Trying Read the Words at school

This is a test to see if we can run this text to voice option at school.

Another text to voice option

This site is Read the Words. It is a free option but the voice recording only lasts for 30 seconds with this free option. If you would like an upgrade, then there is a fee involved.

vozMe - From text to speech

vozMe - From text to speech

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New audio recrding tool

I have just located this new audio recording tool. You can use it for text to speech or to record directly. I am trying this at home so I hope that it works at school.
The tool is AudioPal. This is my test trial to see if I can embed my recording.

Professional Practice project Week 4 Term 4

Yesterday we continued with our poetry writing, introducing metaphors.
Prior to this, we did a reflection on similes. The students did another circle map and wrote down everything they new about similes. They then looked back at their initial circle map and then used their definition rubric to assess their progress in their thinking and knowledge and understanding of similes. They had to choose a symbol to indicate their present level of thinking, knowledge and understanding of what a simile is. They had to give a justification for their choice.
We then had the opportunity to discuss these justifications.
I will post some pictures of the initial circle maps and the present ones. I will also post recordings of our discussions.

We then watched a You Tube video on metaphors, with a view to establishing a compare and contrast HOT map on similes and metaphors.

Today I conducted a quick survey to see how the children felt about their learning, thinking about their learning, reflection of their learning and determining next learning steps.. I asked them to think about how using Solo Taxonomy, the HOT maps and the rubrics may be helping with these aspects of their learning.
To put this survey in context, it is something I do every morning.
Each day when I call the roll, I always have a survey about some aspect of our life at school. It may be something like how are you feeling about going on camp or how are you managing with your home study this week. The children have a scale of 1-5 to indicate how they are feeling or how they are managing.
Because we have done this every day, the children feel safe enough to be absolutely honest. Their responses give me a quick indication of how they are sitting or feeling about a particular issue, task or area of learning.
For the survey today 5 indicated that they felt that using the HOT maps, rubrics and thinking tool was most helpful for them, in helping them identify criteria or skills required to develop their thinking, reflect on a specific piece of work, self and peer assess and decide what to do to improve that work. 3 would indicate that they felt that it was assisting them in all of the above mentioned areas but they wanted to develop their use of all the aspects further. 0/1 would indicate that they had no idea how these tools were helping them at all to develop as reflective, self-directed learners.
23 out of the 25 children in my class were present at school today.
The results were as follows:
2 said 5
9 said 4
6 said 3/4
3 said 3
2 said 2
1 said 0/1
This was an encouraging indication of how the children view the use of this initiative at present.
Some of the children also did an e-Portfolio reflection based on the same criteria today.
CK
BM
These children are 9 years old. These reflections were totally unassisted writing. I can see that there is still work to be done in the helping the children to articulate their thinking in terms of the developmental stages using Solo Taxonomy but I feel that they are becoming reflective about their learning. I think that they also feel far more empowered. This observation is qualitative and there is no quantitative measure.
Another development is that my teaching colleague is now asking questions about what we are doing and she want to know about Solo Taxonomy, the HOT maps and how we are developing and using rubrics to direct our thinking, learning and deciding on next steps to learning.

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.

Our thinking about how we use Solo Taxonomy Week 3 Term4

In our discussion we said that now that we have being using Solo Taxonomy and the different rubrics, this helps us compare what we did last time in our learning with what we are doing this time in our learning in everything.
This is a recording of what we think.
JB and ODJ