Thinglink

My class are in the midst of ICT week and have been creating posters about biosecurity risks. As they finish these posters I have been moving them to creating a ThingLink image. Rather than explain what this is, take a look at Sara's example:
 

Sara was the first of my class to have venture onto this during the week and quickly became the class expert, both modelling what they could do as well as trouble shooting for a few students.

Previously, I had used a Thinglink image to show them some work earlier in the year, this introduced the concept and aroused some curiosity. But the following steps were used to help the children create their own.

Steps:

1. The first person who finished the poster got to be first to create on Thinglink, I would demonstrate only once to an individual and allow them to become the expert. As each child finished they were first directed to Sara's work to see what she was doing.
2. I got the class to sign in using their class twitter account to avoid further password confusion.
3. Allow them to find an image to use as the main image.
4. Explore the internet to find images, information and video to embed as tags.
5. Share to class blog/individual blog using an embed code.

I recommend that you use this tool in your class, it could be a great way to have children explore and share their understanding of many subjects especially the sciences. But I'd love to take an illustration or piece of text from a reading book and have the children use this to share their understanding. As a tool it is useful for allowing students to share their voice and it also comes as an App for the iPad/iPhone.

Shhh don't tell Mr Walker...

My mentor teacher came and taught a science lesson yesterday for me to observe, the first part was run of the mill discussion, questioning, sharing, hands on learning with rocks. I sat there recording how some of my students were going, his management of them and all the usual BT type stuff.

In the 2nd part of the lesson, there was a rock identifying challenge and I pulled out the iPad to record what the students were doing. The challenge was team based and my class are a competitive lot but I soon found just how competitive!

MT got the classes attention and told them he thought I should take part, I could hardly say no hence the teacher quickly became the student. Room 1 automatically became more competitive as they strived to beat my score, prevent me from seeing all the rocks, attempted to see my answers on the iPad and generally outdo me. Like any red-blooded male I wasn't going to back down...

I loved how they were telling each other off for showing me when all 12 rocks were, "Shhhh! Don't tell Mr Walker" was the catch cry for the 30 odd minutes we were doing the challenge.

When it came time to share our responses, they were really interested in how I scored, particularly when their team work had resulted in a correct answer. I didn't get them all right, but that was one of the reasons behind having my MT deliver this lesson. I earned some respect along the way and got a kick from their interest in my results.

Created on PicCollage

Learning with your students can be so rewarding, I am able to orchestrate this with ICT, Te Reo & Visual Art easily but find this can be difficult in other curriculum areas. If you have any suggestions...