/) you will be taken to the youblisher e-book format.

Music blog at school

Well, last year, after I had had my classroom blog for a while, I thought it would be great to have classroom blogs for all the grades. So we started one for each grade with the Grade 7 monitors collecting the news and u0ploading it regularly. My aim was that ultimately teachers would take their own responsibility for maintaining their blogs and to my delight this happened this year with our music teachers' blog. One of our teachers, Fanie Zondagh now takes responsililty for uploading to his blog himself. He uses his music pupils. It is WONDERFUL - one less blog for me to worry about! Their blog address is http://musicfishhoekprimaryschool.blogspot.com

Thinkquest teams

Last year I had the privilege of presenting three Thinkquest courses to teachers around Cape Town. Thinkquest projects is an amazing interface and the children love it because of its mini-Facebook (as they call it) appeal. Teachers love it because of its online safety approach. I was very keen to enter a team into the competition this year. When I asked my Head for permission he wanted ALL the Grade 6s and 7s to enter. Well, I know that is an almost impossible task, I mean around 50... but why not get them all doing Thinkquest projects I thought. So that is what we are doing. They have all thought of their own fascinating projects. Every break the computer room is buzzing with enthusiastic project workers. As it turns out I have a very good one emerging for the Digital Media event, and about three others in the Thinkquest projects event that I will enter. The other groups will get a Technology mark. It has been a good way of teaching them about plagiarism, royalty free music, not only using the internet for project but also finding out from experts, field trips, and polls, not to mention working in a team, sharing the workload, brainstorming, uploading information, repecting other people’s right to privacy of information, and online safety etc. Here is a slideshow of some of the budding Thinkquest teams. The prizes for the winners are awesome - a trip to America (with one parent each) and an apple laptop for each winning team member is the main prize on offer.

Here is a Picasa slideshow of the Grade 6 and 7 teams

Tools for the 21st century

In my internet ramblings today I came upon this fascinating guide to 21st century tools. I see there's a part 2 as well. Thank you to the author, Michael Zimmer. It is presented in that application I love so much - Youblisher (which is free!!!) at http://issuu.com.

Open publication - Free publishing - More 21st century

http://issuu.com/mzimmer557/docs/tools_for_the_21st_century_teacher

And here is Part 2

Open publication - Free publishing - More web 2.0

http://issuu.com/MZimmer557/docs/tools_for_the_21st_century_teacher_2nd_edition

I think I will add his one on 21st century lecturing as well:

Open publication - Free publishing - More education