Tag: Wiki
Google Earth Wikispace
At this time of year I like to look at this great resource in Google Earth I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.
It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and layered into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.
Open this Placemark
Take a look at my wikispace for classroom uses of Google Earth for further resources.
Uses for Wikihow in Literacy
So here is a great recommendation. If you are a teacher working with your class on instructional text then I would recommend using Wikihow. It reminded me of the How Stuff Works site but is characterised with wiki features – you can freely contribute articles and edit others.
So how would you use it in your class?
Well with my Year 6 class, I am always on the look out for real, purposeful opportunities to write. In our 1st week on instructional text we wrote for an audience of children in Sydney. In this second week I wanted to get practical – so the children could make something in the classroom and then we would write up those instructions. Wikihow provides you and your class an excellent opportuntiy to publish what you write to a wider audience and as it is a site taking requests for instructions, there is also a real human purpose to putting pen to paper.
So we decided to answer a request for “How to make a Healthy Breakfast Drink”. The week’s planning, for 5 literacy lessons, included other independent tasks related to instructional text work – but the shared time was planned out to work on this request.
Monday
We introduced the site and explored the framework we had to write to. I highlighted the audience and purpose of our writing. As a class we recapped the instructional text features and talked briefly about our targets for the week, what did we want to achieve? It boiled down to: By Friday we want to submit a well written instructional article to Wikihow.
Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday
I divided the class into groups of 10 children and on these consecutive days they worked with a teaching assistant on our healthy smoothie recipe which I had done some preparation on. The group worked together and prepared, made and tasted the smoothie and also recorded brief notes on the procedure on a large flipchart. A digital camera was used to capture various stages. (These images will be used in the Wikihow article later.)
Whilst the groups were working with the TAs I worked with the rest of the class on some word level games such as dictionary races etc. The remaining children then went to work on their independent tasks.
Friday
So this turned out to be our big writing session. We worked together as a class to produce the instructions for the Wikihow article. We worked directly in the text frames on the Wikihow site, but could have easily done this elsewhere.
I really like the structure of the Wikihow article and it is simple enough to follow – just be aware that the “You will need” list is an optional extra. Scroll to the bottom of the text frames and there are some check boxes to add on writing sections, for example “Warnings” or “Top Tips”.
Take a look at our finished piece of writing titled “How to Make a Healthy Breakfast Drink”
If you are looking for a great source of instructional text then there is a huge number of articles to choose from. The content is closely monitored by the editors and seems ideal for school use.
So what else can you do with the site:
- Use as a guided reading text during your literacy hour – if you feel something is missing then why not edit the article and make additions. (Guided writing)
- Read some text as a whole class when identifying the language features of an instructional text. Use your whiteboard tools to highlight and annotate the article.
- Use the writing guides available on the site, they work in line with the literacy objectives from the Primary Strategy (UK)
- Look for a related activity or article that you can carry out in a different subject area. For example making a rubber band guitar could be done when looking at sound in science lessons. There are lots to choose from.
- Post a request yourself. If there is nothing that you would like to respond to then post something worthy of your efforts. Make it relevant to your curriculum work – if you are doing the Romans then why not post a request for “How to make a model Roman shield” – then get your kids making it and write the instructions in literacy, a good cross curricular link.
- Create a set of instructions over a short period of time. I will be editing our article with some images taken during the activity. The writing could be added to – slowly improving your work. Also don’t fret too much if others do this – remember that is what makes this so great, a collaborative writing effort.
- As I have done with my class – why not respond to a request for instructions, make or create it so the children get a first hand experience and then incorporate the writing as part of your shared work in the literacy lessons.
Offline Blogging
Since the staff at my school have begun blogging the questions surrounding the pedagogical practises in the classroom that incorporate blogging have been spiralling amongst us. For many, including the teachers of early years classes, it seemed a very solitary activity with the children sitting and the teacher typing.
It is clearly an important stage in the development of our school blogs. I have read a small number of articles that sound out the fact that there really is no hard evidence of the widespread use of blogging to improve standards etc. I suspect, in my humble opinion, that there has not been enough of us to ask the questions. Not enough classes actually engaging with the technology to make it part of the daily fabric of the classroom. There will always be a form of playing and dabbling with the tech but as one of my colleagues asks:
“How does blogging actually improve what I am already doing well?”
So after half term I will be working with my school to take our blogs offline. As in what can we do as teachers to incorporate the use of our class blogs into the rich learning environments we have already created.
John has already taken a small step towards this with a page on my Classroom Blogging Wiki (newly reorganised) called Classroom Organisation. as he puts it:
Recently on my blog I was wondering ‘How long does it take your kids to post?‘ and had a few replies. I though it might be a good idea to collects the various ways of organising blogging in the primary classroom.
This however is specific to working online – I want to collect ideas about creating opportunities for all the children in the class to interact with the blog even if they are not online. So back to simple things like a writing table, that many early years classes in the UK have, leaving a piece of writing from another class blog there for them to look at and write a comment on some paper. I suppose it is also an effort to embed the vocabulary into the class as well. A post-it note wall so the kids can write ideas for the class blog on.
In the UK we have something called guided reading during our literacy hour – perhaps children could be working with an adult to read another class blog and at the end of the 15 mins leave a comment written together.
I understand that this last example is online work but it is blogging where we might not consider it. I think that we need to look at not only our curriculum but the learning environment itself – so the children can see their blog (and others) around them, not just if they sit in front of a computer.
We need to bridge the gap between writing online and writing with a pen, between seeing their blog online and seeing it offline, and perhaps we can begin this by creating a rich learning environment that encapsulates the diverse learning opportunities that blogging brings.
The children have spoken…
Over the last week my class have been voting for their new wordpress theme on our class blog. We decided upon 5 themes including the current one and I set up a poll on our wikispace so that the class could vote for their favourite. I used PollDaddy to create the poll and embedded it into our wiki cover page, with some little thumbnails of the themes to help the kids remember. It was a great way for the children to personalise their blog and to make a contribution.
I have been astounded by the response – I deliberately left the voting open to multiple votes just to give a it a bit more scope. I expected the kids to enjoy doing it but the response was so far beyond my expectations!
There were 2567 total votes!! Take a look.
It seemed a small campaign sprung to life during my lunchtime bloggers clubs on Thursday and Friday! Children were calling for supporters and the two themes that emerged as potential winners battled it out, staunch defenders of one theme soon caved in to the massive pressure and swapped sides cancelling out their previous votes.
China Red emerged the winner with 62% of the vote and 1589 individual votes. So we have a new look.
I know the kids were just voting and voting again, but it was a lot of fun and there was so much buzz about with my kids. I know everyone voted and consequently I now know I could use the polls in other ways.
One boy turned to me, as he repeatedly voted China Red into an insurmountable lead, and said how it would be great if we used these to help decide what we can do in class. So we came up with one idea of having a free hour session late on in the week and setting up a poll with a few options like extra PE or art. Let the children decide what they would like to do. Their own democratic timetable!
So I will be exploring two things and would appreciate any help,
- Can you embed a similar poll directly into a Learnerblog post – as opposed to doing it on the wiki? (however successful it was)
- What other curriculum based applications are there for the open use of a poll such as this?