STaRT Tech Learning Community

My name is Nisha Ganchar. For my inquiry, I am planning on making a website for the parents. Since I teach French Immersion, parents often need help with oral language. On this website, each parent will be able to log in and hear audio of spelling tests and other news from our class. I am hoping this will make communication between home and school easier. Check it out so far at www.division17.notlong.com

For my project at Aberdeen, I going to try and increase the level of my students writing by using The Writing Room and technology in general. Because this is grade six and seven, I am also requiring that they type up their essays, provide proper formatting and referencing. This has proven a bigger task than originally anticipated because my students cover the spectrum of ability levels. My students are very comfortable with the basic uses of the computer, where the games are, and the tricks to change their settings. However, I have found that students are not trained in how to use the computer as a tool to independently complete task. The only use as a tool is for teachers through STAR reader or Success Maker. Thus, my first assumption has been proven false - student familiarity with the computer does not generalize across all applications.

I have decided to start from the beginning and immerse my students in many different application experiences on the computer. Gary has come in once a week, for many weeks (Thank-you Gary!), to support me in this and show the students a new application each week to generate an excitement about using various applications and so that students have a solid knowledge of the applications available. Next, I plan to create a bank of computers in my class to serve several purposes. The first purpose is simply so that students have constant access to the computers. Ideally, using computers to complete tasks becomes part of the classroom environment. Next, I have found that my student’s ability levels sit at two polar opposites, splitting the class evenly. For most projects, half of the students will be finished and the other half will be struggling with their work. In a recent example, I took students to the computer lab four - five times to complete a project, when half the class had finished in two sessions. This means that projects such as The Writing Room or in-class projects are difficult because I have to take the entire class to the computer lab and half my class will have completed the project, while the other half requires much support. I am working towards peer helpers, but this class has much history and at this point, peer helpers must be selected very carefully.

Six in-class computers will allow struggling students more time to complete and allow me to differentiate their instruction without having to drag the entire class to the computer lab. By having students access a bank of computers on a rotating basis, I can stagger the responses in the Writing Room, so students in my class can not only respond to other classes, but to each others comments. I believe that this will make The Writing Room much more interactive than receiving twenty-six, unrelated entries all at once. All students can take the time they need to complete, well thought out entries and because the entries are staggered, the conversation strands might be longer as well.

All that to say... I am looking at if student written output increases over the course of the term by offering many on-line opportunities to work in different applications. As well, I am trying to create a technology rich environment where students become accustomed to using technology for their classroom projects. If technology is used all the time, is available all the time, will students be more likely to use it to present and create their projects? To assess this, I am going to have students create a written response using pen and paper and create a similar response using typed response. I will use a similar or the same questions in March and in June to see if written responses increase, both pen and paper as well as on-line.

I just wanted to share 3 Manitoba resources that I find interesting/helpful.
1.Curriculum Navigator
http://www3.edu.gov.mb.ca/cn/index.jsp
Creating an account in Curriculum Navigator provides you with:
-curriculum-matched flexible, integrated, instructional and assessment strategies
-downloadable and customizable electronic back line masters
-links to approved, curriculum-matched websites
-online help and tutorials
-student exemplars and sample activities
-record keeping and outcomes tracking
2.Bits and Bytes (check the archives)
http://www.wsd1.org/bitsbytes/
"Bits and Bytes" is an educationally based newsletter, which has been distributed throughout the Winnipeg School Division since October 1984. Its focus is to provide educators with tips and techniques to help them integrate technology to enhance learning in K-12 classrooms. It is published nine times each school year midway through the months of October through June.
3. Schlib Digest
SCHLIB is a listserv for those who are interested in resources and opportunities for teachers and library staffs in the province.
There are usually one or two topics sent daily.
An example from Nov. 23:
Today's Topics:
1. New Downloadable Media Literacy Resources (Margaret Stimson)
2. Pageflakes (Margaret Stimson)
http://merlin.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo.cgi/schlib

November Update -The Writing Room

Click on the below link to view a streaming Quicktime video of my progress with using First Class 8.3 Client and the Writing Room with my grade 5 students. In summary, I have created a class conference folder for my students to respond on weekly topics in the same fashion as how they would use the Writing Room. We have just begun to use the Writing Room, but hoping to connect with other grade 5 teachers who can reply to.

Click Here to View Video Clip!

I wanted to just highlight what I would like to do with my classes. To start with, I'm looking at improving students' level of understanding of math 10 and also to keep them engaged by showing a higher degree of relevancy of the material. After the initial session, there are two aspects I would like to focus on.

1. Creating a webpage so that students and teachers can access the daily homework, find out when assignments and tests are and also to include the lessons on the page. When students miss one or more classes, they feel they get quite behind. Math is the one subject where "reading the text" doesn't quite cut it.

2. Secondly, I am receiving a tablet and projector at some point in time (it has been ordered). I would like to modify my lessons to include graphics that will engage the students, being able to graph more accurately and show how changes can affect graphs. I will be researching sites that will help in this regard.

I am likely to start the second aspect next semester as I will have a little more time to devote to this. The webpage would be what I would start with. Both parts will definitely move me out of my comfort zone as my level of technology has been limited to my overhead and pen.

I am not even sure if using technology will prove to be effective in improving students' understanding or interest of the material, but with any new experiment, you have to give it a shot.

November 10
This is part of my pro-d activity for today, getting signed on to this blog and moving forward with project plans. I am feeling a bit daunted by the size and complexity of the projects already posted. I would like to set up some kind of a writing conference but am not too sure what would be the best way. So any tips from you writing conference experts would be appreciated. I am also going to get my parent survey ready today to begin my plans for improving parent contact via email/website etc. I have a problem in that I am totally without email at school (it just stopped working) so until that is sorted, I will have to do things as I can at home. Take care everyone and have a great Pro-d!

I have been looking forward to focusing my technology teaching practices into the curriculum in more relevant detail (Writing & Research). Sure, Garage Band, iMovie and such are always a hit with the students, but they do tend to take a long time to come to fruition. And, at times, I get to the end of that unit and think....."What was the purpose of this unit again?" Sure we have a movie, but its initial intent gets muddled up somewhere along the line. My project will be focusing on the using First Class 8.3 Client with my students. Students will use this software to send e-mails, create web pages, and post and respond to student writing in the Writing Room.

With this writing initiative, I am really excited, as are my grade 5 students, to begin this journey. I have a friend in Japan who is requesting me to 'pen pal' up my students to help develop his students' language. Just recently, two of my students replied to a grade 8 poem in the Writing Room. I am still trying to get them to use spell check. Most of my students have good inspirational quotes in their signatures. I think they will present themselves well to other students with tweaked fonts, colours, quotes, and signatures. Plus, they are responding to these e-mails professionally! We have a class conference folder and I post weekly reflection topics: Here is what I posted last Friday:

Today we are going on a field trip into the community. Describe, in detail, your roles and responsibilities as an ambassador of Bakerview Elementary.

(Be sure to spell check your work)

Some Responses:

• My role as a ambassador is very big.I have to keep my hands to my self,act my age ,stay with the class ( don't wander),no rough play,do not talk while someone else is speaking,I will listen to the adult helpers,I will act responsibly and I pay full attention

• As a ambassador of Bakerview Elementary I have the responsibility of being in the oldest grade and to show how great we are of a school to the other schools, teachers and
people who work at the mall. if I were to be unrespectful, I would not be a ambassador of Bakerview Elementary.

-"Life is a dance floor, use it"- Pink

• I wont be walking on the street or screaming and yelling I'll just walk quietly.When I get inside I'm not going shopping or behaving like a monkey.At that time in the middle of going on a ride or writing we wont shove/push others from different schools!

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."~ Bill Gates

Here goes...the hardest part is starting one of these things, but I am confident that it will be worth it. My research topic is Student Online Writing. If you are not aware, I am heading up the Writing Room, a conference on AbbyNet where students in grades 6-8 are posting their writing. So far there has been some activity but we are only at the beginning stage of this project. There are about 10 classes across the district that have indicated that they would like to participate. After talking with Shelley Wilcox about a similar project in Surrey, I learned that there is a size after which a project like this can get too big to work effectively.

So as I begin learning things I will be sharing my findings with YOU, my Tech Learning Community colleagues. Thanks in advance to making this a rich experience.

BTW: I'm doing this blog post using Firefox 2.0 It has built in spell-checking and a whole lot of other great features.

I had posted twice in Blogger so will copy and paste those entries here.
Oct. 25
I went to the training session today with a plan in mind. I definitely want to focus on developing Grade 4 writing skills (and incorporate mini-lessons from the district resource, Developing Writer) and I also want to use the math/literature connection as an activating strategy for the writing activities. (Numeracy is a school goal.) I had picked out ways to integrate technology including word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, and webpage development. After the presentations and talking with others, I now want to explore using a class conference in FirstClass, the "wiki" idea to collaborate with our keypals in Manitoba, Comic Life, HCK and iMovie. I can see I will have to be attending some tech. workshops. I feel limited by the fact I have no computers in my classroom. A pod of 3-4 computers that students could access throughout the day would be nice.
In my plan, I had separate activities to reach specific math and writing outcomes and had only integrated technology with the writing activities. I had done this because I had (mis)understood that we were to focus on literacy, which I had interpreted as reading, writing, etc. After hearing the wide variety of ideas from other teachers, I am going back to integrate technology into the math activities I had planned.
Oct. 28
I have stumbled my way through creating a Writing Conference for my students in FirstClass and also through creating a webpage with the Home Page Construction Kit. I still have some glitches in the conference set-up. In the writing conference I created 4 subconferences where the students will "hand in" particular pieces of writing. On their desktops, the Writing Conference folder icon appeared, with the 4 sub-conference icons inside. When I worked on the Permissions for the sub-conferences, they then also appeared as icons on the students' desktops. I am wondering if I don't have to list the students as subscribers to the sub-conferences as they are already subscribers to the main conference. I have to check that out on Monday but that leads me to my next question. Is there anyway I could access my students' e-mail accounts as an administrator instead of having to keep a list of their user names (7 digits) and passwords (7 more digits)? HCK was fairly easy as I made myself a hard copy of the Help and walked through it step by step. I was baffled trying to find out the URL but finally found a webpage created by another district teacher, plugged in my own name and there it was. I want the students to create their own pages. I have to see on Monday if they have access to HCK. If they did, could I create a webpage for them in my Home Page Folder and then put it into their Home Page folder? Then they would only have to worry about the content of the page. If they don't have HCK they could still use FirstClass to create webpages but those are a little more frustrating in terms of controlling the lay-out. I am working on the wikispaces website. I plan to use this as a way of collaborating with our keypals in Manitoba. This is a perfect way for us to collaborate on writing as they don't have individual e-mail addresses. We would have all had to work through the teacher's e-mail address.
My premise(s) in developing this writing project is/are that students' writing skills and attitudes about writing will improve because:
a) the activating strategy is "fun" math literature
b) they get to collaborate with each other in the Writing Conference in FirstClass
c) they get to collaborate with another Grade 4 student in another province (wikispaces)
d) they get to present their final product in a variety of ways to a larger audience (word processing, webpage, slideshow)
I have played with iPhoto this week. I need a program that they can use to write and illustrate poems and stories as books or slideshows and then publish to the web. If I was doing it all, I would use PPT, but I want them to be involved in the process. I may need some help on this one. I'm not sure what we have at school that they could use. I find that Slideshow in Appleworks is easy for students to use, so I need something like that. I don't want to bother with a digital camera right now so we will be inserting free clipart/graphics. The graphics I tried in iPhoto didn't always work so that would be very frustrating and time consuming for the students, and thus for me.
It looks like I am now getting some computers in my classroom. That will make things so much easier.
Nov. 6
Interesting to read over my previous comments/questions as I "blog" tonight and find I now have some answers to my original problems, and inevitably, more questions and problems.

This is my first time "blogging" so I hope this is correct. My project is Video Learning Objects and my focus is whether or not it improves the oral participation/pronunciation of the French 9 (FSL) students in my class. More to come...

Welcome
This blog has been set up for the STaRT Technology Learning Community. The members of this blog will be recording their thoughts, reflections and findings around their classroom technology projects.