Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ulearn 2011

Am currently sitting in a keynote at Ulearn and soaking up the amazing learning atmosphere here.  I love Ulearn and Belinda...please, please, please can I come again next year!!  It is great to be at a conference with like-minded, motivated teachers who are sharing ideas and teaching philiosophies that challenge my teaching and thinking. 
Actually got up early this morning and went to an Early Bird session which was probably the best breakout I have attended so far.  Got lots of ideas and some great links.  Check out this wikispace for some inspiration http://rellco.wikispaces.com/.  
Am looking forward to the rest of the day and apparently the famous Conference Dinner tonight!  It's all about networking...or so I'm told. :)

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

ICT Lead teacher meeting

Today we had our ICT Lead Teacher meeting.  I have learned some new links which I will try out including:

toonlet.com - great to create comics etc - could be used for reading retells etc

mathzlinks wiki - has some great links for each maths stage

snack tools - great to upload kid pix and create slide shows etc.

We also discussed  RSS feeds (googlereader etc) which are a great tool to keep up to date with things happening on other blogs/wikis etc.   Also created my own igoogle homepage and  google reader/alerts to track things.  Amazing the number of things you can do on Google!! 

Will have fun this weekend playing around with these new applications and how they can be applied in my classroom.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

ICT Lead Teacher Workshop

It was great to go to Botany Downs Primary School today and see what they are doing with ICT.  Walking through the classrooms has given me some good ideas to use in my own class and inspired me to integrate ICT more throughout my class programme.  I was impressed that there is an expecation that every teacher in the school have a blog.  I think this is a great way to get teachers feeling more confident about using ICT and see the value in doing this for students and their families. 

Some sites I will try are:

Communication for all
Jelly pages
Picture Trail
literactive
www.city.lego.com
Comic life 2
Artrage
Smile box
Tagxedo
Kerpoof.com

I am also keen to set up a Digital Learning Centre for my class to refer to when they are doing maths/literacy/inquiry.  I saw a very good example of this at Botany today which is being used widley throughout the school.

Belinda shared her ipad with us and it would be an amazing tool to use in the class.  They have alot of apps that are not available on mac and I can see that they would add value to the childrens learning and motivation.

My goals until the next meeting are:
  •  To set up a Digital Learning Centre - Start with reading and move onto maths and literacy
  •  Use Communication for All within reading groups - start with Clownfish
  •   Use kidspiration as a brainstorming tool for reading groups.