Wiki

My class has been using a wiki regularly since the beginning of the year. They are now (mostly) competent at linking to pages, adding content and editing pages.

We run into the occasional problem such as someone accidentally linking to an already existing page and proceeding to delete all content!! But in general I am incredibly impressed with the skills they have gained in such a short time.

I am now seeing these skills transferred. One of the students in my class has now gone on to create her own wikipedia page. Remember these kids are 9 and 10 years old!

The most positive outcome of using a wiki is the fact that all of the learning that occurs is authentic. It serves a purpose. There is always an audience -- a huge audience!!

Please check it out at http://pohutukawa.wikispaces.com

Questionaut

Checking my various feeds today I came across several mentions of the BBC game 'Questionaut'.It is a beautiful and fascinating online game. The user must figure out a puzzle (no hints or information is given) in order to activate the game. They then answer a range of questions (Science, Maths and English) in order to move to the next island. The questions are a little tricky so probably suit Year 6-8. Check it out at http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/games/questionaut/.

Today was the first of our off-site cluster meetings with our facilitator (etime). We looked at how to use digital cameras properly and how to edit using Picasa. My group had the topic "Discovery". We went around the middle of town taking a variety of photos using the different functions on our cameras. I look forward to using these skills with my class!

World Maths Day

On the 5th of March my class participated in the international online mathematics competition. We had set ourselves a goal to achieve 10 000 correct answers. We booked the pod of laptops and scrounged around the school to get extras so that there was one laptop/computer for every two children. At about 12 the website overloaded and we were unable to log on anymore! Kids were gutted as we had been practising for a week or so beforehand. On the Friday the website updated our scores and the kids were sooo excited because we had guessed we had about 12-14 000 correct answers. When we checked we only had 8600! Kids ended up writing (for some of them) their first email to the organisers of the site. We got a reply later that afternoon apologising and allowing us (and I guess everybody else) access to the site for another week. It was a great lesson in what you can do when you come across something that isn't 'fair'. WorldMathDay people were fantastic. It was such a valuable thing to be part of. Will be lining up to do it again next year (and they are working on ensuring site doesn't crash next year!!!).

Pohutukawa Island

As part of a Social Studies/English unit my students are learning about laws, rights and responsibilities thanks to a couple of fantastic units from English Online and Social Studies Online. We have created an imaginary island where each student has taken on a character with an occupation that we brainstormed as being vital to the survival of our community. We are sharing this journey on our wiki http://pohutukawa.wikispaces.com. We are updating it pretty regularly if you would like to check it out.

Wiki

The students of M3 (who are aged between 8 and 10) have started adding content onto the class wiki. They are responsible for a certain graph or compenent of statistics and in pairs have to write an explanation and show an example of how to do this. This has taken their learning to another level as they are now having to consider how to best explain their topic. The fact that they have a worldwide audience means that they are harder on themselves than I would be! They have had to learn how to edit the wiki, how to search for info on google, creating graphs using excel as well as how to work with another person! They are still getting 'taught' how to do stats but then they are actually doing something useful with the knowledge. Check out the results on our wiki

Blogs 2

Blogs are going incredibly well. There seems to be ao much interest in celebrating their learning. The first thing we do every day is check out recent posts and look at our cluster map to see how many visitors we have. The kids are excited to offer friends and family the opprotunity to visit their blogs. They are getting the hang of it and are even learning new things about using them and teaching me which is great. I love to see that they are posting out of school hours too!