Learning Curve

Preparing for a visit to the UK within the next couple of days and ten years since I have been back to visit family and friends, I realised how much technology has changed during that time. My must-have tools to take with me include:

ipod

flip video camera

digital camera

portable dvd player

smartphone with all my contacts and loaded with satellite navigator

Web tools that I will be relying on include  vimeo video upload, photoshow and photopeach, skype and gmail to share and stay in touch.

What are your favourite tools when you travel?

Tate Kids is an amazing art site for kids.  It consists of:

My Ga

llery: upload your art and visit virtual galleries

Games: create an imaginary city and make a masterpiece in Tate Paint

Films: explore art through comical characters

Tate Create: lots of ideas for making art

The site also Includes coverage of online safety  and e-cards can be created.  Altogether a wonderful resource for the primary classroom.

I was searching for resources for primary school students on virtues and values such as respect, caring, fairness, responsibility and trust etc.

I came across Go-Givers which is a project developed by the Citizenship Foundation, an independent charity based in the UK.  This wonderful site has resources for teachers, parents and children which states the fo

llowing aims and objectives:

Go-Givers has been developed in the belief that our children’s education should have its basis in a philosophy of personal responsibility, mutual respect and concern for the world we live in.

Its purpose is to create ‘Ripples of care across the World’ by means of educating children to care for their family and friends and about issues relating to the local, national and global communities.

Objectives:

• To develop an understanding of Human rights/Children’s rights
• To cultivate an insight into other people’s problems and their causes
• To inform how resources are allocated through the taxation system and charitable giving.
• To inspire compassion linked to social and moral responsibility
• To enhance the skills of communication, and participation in the community.
• To develop the ability to make choices, set goals and take action.

Attitudes:

• Respect for other people’s views and experience
• Empathy
• Care
• Concern to act fairly
• Spirit of enquiry
• A positive view on things

Values:

• Can prioritise according to Human Rights/Children’s Rights
• Understands what makes a responsible Citizen
• Ackno wledges rights and responsibilities
• Appreciates ethnic/cultural differences/values/customs

The teachers resources include powerpoint presentations on the topic and printable pdf worksheets which are excellent. The lessons are by themes or subjects.  Lessons by Theme include:

Diversity and Cohesion: lessons such as All for Profit (child labour), Equal Opportunities (the nature of prejudice), Freedom (from slavery), media representations and other great real world situations.

Feelings: Mind the Gap (third world living), There’s No Place Like Home (homelessness)

Global Issues: Charities Helping Areas At Risk, Migrating to a Foreign Country, Famous Philanthropists, Fair Trade, Environmental Issues, Unity of Religions, Working for Peace.

Other Themes include: Rights and Responsibilities, Equal Opportunities, Friendship and Care, Democracy, Money, Sustainability and Values.

The resources cover many subject areas: art and design, geography, history, ICT, music, numeracy and literacy, SOSE, religious education, science and physical activity.

These are wonderful resources to raise awareness amongst students and guide them towards being thoughtful, caring, responsible citizens.  Suitable for lower and upper primary.

If you haven’t seen the video of Susan Boyle singing on Britain’s Got Talent, 2009, it is an intensely moving and inspirational experience.  Despite negative vibes from the audience and judges before she performed, Susan was not swayed and remained calm and confident in pursuance of her goal.  Along with her performance, Susan taught some great lessons:

Susan Boyle taught us all that we should not be put off by others’ preconceived judgements.  How many students are judged by how they appear?  Especially students with challenges.   It is all too easy for them to be labelled as difficult or disruptive, unable to learn and lacking in intelligence (especially if they have poor verbal skills).   Given the opportunity Susan Boyle surpassed the judges expectations.  Many educators have this belief in the students they teach, but many also do not, preferring to label them in some way.  Susan taught us to see there is more to a person than what we initially perceive.

Let us all take that and apply it to others that cross our paths.

Image by Albino Flea

I wanted to create a booklet and although I found information that enabled me to do this in Word, it was turning into a complex task.    From the print menu I needed to identify my pages in order of printing, ie page 12,1; 2,11; 10,3 etc.  Despite doing this, it wasn’t working as simply as I would have liked.  When I numbered my pages in a 12 page booklet, the printer churned out page after page, with numbers such as 52 and 64 on my pages.    Also it would appear very tedious to have to identify pages in order of printing with a very large document.

I came across a really simple solution via Office Watch.  I saved my Word document as a PDF file, (Office 2007 users can do that with the free Save As PDF add-in) and then printed the PDF saved version as a booklet.

How to print your PDF document as a booklet:

Go to File > Print, then, Page Scaling (left hand side of the Print menu) - click on ‘booklet printing‘.

If your printer is capable of back to back printing, go down to booklet subset (underneath page scaling) and select ‘both sides’.  Quick and simple.

If you are creating your A4 document to be printed as an A5 booklet, I’d recommend replacing a 12 pt font with 17pt in your original document, and make headings 20 pt.

When I came across this site I thought it was a wonderful resource to use in the classroom.  If you haven’t come across The Big Picture, take a look.  Taking a few minutes at the beginning of a lesson to reflect on what is going on in the world is a great lesson in itself.   The images that go with the news stories make the news articles suitable to share with primary students.  Great also for the ESL classroom.

Shattered roofs of collapsed houses are seen against the backdrop of snow-covered mountains after an earthquake in the Italian village of Onna April 6, 2009.

It’s hard to keep up with all the innovative and great resources that the internet offers for learners, it truly is an age where resources abound as never before.  I only wish that I could have had access to a fraction of what is now available during my school days.  Maths was never my strongest subject and I know that the gaps that remained through my schooling have followed me to adulthood.  Now, instead of enrolling in a maths class (which of course I never did) I can fill in the gaps from  home with my own personal tutor.  Math online is a wonderful free resource available to all Australian high school students (teachers and parents) and covers the whole Australian maths high school curricula from grade 7-12.  You can see the demonstration here.  There hundreds of  lessons explained by a tutor (video) going over the concepts and examples.  There are worksheets, answers and a summary which can be printed for reference.  Students results are recorded online.  I’m really impressed with this resource which is a great example of 21st century learning and encouraging students to take control of their learning.  Great for ongoing learning as well as exam review and for parents to provide support when their children are seeking homework help.

Connect is an awesome site for early childhood, primary and secondary  students implemented by the Victorian Department of Education and Early Education.    Links to each of the age groups contain an Aladdin’s cave of wonderful resources.  The primary students link has some of my favourite sites such has the ABC Behind the News site (a great resource which looks at local and overseas events that hit the news and simplifies it - suitable for upper primary and secondary).  Behind the News is complete with lesson plans and worksheets.

Another great site featured on the primary link is the educational site, BBC Bitesize, which covers numeracy, literacy and science for KS1 (ages 5-7) and KS2 (ages 7-11).  Lots of wonderful resources for extension work, revision or introduction to new topics.  Other links on the site include “Things To Do” featuring activities to: listen, draw, create, experiment, watch, design, publish, discover, read, play, make multimedia.  The primary students page also hosts a dictionary, thesauraus, encyclopedia, maps, calculator, news, environmental news, health, science, art, health, sports, animals and more!

This is definitely the best  one-stop shop for primary resources I have come across.

The secondary student resources at Connect are equally impressive.  If you have early childhood learners, there’s plenty there too.

Great tools are always popping up, it’s hard to keep track of them all.  Having many tools under one roof is great for the busy teacher.  Web 2.0 in Education, a  UK created wiki has everything any ICT teacher would ever need. It has over 295 tools with a review and screenshot or example of the tool as well as suggestions on how they might be used. Definitely worth a visit.

Please share it with others and send a note of thanks to its creator.

Here is a list of its contents:

• mindmapping tools
• website builders
• timeline makers
• comics and cartoons
• drawing tools
• photofun
• mapping tools
• presentations/slideshows
• scrapbooks
• multimedia
• electronic books/writing
• quizzes and games
• video and screencasting tools
• graphs/charts/databases
• music tools
• discussion/debate tools
• surveys/polls
• Read/Write/Think tools

I love this tip that I came across on Fred Jones, Tools for Teaching site. Fred likens the classroom teacher to a performer or presenter.  When someone in the audience appears to be causing a disruption, the presenter will sometimes circulate the audience  and/or use eye contact to bring the disturber back to attention.   All teachers know that it is essential to move around the classroom and not stay in one spot at the front.  However, I think it is a useful  tip to utilise nonverbal cues to attend to any disruption by moving closer and using eye contact which means that the lesson doesn’t have to be interrupted to attend to disrupters.  It also avoids a confrontational situation and prevents any embarrassment being caused to the student.

Fred identifies three zones of proximity in the classroom:

Red: the teacher is physically close so students in that zone are less likely to disrupt.

Orange: students are aware of the teacher’s proximity and will on caution not to be caught whispering or doing anything out of line.

Green: when students are least close to the teacher’s proximity they are more  likely to disrupt.

So, it definitely pays to keep circulating and changing the green areas to red alert.

Keep reading for more great classroom management tips!

Crowd Control logo created with Photompact, image by James Cridland.