CoETaIL Blogging Assignment:  Sept 14-20th

Use Creative Commons image search to find an appropriate image to use in at least one of the classes you teach. Include this image in a blog post and share how you plan to use it in the classroom. How can visual imagery support your curricular content?

Our Enduring Understandings:

• Design and layout of information influence effective communication
• Audience and purpose behind your communication affect how and what you communicate.
• Different information mediums require different strategies when organizing information and communicating effectively.

I use Creative Commons all the time to help me with my Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop mini-lessons.  I hope that it helps my students visualise and capture the heart (no pun intended) of what the mini-lesson teaching point is. At the same time I use images to model to students how to attribute images used.  There’s always an attribution slide at the end of the mini-lesson.  (That’s me – always looking for multiple teachable moments!!)

This is one of my most favourite images used to date.  It’s popular with my students too!

The Writing Workshop mini-lesson was:

Good writers revise by asking themselves “What’s the most important part of this story?” and then develop that section.  You can do this by ……….

• Rereading your story
• Find the heart of it
• Develop that section of your writing

After a very long (self-imposed) break from blogging, the start of Course 3 of our CoETaIL.asia group means I’m back in the saddle again!

Our first blog post requires to us to reflect on implementation of ideas learned during the past two courses.  There’s are the essential questions:

• What have you tried/are trying in your classrooms?
• How has this / or how do you hope this impacts student learning?
• What do you hope to get out of of this next course?

For me personally, Course 1 and 2 didn’t really offer me anything new to try in the classroom.  I don’t mean for that to come across as big-headed as that sounds either!   Technology, global collaboration and connections were already staples in our classroom learning environment.  What Course 1 and 2 did give me was the opportunity to share ideas and tools as well as offer support to teachers who were willing to have their thinking and their knowledge pushed.  This aspect was immensely satisfying as it is always a good feeling to be able to “pay-it-forward” in terms of giving people help like people (in my PLN) have helped me in the past.  My pedagogy was challenged as were my reasons for using technology in the classroom for learning.  I found this extremely helpful to deepen my own understandings of how and when and why I use technology and it also gave me the opportunity to look at things from another person’s point of view – which I can often forget to do.

The impact on student learning has been more in the development of our Grade 5 Digital Literacy Overview.  It is a great thrill to work with, support and guide a fabulous group of teachers in our Grade 5 team who are willing and enthusiastic about the value of using a blog as a “Window into Our Learning”.  The impact on student learning will no doubt reveal itself slowly over the coming year and be evident in the content of our classroom blogs and individual student blogs.  Every single Grade 5 student has their own blog.  That’s an incredible step our team has taken onboard!

I’ve always considered myself to be a “life-long-learner” and I am nowhere near close to knowing everything there is to know about Information Technology and Digital Literacy.  I hope to continue my own personal learning journey by finding more ways to inspire, guide and facilitate learning in the classroom through digital literacy as well as continue to support and help my fellow colleagues who have been led to the water, and are now drinking it by the bucket-full!

Image Attribution:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsurfdude/322217434/

Our budding young scientists in Grade 5 have been learning about Variables and how to investigate them. During the investigations they have been learning things like how to use a two-coordinate graph, how to predict, how to identify variables and control them, setting standards and recording data.

To help them with their reflection and interpretation of data (we’ve done the what – so what?) we’d love you to click on the student blog links on the right hand side of our class blog and read our Measuring Capacity post.
Each student has posted their two-coordinate graph with a little explanation of what investigation they were doing and are asking other student scientists around the world two questions.
What do you notice? What would you suggest we do next?

Of course they’d be really excited if an experienced scientist left us a comment too!  If you can help us out please head on over to our classroom blog and click on the individual student blog links on the right hand side.