As you can see from the above link Room 17 has been working on wikispaces. We have a wiki set up for each child and we use this as a link to each other, to home and to anyone who is interested in what we are up to in Room 17. We have been posting examples of our lessons, including Reading, Art and Physical Education (we are attending Swimming lessons and running Cross Country this term). We were able to share our posts with our parents at our recent 3 Way Conferences and I am hoping that this will encourage parents to keep a watch on what the children are posting and make comments.
I have had some fantastic feedback from parents about the interest and involvement in the Olympics, so it is great to know that what we are doing at school is transferring to discussions at home!! I have also been thrilled that children have been very enthusiastic about taking work home to finish, have been adding bits to their wiki pages at home and are beginning to think of things that they would like to add to their own pages.
Another bonus of this exercise is that the children are collaborating on many more things in class than they did before. If someone finds something exciting to add to their wiki, they enthusiastically share in class and when we visit the IT lab then they can ask each other for help to add bits and pieces that they have seen on one another's pages.
We have mainly been using Fotobable and Educreations to add content, but the children are also posting directly onto their wikipages, including pictures to illustrate their report writing. I was thrilled to hear that wikispaces has added a mobile site, as this means that we will be able to work on the wiki pages using the iPads in class, not just wait for time in the IT lab, or wait for turns on our class computer. From the wikispaces webinar, I picked up that I could embed the Google translator app, but apart from one family in may class, I suspect that most parents actually want to see their children working in English. I will canvas opinion on this with my children.
We have also been part of the Edmodo community this year and some children, particularly, enjoy posting messages on this. I recently tuned into Edmodocon, which gave me some more tips as to how to use this tool more fully with the children. The updates which have been released this week make it a much more exciting and useable tool.
We have also been using our iPads to the max - incorporating them into our maths programme - this week we will be not only recording what we were doing during lessons, but making an iMovie showing our map making and following directions, using I Can Animate to demonstrate the children's understanding of flip, slide, turn (reflect, translate and rotate). We are using the iPads during Literacy to aid in the implementation of Daily 5, listening to stories, working on word and grammar games and using Scribble Press to write our own books, using Twitter to write tweets and from now on access our wiki pages. We are using our iPads for artistic endeavours, not only taking pictures of any art we have done and talking about the process, but actually incorporating them as a tool for photography and manipulation.
As part of our Topic this term (Olympics, of course) the children have used the iPads to research an Olympian, past or present, from any country and will be able to publish these on their wiki pages. We previously wrote a report together about Ian Fergusson, which I have posted on my own page (this is used as an example for the children of what I would like to see on their own pages - my page is like a pretend student's page). This was followed by a collaborative research and brainstorm about Mark Todd, from which the children wrote their own short report and published to their own wiki pages, adding a picture.
Our next major step is for the children to manipulate, publish and upload their own work. This past week they learned how to update their wiki pages and they picked it up amazingly fast. This coming week I will show them how to upload content from the iPad (which, again, will be made easier by wikispaces mobile ability, assuming you can send content straight from the iPad onto the wiki). I will train a couple of experts to use and manipulate content on iMovie.
PS - Just for fun we are also using Class Dojo for the morning roll, for rewards for passing maths and spelling tests, for bringing in Homework on Friday and newsletter slips on Thursdays. I have just added rewards for coping with the independence and self-management expected to run the Daily 5 programme. Fast and easy to use and VERY appealing for the children!
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