Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Twitter for the classroom

I am trying out the new twitter for the classroom, it sounds quite interesting. I have set up accounts for all the students under my account and we are going to use it for communicating and sharing ideas. I showed the class on Tuesday and they are all keen.
Watch this space and I will tell you how it works out!

Sunday, April 25, 2010

New books about to be published!

Over the holidays I managed to finish the two books I started in the previous holiday. Magic of the Mac for the Classroom is one of the books. I wrote this specifically for teachers who are encountering Mac computers for the first time and need to find out more tips and tricks for using a Mac. I have also explained how to use the I-Life and I-Works programmes and provided ideas for use in the classroom.
The other book is a reading comprehension book with questions and activities for 2009 part one and two journals. I have included inference, evaluative, re-organistation and retelling questions and the activities have some e-learning suggestions as well as practical activities which are based on current best practice thinking skills. I am working on the part three and four books so there will be a set of two for 2009 and in the future will create a set for 2008 and 2010. I use these myself in the classroom and have found them very useful.

Term one over!

The first term was so busy I have not had a chance to keep up with this blog. I felt that there was so much testing it didn't leave much time for actual teaching!

I have enjoyed teaching in the digital classroom with so many of the latest I-Macs. The students have all completed a Keynote about their PYP inquiry topic, used Numbers and Pages for creating graphs and tables as our strand for maths, created a wiki web site for their next PYP inquiry topic, used Pages for publishing poems and stories and this term each student has a journal for personal recounts. The students also created movies acting out a role play to show a learner profile. We used our flip video camera to film and i-movie for editing.
I have made good use of the resources I created last year such as the literacy safari, the resources web sites and netvibes pages. I create a web site resource for each inquiry so that students can be directed to their central idea, lines of inquiry and key questions and have web resources to follow the inquiry.
Here is our class web site!