I found this site last year and was quite excited at the prospect and opportunities it represented for the kids. It was exciting, when I first bought it into the classroom the kids picked it up very quickly, excited to be able to 'chat' to each other in this way and immediatly began comparing it to Facebook.

I hadn't done enough ground work though. No real thinking or planning on how to effectively integrate it into my general practise, naively I expected Edmodo would develop it's own place in our room.  Accordingly I was never able to take the next step and bring it into the learning environment. Further, I had no other audience for my kids to connect with beyond themselves; any of the ideas for use I arrived at seemed contrived if it were only between eachother. These tools can not replace face to face and all of my ideas seemed to be trying to do this. After a while the excitement died off and I became distracted by other things. Hence Edmodo died a slow death last year.

Edmodo was never very far from my thoughts as I began to plan the learning for the new school year. Then, when I found Twitter in October I began to realise that I had a new opportunity to make connections with people outside my classroom - bringing use of the technology into the real world, rather than the contrived uses I plagued myself with last year. Literacy seemed to be the place to start - talking about books, authors, specific genres or titles. With such diversity in reading material I have no way to keep up with everything that is being read - but others are reading, why not try to connect the kids with each other?

This week marked my real foray into the Edmodo world. I have connected with an experienced Edmodo teacher and the kids are writing more than ever. It's still early days, we've given them a chance to meet and greet and they are loving it. Discussions about books and learning have already begun. They've been learning about similarities and differences in school populations across continents (Europe and USA). As the kids left the classroom on Friday, for a long weekend holiday on Monday, they were making plans to connect to each other. Each time they connect they will be writing and publishing their ideas, they will be sharing their thoughts and developing relationships. They have already (after only 5 days) begun to use the group setting to ask for support or ideas. They are sharing their learning, a student on Thursday taking a photo of his planter box and uploading it to ask for adivice and feedback on the next steps - design and colour.

They will do all of this without complaining of the writing they are doing along the way. I can see that their expression, spelling, punctuation and grammar are all improving with each new day. They are writing for a purpose, connecting and extending the ideas which the individual connects with, it's self differentiating.

I'm excited to be a part of this style of learning, as kids take control of their own learning and develop deeper understandings of the the world around them. As they find real-world audiences for their writing. This would not be possible without the support from my PLN, where I was able to send out the request and find likeminded teachers who were willing to give me a chance. Thank you.

Maths, UOI, inquiry that just keeps on giving

You know you've stumbled across a great inquiry when the learning just starts to develop a life of it's own. Our planter boxes just keep getting better. Accuracy of measurement, comparing informal with formal notation, converting between inches and centimetres, length, width, height, volume, capacity and the list continues to grow.

After drafting then building their paper models, determining the volume in cm3 the students were ready to order the wood. All those who were building with wood that is, some have chosen to use clay. My visit to the hardware, in very broken German, managed to have all of the students requests fulfilled - five pieces of wood per box, three different sizes for each box. Quite a language lesson!

All this was planned and anticipated, fantastic discussions, motivation levels extremely high.

What I hadn't planned for were the discussions which have begun today as the students compare weight to dimensions. Each group knows clearly how much soil they want - in cm3 the problem is that soil is sold by the litre. How many litres of soil do you require to fill your 8750cm3 box? This discussion will lead nicely from the clay kids as they need to determine how much clay they need just to make the pot - sold by the kilo.

Collaboration, problem solving, collegiality, inquiring minds ... connecting maths to our unit of inquiry: the form and material of an object affects its use. Connecting oral procedural texts as students now begin to produce shared videos (diary room style) of the learning process ...

Thank you to my colleagues as we talked through bringing measurement into our real world. Thank you to those who shared their thinking with the group and helped transform the beginning of an idea into a rich and rewarding inquiry based learning experience.

Class Poll

Sometimes writing a blog post can be as simple as asking a question and getting everyone to give a simple answer. Example: What was your favorite part of the field trip? Scott: the giraffes Mary: the elephants or What did you learn today in reading? Melanie Holtsman's next blog challenge.

I polled my kids today. First, a bit of background.

The maths inquiry is going great guns, the kids are using all the language of measurement, they are converting between informal and formal measurements, they're converting between inches and centimetres. They've constructed scale models of their planters and tested them out on the windowsill to make sure they fit, won't fall off, that sort of thing. They've gone back and double checked the volume of their planted because "7,680 cm cubed sounds like way too big". It's all great learning but did they really want to carry on?

This afternoon I gave them the choice; to actually build their box or not, individual choice. 100% yes. Hmmm, now on to the next challenge, where do we find the resources?

What is the exhibition supposed to look like?

Last year was my first turn at facilitating a PYPX, lots of things went well and the students really did develop their thinking and learning in diverse and creative ways. What follows are some wonderings and thoughts about how best to empower the students and truly allow them to take control of their own learning. Not just take control, but to also develop a truly enriching learning experience which is tailored to themselves.

How do we encourage the students to consider all six of the transdisciplinary themes in their own inquiry, when the models they have been exposed to in every other teacher developed central idea is explicitly linked to only one: Who We Are, How the World Works, Sharing the Planet, Where We Are in Space and Time or How We Organise Ourselves. Is it sufficient for them to consider each of these and then choose one which will become their overarching transdisciplinary theme? The key concepts offer a similar challenge, how to explicitly employ them all?

They've had some thinking time, engaged in loads of discussions, brainstormed and talked through ideas with each other, peers and classroom support teachers; they've decided that they want to spend the next 6 weeks learning about basketball. How do we help them think about basketball from a different perspective, how do we help them to see it's the sportsmanship, or the game strategies and quick decisions that players make. How do we help them to uncover these big ideas without putting words in their mouth or leading them with our own interpretations? How do we get them to inquire into fat central ideas?

This initial questioning time is where I felt most uncomfortable last year, worried that I was going to put words in the mouths of inquiring minds. Thinking of the questions to ask which allow students to develop their own ideas is the biggest challenge I think I have ahead of me as we begin to discuss PYPX at our school for 2011.

How do you prepare your learners to develop their own unit of inquiry?

Help a Small School

Please help a small school get a staffroom make-over. My aunt, who is the Principal at Springbrook State School, a small 3 teacher, 30 student, government school in country Queensland (Australia), has recently asked for support in a competition.

One Queensland (Australia) school will recieve a $30,000 staffroom makeover. The winning school will be the one with the most votes, so this small school needs as much support as possible. Voting closes on Friday, 22 October 2010, please help Springbrook State School win the ultimate staffroom makeover.

If you'd like to help please click on the following link and vote for Springbrook State School
http://www.staffroomforimprovement.com.au/vote.aspx

Please feel free to forward this message to any other friends or colleagues whom you think would also be keen to support such a worthy cause.

Inquiring into Measurement

Well. I pitched my inquiry idea to the colleagues this morning and it lead to a fantastic conversation, needless to say it's a much better plan now. Rather than asking the kids to develop plans for fishtanks, sand boxes or swimming pools which will never be put into play, we're going to design and build planter boxes for the windows. This was an idea which grew from our discussion about connecting maths not only to the real world but to our unit of inquiry also - our central idea is "The material and form of an object affects it's use". Hello, makes perfect sense.

So, here's the task: Design, plan and build a planter box which can be stored on our windowsill. You will need to consider what materials you will use, how much of them you will need and how much soil you will require. You will need to prepare an accurate and detailed diagram as the plan for your planter box. All of the finished boxes will have a new home on our window.

How do you provide opportunities for kids to develop conceptual understandings in meaningful, real world situations?

My Life as a Mathematician

This week's prompt from Melanie is: Your Life as a Mathematician. When you're not at school are you still a mathematician? How do you use math to solve problems in your daily life? How did you use it today?

If you asked me 6 months ago the answer was unequivocally, “I am not”. As I looked around for ways to engage students in inquiring into maths concepts, rather than teaching them, I realised that we are all mathematicians. Perhaps not in the traditional Archimedes or Adam Spencer sense, but we all certainly use maths in our daily lives. As I looked for ways to improve my teaching of maths I forced myself to find reasons for knowing or understanding these concepts. If we aren’t going to use it in the world, or build on the understandings for some future purpose, than why learn it in the first place?

I started with the obvious … How much money will this cost, sometimes estimating, how much change will I receive? Walking through the isles of the supermarket shelves, which should I buy the big pack for $20 (56+6 dishwashing tablets) or the smaller one for $10 (22+8)? Calculating the time it will take to drive from home to the movies, what time should I leave to arrive with plenty of popcorn buying time to spare?

Then I moved on … I recently started running and wearing a Nike+ band, what distance did I run today, how long did it take me, how many calories was that, how many calories did I consume yesterday, am I in front or behind? Recently I’ve started twittering and blogging the stats I’m collecting are fantastic, Redesigning the kitchen and choosing the tiles I have been challenged with shape & space, patterns and measurement all in one – no wonder it is so hard to choose.

Grade five are working on volume and capacity, so I’m looking for areas in my own life where I am forced to apply these conceptual understandings: filling the fish tank or the pool, buying sand for the sand box, adding enough water to the saucepan to allow for the displacement of my artichokes (they were both enormous and delicious).

For me, the challenge to develop ways to facilitate inquiry has been resolved by looking for these concepts in the real world (which in turn becomes the challenge). From these real world examples I try to develop tasks that will give the students an opportunity to uncover the mathematical concepts through their discussions as they work collaboratively together. I agree it is hard, not to mention time consuming, but rewarding when you see the kids make sense of their learning. Learning about mathematical concepts in these ways, and understanding them myself, allows the students to develop their own purpose and application of the concepts. I always wondered how maths would be relevant to me outside of school – hopefully my students will develop this understanding while they are also developing the understanding of the concepts. Making the learning so much richer.

How do you use maths in your real world?

Tweeting...

It’s almost the end of our October break. With my husband away and my daughter in and out doing her own thing, I’ve taken the opportunity to engage in a bit of personal professional development in the form of social networking.

Always one to pick up something new and give it a go, I don’t mind a bit of technology, but after creating my twitter account last year I couldn’t make it work for me. I just didn’t see how on earth I could begin talking to strangers over the Internet. So, like so many good things, I put it down and walked away. With a week in front of me, my shiny new iPad on my lap and no plans for anything else I decided that this was the week.

attribution

It’s been strangely comforting. A little weird at first, voyeuristic certainly, yet over the past few days I relaxed into it. Nervous about where and how to begin I read quite a few ’How To Twitter’ posts (sorry I have read so many blog posts in these last few days I would have no hope of finding them again to attribute) which all seemed to offer the same advice: find some people with similar interests to you and follow them. As I clicked and navigated my way around I found there were loads of teachers just like me! I realised, as I started flicking more and more through tweeters (is that what a twitter post is called?) and profiles and links to web sites or blogs that this was an opportunity for me to find like minded educators – not only find them, an opportunity to follow them and learn from them.

Always a little slow on the uptake I then found links and references to things called PLNs. Never big on acronyms I investigated a little further and realised just how ahead of the times my own realisation had been. Through all of my twittering I began to feel revitalised about my own teaching practises and develop so many new ideas and plans for learning opportunities for my students. I have been having lots fun these holidays thinking about work.

This week I embarked upon my own learning inquiry – perhaps stumbled is a little more accurate because I hadn’t gone out looking to begin an inquiry. I just wanted to see if Twitter could work for me. I realise of course this was an inquiry and for me a most valuable one at that. Sharing in the learning experiences of my students is not enough, I realise that I also need to learn in the ways I am expecting them to learn. Using technology is a big part of what I do in the classroom, finding new and innovative ways to express yourself is exciting. I believe that it’s this excitement that contributes to making learning fun. I need to do it too, not as a teacher, but as myself. This is how I will truly learn.

This week of fall break has been one of my most productive yet. I have made some new friends (is it appropriate to call people whom I follow or who follow me friends?). Friends whom I know will help me to understand more about education, about learning and about technology. Thank you to all of those who have let me follow them and especially thank you to those of you who now follow me. I sincerely look forward to the learning we will do together.

Reading in the Classroom

A while ago I found myself questioning the purpose of traditional literacy circle sessions in the classroom. Why do we split the kids into ability groups, give them three or four books to choose from and tell them how to organise themselves? I couldn’t justify continuing with this traditional approach as I watched the students become less and less enthusiastic about reading. A colleague suggested I read Nancie Atwell’s, In the Middle: New understandings about writing, reading and learning (1998). As I read through her ideas I found myself adapting the concepts to suit younger students and my own personal philosophy. I realised that my main (reading) objective as a 5^th grade teacher was to have my kids leaving the classroom identifying as readers. I realised that the only way I was going to achieve this effectively was to give the kids control of their own reading. So, after quite an insightful (for me) and lengthy discussion with the kids, we all went down to the library where the students were invited to select the book they would like to read – no need to find multiple copies, no need to be fiction, no need to be a chapter book, no need for it to be a book (as long as you could borrow it from the library), there was no need words at all in fact.

The remainder of the year was one learning experience after another for me. As the students began to take control of the books they were reading during ‘literacy circle’ sessions they began to talk about books, unprompted, throughout the day. I often heard them talking about what they were reading as they walked in in the mornings and as they walked out on their way to lunch. They would compare and share authors, they recommended reading material of all different genres and styles. The students themselves initiated reading circles as they began to find like-minded readers – and sometimes in the most surprising of partnerships. As the year came to a close many parents commented on the diversity of reading material their child had been engaged in over the year, including holiday periods. The results could not have been more positive, as I said goodbye to last year’s grade five students I knew they were leaving the classroom not only as readers but identifying as readers.

It stands to reason then, at the beginning of this school year there were no literacy circle groups assigned, no books offered as a place to start. Our literacy sessions this year started with conversations about reading. Questions and conversations, which were very similar to those posted by Melanie in her blog, Once Upon a Teacher, because reading in the classroom should happen just as it does in the real world. In our classroom we developed a list of reader’s rights. These rights form the basis for our reading together:

What does reading look like in your classroom?

My Life as a Reader

I am a reader. I don’t read everything all the time, nor do I read things quickly, although I don’t read slowly – I don’t think. In a conversation only recently I found myself explaining that if I read a book too quickly then I feel duped somehow, like the pleasure has been stolen from me for the rushing. I don’t have a favourite place to read, nor do I have a favourite thing to read. It depends on where I am or on my mood or how much time I have.

None of that really matters though does it? I identify as a reader. I like to browse through reading material; I like to walk through the bookstore at every airport I go through. Despite myself, I walk into the local bookstore to browse through the books, even though I don’t read the language many of them are written in. I don’t really like libraries because those books aren’t for keeping or collecting. I love to see the books growing in number on the shelves at home. I love the feeling of reading a book fresh from the bookshop, the way the spine hasn’t yet been tainted, the pages haven’t been turned by anyone but me.

My mother still jokes about the time I catalogued all of the books at home, Dewey decimal style, as a child. I don’t do that any more, but I do need to keep the genres together. It’s strangely calming to reorganise the books at times too, of course genre always comes first.

I read for work: young authors (at the moment they are 10 & 11 years of age), educational books, books about text type, teaching resource guides, journal articles, chapter books, picture books, comic books, graphic novels, web pages and emails. I read for pleasure: historical fiction (to understand more about Australia, where I grew up and Germany, where I live now), crime, thriller, travel, cooking, biographies and self help books, emails and magazines. I read for instructions when I get new stuff or when I want to learn without figuring it out myself first, when I am shopping to make informed choices and when I am travelling, driving or navigating public transport. I read without even thinking about it.

Isn’t this what reading is all about? Using the written word to make sense of our world and go further within it?

How do you read?