My Digital Classroom

Once again, we taught our inter-disciplinary unit on the Great Barrier Reef. Unlike last year, however, we added a few new things to make the unit more interesting, effective and authentic.

Lat term we were able to place a Skype call to marine biologist, former teacher and current charter boat captain, Matt McDonald. As it is really difficult to have new software installed on the computers on our school network, I ran a portable version of Skype from my USB. These USB apps are great and I’ve been able to get around a number of software issues by running programs straight from the usb. My favourites are the portable versions of Skype, Firefox, Audacity, Camstudio (screencasting), Virtual Dub (video editing) and VLC media player. These programs open up the possibilities in the classroom and enable you to do a number of activities which were previously prohibitive.

To minimise the potential for the Skype call to drop out, I made the call during recess. The students handled this remarkably well and I was surprised by how excited they got when the image of Matt appeared on the IWB. Tapping into the knowledge of an expert located on the reef was invaluable for the students and they got to ask a number of interesting questions and have them answered.

I’m sure anyone who has used the Activotes, or any other ’student response system’ can testify, the students absolutely love them. They are a great way to get kids excited about doing a quiz and revising for a test, whilst also giving teachers an idea about the areas they need to go over with certain students.

While we have a lot of IWBs at school, we have one class set of Activotes that reside in the Resource Centre (and are loaned out to teachers). Therefore, I am not someone who is going to get them out for a lesson just so I can do an ad hoc question about the students opinion on a certain topic. That’s what classroom discussion is for. So here’s how I generally use the Activotes:

At the conclusion of a unit in SOSE (History/Geography/Economics), I give the students a quiz using the activotes which I use as part of my formative assessment. I can then see the areas which I need to revisit with different members of the class. Ok, nothing new and I’m sure it’s how they get used most of the time. Incidentally, I don’t like to use them for summative assessment, as there is only so much information you can gain about a student’s understanding from a multiple choice test. What I create out of this quiz instead is a revision sheet that contains the questions from the revision test and whether or not the students got these answers correct.

Revision sheet

At the end of the quiz, I export the results to an Excel file and set up a new sheet with IF statements that will put in “correct” or “incorrect” into each cell, depending on the student’s answer for that question.

I then mail-merge the Excel file with a Word document that has all the questions on it, along with the student name and their result in the revision test. The students are then given this as their revision sheet for the unit test. For those students who perform below par on the revision test, I also give them a more structured sheet to aid in their revision.

Today we had all six classes of year 8 English (two classes working together each time) complete an activity based on de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats. We are studying A Bridge To Wiseman’s Cove (an excellent book by James Moloney) and to break things up a bit, we opened up the dividing wall between the two classes, divided the two classes into 10 smaller groups, with each group looking at a particular character. The groups then had to look at their character through the lens of the red hat (emotions), green hat (ideas – predictions), white hat (facts), Black hat (criticisms), Yellow hat (positives) and blue hat (summary of other hats). At the end of the session, each group had to present their findings to the wider group.

The activity seemed to work really well, with students finding evidence to support each of their points, and it was really interesting to see them having to look for the positives in undesirable characters.

The IWB file made it really easy to keep track of the time allocated for each hat, and gave the students a visual cue as to what they needed to be focused on during that time period.

I did receive the comment at the end of the day by another teacher who wasn’t 100% sure about what they gained from the lesson, as much of the information presented by her students had already been covered when they constructed individual mind maps for each of the characters earlier in the novel study. I’m sure this is true to a certain extent, however, I think that they were also picking up new things and were forced to think deeper than they had previously done about their character. In addition to this, it will also have reinforced and built upon the work that was done earlier in the novel.

I do think highly of this teacher and think that we have to look critically at our lessons, making sure that we review what student learning took place.

Today I taught my other year 7 English class using a lesson I had prepared for the IWB. This is part of an Action Learning project we are undertaking on enhancing the teaching of the Reading to Learn scaffolding program using the IWB.

Reading to Learn is a program in which all students are scaffolded so they are able to successfully read and write age appropriate texts. The class looks at a key passage from the text and the teacher directs them to important words, phrases and language features in the text, which are then highlighted by the students.

The passage we were looking at came from the Roald Dahl book, Boy as it is a good text for teaching the students how to write reflectively. I had a copy of the passage on the IWB with buttons above certain words which, when clicked, took you to another page which gave more insight into that particular word, place or thing. On one page was a series of maps and photographs showing the location of the Bristol channel and Weston-super-Mare. On another was a sound file for the word ’swooshing’ and a bit of detail and other examples of onomatopoeia. I then had a picture of a paddle steamer which was linked to a video of a paddle steamer leaving a pier.

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Allowing a student to control the whiteboard enabled me to move around the classroom freely, and the incentive of extra homeroom points meant that I had everyone in the class answering the different questions. It was something I should have offered my homeroom when I did it with them last Wednesday as I had far fewer contributors, although as it was the last lesson and they had just finished a test, I might have been asking too much.

What was also good about today was that the lesson was well received by the teachers in my class, as well as by the two DPs who visited the class of another teacher who was using the file. I just wish the file didn’t take so long to make!