Here are my resolutions for 2007 …….

1. Maintain a class wiki
   (kinda started this already - just need Students to start school year now!)
   
2. Explore Google Earth
   (like this assignment that Chris Craft has done)
   
3. Join a collaborative project
   (Just got an email today from Online Projects saying there’s a match! Yahoo!)
   
4. Have a go at podcasting 
   (check this site out - it’s great!)
   
5. Skype with a class in another country 
   (might be a possibility with my Online Project Partners!)
   
6. Use flickr for a class assignment
   (this teacher has used flickr in Maths - awesome!)

What are your resolutions for 2007?

There are some amazing people out there sharing their best “toys” for educators to use in the classroom - most are free, some have a little charge.  Check out these links:-

“New Toy” Heaven in 2007″  from the Cool Cat Teacher (Vicki A. Davis) at techlearning.com

Bit By Bit by teachers for teachers - there’s a wealth of links to stuff here! (Thank goodness it’s our long summer break here in NZ now so that I can check all of these out!)

OR read this post by Lucy Gray on Chose Your Own Resolution - there’s some fantastic suggestions and links to try new things in your classroom! 

Here are some of our favourite gadgets:-

Photostory 3.0 - bring your digital images to life!  
This is such as easy programme to use and so effective.  Last year we used it to report to parents during the middle of the year for Three-way conferencing.  Each student organised photos depicting their learning throughout the year and then wrote their own “report” as per the photos they had chosen.  This report was then recorded into photostory 3.0 and music (pleasant soft, classical) was added.  (We’re were going to compose our own music using our Mixman DM2 but unfortunately we ran out of time!)  The class was a hive of activity as you could imagine, the conversations and the writing was rich as students discussed what learning they were going to share with their parents - and the impact was huge!  Some parents were just blown away by what their child had been doing - and hearing their child verbalise exactly what they been learning was a first for many parents!  

Skype - This is fabulous!
A programme that allows you to video-conference for FREE!  We just started using this at the end of 2006.  In 2007 we hope to broaden our horizons and completely knock down those 4 walls of our classroom and do something like Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsey did with their flatclassroom project.  Along with Skype our classroom was using

Skype Talk & Write
We used this programme (free!) with a school in Hastings (Year 3’s - we’re Year 7’s) to complete some mentor writing.  The Year 3’s shared their writing and the Year 7’s mentored whilst video-conferencing.  This was so powerful! 
The best conversation I overheard was a young man who had always struggled to put his ideas down on paper.  I knew that he could orally tell some very good stories but I never knew if he was actually learning the deeper features of storywriting I was trying to teach the class since he had great difficulty getting his words on paper.  I was listening to the mentoring conversation he was having with his Year 3 buddy during their video conference and I could hear him using all the things that I had been showing the class during writing.  That confirmed for me that this young man was certainly learning …. and now I had proof that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.  Impressive!

Wikispaces.com
As mentioned in a previous post, wikispaces.com are trying to give away 100,000 wikispaces to educators for FREE!  This will certainly be a huge feature of our classroom in 2007.  Our wikispace is slowly building as I put more ideas into practise.  There are some fabulous teachers out there that I am so grateful to for sharing what they have been doing in their classrooms with Wikis.  Some of these I will be giving a go this year!  Keep ya posted!

Flickr
Gickr 
Spell with flickr
The best way to store, search, sort,  and share your photos; animate your photos; and spell with your photos! 
Check this out to see how one teacher used flickr in his classroom for maths - it’s amazing!

It’s amazing what you come across, late at night, (when you’re actually looking for something else!!).  I’ve just finished listening to a presentation by an Australian teacher called John Pearce. (His other blog here) 

He’s recorded a 30minute presentation entitled

“It’s Elementary“  discussing the success of his journey regarding Web2.0 technologies.  This is a definite must listen to if you are wanting to start out with blogs, wikis and/or podcasts.  Why oh why couldn’t I have discovered this stuff about 6 months ago!?!  There’s only 8 days of our school year left and I have to wait 6 weeks before I can hit the ground running with next year’s class and get absolutely knee deep and roll around in this Web2.0 technology. 

If there’s anybody out there reading this ……. and you’re interested in doing some sort of collaborative project using blogs, wikis and/or podcasts, whether you be a newbie (like me) or an old hand willing to share the bumpy learning journey of one slightly “mad” teacher and a class full of newbie students …….. please, please, please, leave a comment here!

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic post on Chris Craft’s blog about Skyping Peru and listened to a podcast about it (I was originally listening to Vicki Davis’s 5 min podcast on her Flat Classroom Project) anyhow ……… Skyping!  I’ve heard that Skype might not remain free after January 2007.  We seriously need to do something about this!  This is such an innovative tool that links us globally to one another that does not differentiate us depending on how big our tech budget is.  The possibilities of this FREE tool are endless and already there are some fantastic, awesome and totally out of this world things going on in classrooms thanks to Skype. 

If it’s going to happen - that is - if Skype starts to cost - there’s got to be someone out there that can make something to take it’s place - Please, please, please. 

There’s a heap of people my students and I would still like to talk to ….

If you haven’t already ….. you need to take at look at this guy! Quentin D’Souza aka Teaching Hacks.com.  Download his Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators - it’s become my bible - and it’s a little tatty too through over-reading.  Add to that CoolCatTeacher’s handy tips that she’s giving out all the time and I’ve got myself one powerful little book of tips and tricks! 

(Check out Teaching Hack’s delicious links - they are exactly what it says - delicious! 

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 ……….