Teaching in the big wired world

This week’s WOW is Maths Starter a Day. This site features a calendar that has links to a different maths problem for each day. The problems are based on a range of maths topics and encourage problem solving skills as they provide JUST enough information for the students to solve the problem. (Can be quite frustrating for some students at first until they start to develop their problem solving skills.)

I have used this in class as an introduction to the Maths lesson and it is also an excellent activity for early finishers. The problems range in difficulty and I would suggest that they are probably best suited to high grade 3 students and upwards.

All problems have the answers and usually some demonstration / explanation of how to solve the problems at the bottom of the page.

Here’s the poster for Maths Starter a Day

Here’s the site- Maths Starter a Day

Tags: Maths, problem solving, WOW

This week’s Website Of the Week is Writing Fun by Jenny Eather. This site used to be a part of Rainforest Maths before it closed down (it has reopened now). Writing Fun is excellent for showing kids the ‘recipe’ for many genres of writing. It comes with several examples (increasing in difficulty) of each genre and a printable template for the students to use when they are writing. Any genre’s writing lesson should start with this on the IWB.

I use this website to teach the students about each style of genre we are writing in.  After reading through the genre on the first day and reading a couple of examples, I get the students to lead the second and third day by coming up and circling the various parts, words etc on different examples.

Here’s the poster for writing fun.

Tags: IWB, literacy, WOW

After a long Christmas holiday break I am back online and ready with the first of this year’s WOW- Website Of the Week. Australian teachers will be starting (however reluctantly) to get back into school mode now and this week’s website is an excellent resource to kick start your new class’ spelling program- www.spellingcity.com This website is simple to use and has huge benefits for students.

Teachers can set up weekly word lists (or students can add their own) and the students can then either press ‘teach me,’ ‘test me’ or a ‘play a game.’ The website actually creates games such as hangman using the word list entered. It even tests the words using an audio version of your word (and even puts the word in a sentence) – AMAZING! This site allows you to have multiple levels of lists happening in your class without the need to spend hours testing all the different groups. Once the students complete the test they can print off a full report on how they went.

Here’s the WOW poster for this week: spellingcity

Tags: literacy, spelling, WOW

As suggested by one of the visitors to this blog- I am attaching the posters I have made so far for Website of the Week.

I suggest you print these out in colour and hang them above the photocopier to encourage teachers to visit new and interesting sites.

WOW#1- writingfix

WOW #- Mathionaire

WOW #3- Wordle

WOW # 4- Exploratree- Resources for Thinking Curriculum

WOW # 5- Santas village

Let me know if you have any other sites you think would be great for WOW!

Tags: resources, WOW

The website: www.writingfix.com

This website has a daily writing ideas generator. Also features ideas generator for plot, characters and setting. Website includes resources for teaching writing (although this part id still in development).

Suitable for: grade3-adult (more suitable for teachers)

Suggested uses: Students viist site to get ideas for their writing, teachers could use the daily ideas generator for writing time ideas / story starters.

Tags: literacy, WOW, writing

www.wordle.net

Enter keywords about any topic and this website will create a ‘word cloud’ using those words. Words that are typed more frequently are larger in the cloud. You can fully customise the colour of the words / layout.

Suitable for: Prep-adult

Suggested uses: Students type in spelling words, find keywords in an article or type words relating to prior knowledge of a topic.

Tags: WOW

In a bid to get more people interested in technology and integrating ICT into their classroom at my school, I have developed a new idea: Website of the Week (WOW).

Each week I now create a promotional A4 poster featuring a new educational website. I include details such as the website’s name, the grade levels it is suitable for and possible uses for it in the classroom. At the bottom of the ‘poster’ I have tear off tags with the website’s address on them. This poster is placed above the photocopier every week- a place where all teachers go daily and usually stare aimlessly at the wall in front of them.

So far so good. This strategy has succeeded in getting staff to talk about technology in the staffroom and trial new things in their classrooms. How exciting to have other staff sharing ideas on how they have used the same website in their classrooms.

I plan to include each week’s website here on this blog- look for the WOW tag.

Tags: resources, WOW

The web is certainly not all evil- in fact it is becoming one of the most inclusive learning tools around.

In M. D Robyler’s (2006)  book Integrating Educational Technology into Education, Dave Edyburn pointed out the importance of students with special needs having access to the internet. He suggested an alternative web browser (www.Opera.com) for these students, as it is sensitive to physical and sensory disabilities. 

As demonstrated with Edyburn’s suggestion, the numerous resources available on the web today make learning accessible to more people than ever before. There are web browsers that cater for all types of special needs, for example children with autism can have their own specially made browser (see http://www.zacbrowser.com/)  and even the visually impaired have a suitable browser to cater for their needs (see www.webbie.org.uk).

Tags: internet, links, special needs

Just visited http://tagcrowd.com

Similar to www.wordle.net except you can make a tag crowd out of any webpage, file or text. Useful for doing keywords with students. I had a practise using this site as the address and found it to be very quick and easy. The only problem isee is that you cannot save the crowd once it has been produced (hence the reason I have not included my result here). You can print it, but you cannot save it.

Tags: literacy, tools, web2.0

Welcome to my new blog on my ICT and education learning journey. Yes, it’s a journey and always WILL be a journey. As I have come to discover in the last 6 month particularly- just when you finally start to get your head around something new and think you are almost getting up to date with the latest and greatest in educational technology, something else comes out! Then something else and then something else. So yes, researching educational technologies and keeping up-to-date is a lifelong journey. One that I hope you can share with me.

I have tried many varying forms to share my journey include different blogs, wikis and wegpages. I have finally decided that an edublog is the way to go and will now concentrate all my efforts onto collating my learnings here.

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Tags: intro, links