Voicethread

Trying voicethread again for collaboration on establishing a shared view of learning.
I hope it works this time.

Week 7 Term 3 - The start of my Professional Practice Project

I have decided to use the SOLO Taxonomy designed by Pam Hook and Julie Mills to improve my practice as a teacher in designing and implementing a learning programme that will help my students to know themselves better as learners and to help them become reflective learners.
Just a little bit of background on why I have finally chosen this professional development design:
Pam and Julie are experiences consultants in teaching and learning and ICT.
They help teachers with developing pedagogoies that will support thinking and learning as well as e-learning.
The SOLO Taxonomy ( Biggs & Collis, 1982) provides a measure of understanding of thinking, it can be used effectively across all learning areas in a differentiated learning programme and it empowers students to assess their learning and determine their next steps in the learning process.

Using this model, I will follow the steps of:
* establishing a shared definition of what learning is
* share with the students the SOLO symbols and how these relate to levels of understanding and thinking

* develop student self-assessment rubrics with the students - relating learning outcomes to the SOLO symbols of understanding and thinking
* implement the use of HOT maps or suitable alternatives to guide and develop thinking processes
* implement ICT and Thinking interventions to enhance the learning process



The first challenge in helping students become lifelong learners is establishing a common understanding about learning and the learning process.
This week as an important first step in helping the students to understand themselves as learners, the goal is to establish a shared understanding of what learning is.
I asked the students to answer the following questions:
*What is learning?
*How do you know you are learning?
*How do you know how well you are learning?
*How do you know what to do next with your learning?
When I thought about the first question, ‘What is learning?, I realised that this is quite a difficult question to answer. I think that learning certainly means different things to different people. As an educator, my philosophy of teaching and learning and the constructivist learning theory that I adopt influences my thinking on learning.

The student’s responses to this question were:

BP - Learning is something that anybody can do. When learn people they get more knowledge.

CK - Learning is when you are taught or teach yourself to do something. You can have a discussion about it or just talk to someone about it.

RI - Learning is something that teaches us ways to know different things.

AN - Learning is working and thinking. You learn while your working.

JB - Learning is when you learn new things and the teacher teaches you how to do it.

DP - I think learning is when you ... I am not sure.

BM - I think learning is when a person or a group of people work together or alone to work something out or learn each others opinions.

EF - Learning is being taught to do something that you don't know how to do. It teaches you right from wrong, maths, spelling, how to walk, how to watch a movie and and every thing else there is that you don't know.

CC - ''i don't really know to be quite honesed''

OB - Learning is were you learn something new. Every day you should learn at least 1 thing new.

EM - Learning is a way to know things.

BR - I think learning is something where you get lots of new ideas in your mind and use them.

The interesting thing to note is that there is a varied sense of what learning might be. What is common about these responses is that they do not offer much that is useful to the learners in my class as they try to understand the learning process, or what to do next with their learning. From these responses it is also clear to me that many of the students in my class have gone through the year with little of no understanding of what learning is and/or what it is to learn. I feel shocked about this. How could students in my class become life-long learners if they are not clear about what learning means.

From the responses to the questions my next steps are:
*Share with the group their responses to the question – ‘What is learning?’
*Discuss how they felt about answering this question
*Discuss what they feel learning should look like, feel like and sound like.
*Come to a common consensus of what learning is in our classroom and display this 'Learning is …’ for easy reference and clarity.

Other little hitches that I experiences during the week:
I tried to use the narration tool on powerpoint. I really had difficulty with this because even though I saved the recording for each slide only the last recording saved could be hear. I need to work out why this happened.
I also introduced the children to Wordl which is a web2.0 tool which is a free open source tool.
Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
I gave the children five minutes to write down all the words that they thought were associated with learning. However, when they pushed the CREATE button, none of the word clouds materialised. In speaking with our IT department, the problem lies with the updating of software on the school laptops. I am looking into this because I think that the use of Wordl will be quite informative for showing comparisons of developdment of thinking and understanding.

Reflective Practice Week 6

I have been doing some reading on the work presented by Donald Schon on learning, reflection and change.I am particularly interested in his theory of double loop learning and reflection in action. I realise that I have never thought about reflection of learning as reflection during the learning process. I have always focused on reflection once the learning has been completed. I think many teachers would be encouraging this type of reflective practice.
I really like the reference to teaching reflection in action as teaching children to think on their feet.
In his work together with Chris Argyris,Schon says that learning involves the detection and correction of error. This view determines their concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning.
Single-loop learning occurs where something goes wrong, then the starting point for many people is to look for another strategy that will address and work to correct the error, within perimeters of their current thinking. In other words, given or chosen goals, values, plans and rules are drawn upon to fix the error. The fact that it may be these very goals, values, plans and rules that were influential in creating the error are never questioned. According to Argyris and Schön (1974), this is single-loop learning.
They suggest that another response is to question to goals, values, plans and rules themselves and examine these critically. This they describe as double-loop learning. Schon and Argyris explain that this kind of learning may then lead to an alteration of the goals, plans, rules and values creating a shift in the way that strategies are determined in correcting error, in other words, there may be a complete shift in thinking about how to solve the error or problem.

Today,we revisited the Habits of Mind in the context of a scientific way of thinking. We have started to discuss how the Habits of Mind and how these kinds of thinking may actually be happening or evident in our everyday lives. I have printed off some of the Habit of Mind chain strips. This week, as people identify Habits of Mind thinking displayed by others in the class, we will fill in a chain strip. The chain strip asks for the persons name, which Habit they exhibited and what they actually did to display the identified way of thinking.
For next week:
I have created a powerpoint with some questions. I am going to use the Record Narration function to record students responses to these questions.
The questions will give me information on what children think learning is, how they know if they are learning and if they know what to do next with their learning.

Week 5 Term 3

I attended the QSITE conference last Saturday in Townsville. The presenters were from the ICT Learning and Innovation Centre in Brisbane. The focus was on digital story telling, and exploring various free software available such as photostory, audacity and Web 2.0. We also had the opportunity to work with Sam animation which was very interesting and a great deal of fun.
I have also launched into my focus of professional development - reflective and self directed learning supported by e-tools and e-Portfolios.
I have been exploring the Literacy Cycles developed by Dorothy Burt and thinking about developing a cycle with the central focus being reflection. I am in the process of developing this.

As our present Inquiry has a science focus, culminating in a science fair celebration, I have decided to use Art Coasta's 16 Habits of Mind as the main focus for the starting point in talking about and identifying ways of thinking and metacognition.

We started off by talking about and sharing ideas on habits that we may have, good and bad habits and what a habit is and the kinds of habits that we might like to have.
I then spoke to the children about good habits also applying to the way that we think about things.
I had gone onto the Habits of Mind website and downloaded the simplified explanation of each habit with the symbol cards. From this I developed a matching activity. The children worked in pairs, reading the descriptors and matching these to the picture symbols.
In the next lesson we then went through each descriptor and discussed the matching symbol. We also talked about what we might say or do (or what it might sound like or look like) for each of the Habits.
In the next learning we have worked in small groups of 5, with teacher aide support, and highlighted which habits or kind of thinking a scientist might display.
Our next step is to move into some paired research into a famous scientist, and provide 3-5 habits that the scientist of choice displayed and provide an example of each habit- what they actually did or words that described their kind of thinking.

Authentic and meaningful reflection is an important part of the learning process. It fosters critical thinking, connections, deep understanding, and metacognition. Publishing reflections to the web encourages students to find their voice and express their identity more than if they know only the teacher is going to read it.
It seems that Blogs and Voice Threads are two commonly used and effective tools to provide a framework for students to reflect on their learning. Both tools can be built on over time and students can refer back to previous reflections to understand the growth of their learning. On the Voice thread issue, I have found out that Queensland Education has blocked this site so I think that I am going to have to explore alternatives.

In terms of my own further professional development, I have been given permission to attend the 6th Annual IWB and IT conference in Sydney from the 20th - 22nd August.

Upskilling in my own knowledge of e-tools that will support audio reflective practice

I thought that this would be easy because I feel that I am quite Web 2.0 savvy. However, this has been a lot more difficult than I thought. I have had such a problem with Voicethread and have now sent emails out to colleagues and to the Helpline.
When I upload from my computer there is a X in the corner of the block and no image.
When I try it at school I can get the picture, then I record and when I play back there is no sound,. When I type a message there is no sound. I have listened to the tutorials and followed their instructions - but I am not having any luck.
However I have discovered another great option for audio reflection of learning - narrating powerpoint presentations. I stumbled cross this accidentally while looking at a site which will help me to download videos that the children have made.

Here are the notes on how to narrate your powerpoint:
THIS OPTION IS FOR MAC COMPUTERS

Recording a Voice Narration
When you record a narration, you must run through the presentation and record on each slide. If you need
to, you can pause and resume recording. Please note that in order to record a voice narration, your
computer needs to have a sound card, microphone, and speakers. Follow these steps to record a voice
narration:

1. Make sure your PowerPoint presentation is saved.
2. On the Outline tab or Slides tab in normal view, select the slide icon or thumbnail that you want
to start the recording on.
3. On the Slide Show menu, click Record Narration.
4. Click Set Microphone Level, follow the directions to set your microphone level, and then click
OK.
5. Do one of the following:
A. Embed the narration by clicking OK on the Record Narration dialog box.
B. Link the narration. To do this, on the Record Narration dialog box:
a. Check the checkbox next Link narrations in.
b. Click Browse.
c. Click a folder in the list, and then click Select.
d. Click OK.
6. If in step 2 you selected the first slide to begin the recording on, go to step 7. If you selected a
different slide to begin the recording on, the Record Narration dialog box appears. Do one of
the following:
A. To start the narration on the first slide in the presentation, click First Slide.
B. To start the narration on the currently selected slide, click Current Slide.
7. In slide show view, begin speaking into the microphone, and click in the slide to advance. Begin
recording for that slide, advance to the next slide, and so on. You can pause and resume the
narration.

Note: 1. When advancing the presentation to the next slide, halt briefly for 5 seconds before starting the narration.
2. To pause and resume the narration right-click on the slide and on the shortcut menu select Pause
Narration or Resume Narration.
8. Repeat step 7 until you've run through the slides, and when you come to the black Exit screen,
click in it.
9. The narration is automatically saved, and a message appears asking if you want to save the
timings for the show as well. Do one of the following:
A. To save the timings, click Save. Your slides appear in slide sorter view, with the slide
timings shown below each one.
B. To cancel the timings, click Don't Save. (You can record the timings separately.)

Note: 1. In your presentation, only one sound can play at a time. So if you have inserted a sound that is to play
automatically, it will get overridden by voice narration.
2. To run the presentation without narration, on the Slide Show menu, click Set Up Show, and then select the
Show without narration check box.

Editing Voice Narrations
It is possible to modify the voice narration you have added to your PowerPoint presentation, turn it on or
off, or simply remove it completely from the presentation.
To remove voice narration from a slide:
1. On the slide, select the sound icon or CD icon, and then press DELETE.
2. Repeat for each slide you want to delete the file from.

To turn narration on or off in a presentation:
1. On the Slide Show menu, click Set Up Show.
2. To turn narration on or off, clear or select the Show without narration check box.

To re-record a voice narration
1. Follow steps 1 through 6 in the Recording a Voice Narration section of this handout.
2. When the slide for which you want to re-record the voice narration appears in slide show
A. To stop re-recording, press ESC.
B. To continue re-recording, click the mouse to advance to the next slide, speak the
narration on the slide, and click to the next slide to continue re-recording. To end the re-
recording before you go through all the slides, press ESC.


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