Friday Week 3 Term 4

Today has been very interesting. We have been working on our portfolios with a focus on publishing our poetry. I introduced the children to Imagechef , a web 2.0 tool. It has many options for publishing to the web.
I was amazed at how quickly the children picked up how to use the different programmes and how inquisitive they were to explore other options available on the site. It would have been wonderful if I could have recorded the conversations how how else we could use the different tools for different aspects of our learning.
The children also learnt how to find the embed code and how to upload this on to their blog ( e-Portfolio). Once they knew how to do this, many of the children explored other presentation options and went ahead and did the uploading themselves.
Here are the links to some of the work done today.
EF
SB
AN
We also used the Web 2.0 tool Chirbit to write and record our thinking about Solo Taxonomy, how the symbols relate to our thinking, how we use the HOT maps and rubrics to develop our thinking and also as success criteria linked to our learning intentions. Some of the children wanted to talk more about how they felt the rubrics were helping them.
This was very interesting for me as a self monitoring process. The children worked in groups of three. They worked directly onto the computer. They wrote down their thinking and their discussion as they went.
I feel that that using this taxonomy, the HOT maps and the rubric have definitely raised the level of meta-languge around thinking and learning. I also think that the children are more articulate in being able to articulate their thinking and their learning.
One pair of boys wrote that they had no idea of how using Solo Taxonomy, the HOT maps or the rubric helped them in their learning. I replied to them thanking them for being so honest. This was good for me because I now know who I need to work more closely with.
Here are some of the reflections in text. This programmes also presents text as audio and you can record directly. We had a few problems with the direct recording at school.