It’s late, I’m a wee bit tired, but I’m buzzing!  I’ve just got home from a Sitech Conference for Champion Schools -( a contract that my school is on ).  Wow - we have some very talented people out there in good old New Zealand!  Guests included Frank Augustino, Vice President of Business Development and International Sales GTCO (Interwrite software) whom I am forever indebted to because he donated an extra Interactive Whiteboard (which I won for my school !!!!) and a man by the name of Peter Kent.  Now I’m sorry I can’t hyperlink anything to Peter because he doesn’t have a website or a blog.  He’s Deputy Principal of Richardson Primary School, Canberra Australia - and he lectures in his spare time.  Man was he inspiring and did he get you to think about how you use your Interactive Whiteboard.

His message is about Teachers and more specifically e-teaching.  He demonstrated lots of practical ways to ensure interactivity.  And that’s what his company’s name is called Practical Interactivity.   He states that the school environment needs to possess certain traits to ensure that IWBs can enhance teaching and learning within the school and advocates that “e-teaching” involves harnessing the potential of digital technology in presenting a concept, exploring the implications, placing the concept in various contexts, creating links with existing knowledge and leading discussions that probe student understanding and allow students to take their learning in personally relevant directions.  WOW!  If you ever get a chance to hear this man speak - it’s simple DO IT!  The examples he showed us were so simple that you found yourself going, yeah, I could go home and do that, or that is such a simple idea - my students would love to do that. 

One of the very simple ideas he showed us, that I’m going to start doing is, record students explaining how they think.  He had spelling and maths ideas.  3 x 30, how’d you work that out? Recorded was the student’s thinking in their own words!  How powerful is that?!  Hyperactive - how do you remember to spell that?  Another idea was for the teacher to record a quick self-reflection on the last page of the IWB - how did this go? what would you do differently next time? etc - 30secs max.  So simple, yet so effective! 

We are so lucky, well I feel I’m so lucky to go to these kinds of things and be inspired, be refreshed, and be motivated to go back to class and action one or two neat ideas I saw.  Thanks Peter, thanks Frank, thanks Jenny, Garry and team at Sitech and thanks to all those brillant teachers in New Zealand that came to Hamilton and shared their ideas so willingly.  Fantastic, fantastic fantastic! 

We were introduced to Skype about a week ago and since then I’ve seen various weblogs on it.  Working with another school about 20 minutes away from ours we’ve been using the add on Talk and Write with Skype to help mentor young writers.
WOW!  What a powerful tool!  My class are 11-12 year olds and our buddy skype class has 8 year olds.  My colleague Simon got his students to write their stories on the Interwrite pad and saved them.  He then sent the file through Talk and Write to us so that my student mentor for the day could read through the story.  At a prearranged time, we called each other and got Talk and Write up and running as well.  As the two students talked via Skype they were also able to work on the writing collaboratively, adding words, deleting words, adding new sentences etc as they went.

I’d have to say you definitely need to teach your students how to “mentor write”.  They need to encourage and support the younger writer, gently teasing out new ideas.  One of the strategies I taught my mentors was to offer their writer a selection of words to choose from.  We will definitely continue this process and can see the difference to the writing immediately.  It will be interesting to see the difference to the independent writing of the 8 year olds after several mentoring sessions.  I’ll keep you posted on that one!

I’m taking a well deserved break from report writing to mention our current classroom project.  My students and I have been lucky enough to work with a Digital Weather Station (thanks Sitech).  We’re putting together a digital story of our learning journey using Photoshop3 to demonstrate to other teachers what we’ve been doing with this technology.  Well I must say, I’ve been blown away by the varying directions our learning has taken.  What started out as teacher-directed learning fast turned into student-directed learning!  After just a few days the data collected from around New Zealand plus our very own data collected by the weather station meant graphs and comparisons  could be made.  That’s what sparked the students to start asking why questions!  Exciting stuff!  I might challenge myself to uploading the Digital Story for viewing ….. maybe …… and I’ll definitely post the learning encountered in a later post!   I’m just off to have a go at “pinging” my blog update!  Vicki Davis gives some very useful hints & tips in her post entitled “10 habits of bloggers that win!”

But there’s not much there …….. yet ……….

Here goes …… After much thought, research and general procrastination … I’ve finally taken the plunge and had a go at setting up a blog.  My very own blog.  I can’t believe how easy it was.  

There are so many inspirational blogs out there …. such as Thoughts From a Technospud ,  Cool Cat Teacher  & 2 Cents Worth (my personal favourites) in “Education land”.  Special thanks to you three for giving me the courage and the very valuable tips to have a go at blogging. 

The wikispace that comes with this blog is awesome and I’ll be putting that into practise very shortly.  I can’t wait to share blogging and wiki away with my class.