I have been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately but have been beavering away in the background with my class making our compulsory school current events homework more meaningful. The children have to research current events each week and report back to the class on their findings as part of their homework. Personally I would find it pretty pointless to have to do this and then only get to share it with a couple of friends, or have to sit through 25 other people sharing their current events so that we can all have a turn to share.... so TV23M news has been brought back to life.
Last year with Year 2 children we made several news reports - one covering a period where there was lots of storm damage around New Zealand and the other covering the Olympics. These were one off productions that took a significant amount of time to make.

This time we have a time limit - Friday mornings. We have 1.5 hours to make the whole thing and so far over the last 5 weeks we have met that deadline for everything except post production work. This year I am teaching a Year 3 class and it is fantastic to see the independent and responsible way the children have taken on their roles each week. Everyone has a part to play and the roles are shared round reach week. The roles so far are: Reporters, anchors, camera crew, musicians, artist, directors, post production people.

It is fantastic to see the improvement in speaking skills for the students in such a short period of time. Seeing themselves and their peers on video has increased student awareness of what makes a good speaker and how they can improve on this. Every student has now had at least 1 turn at being a reporter and our next step is for each person to set a personal goal to work on for their next report.

Parent and viewer feedback has been fantastic for this project and each week we have read all our comments and discussed ideas for changes to improve. YouTube statistics are also incredibly motivating for the children as we can see how many people have viewed each episode of the news. We have some great improvements planned for next term. Today was our last film session for Term 2.

Please take a look at our work so far and leave the children a comment to let them know what they do well and how they could improve. I am sure you will enjoy seeing the quality of our presentations improve week by week.

Episode 5
Episode 4
Episode 3
Episode 2
Episode 1

Getting My MoJo Back

It has been an interesting year so far and an incredibly busy one for me. Term 1 was a blur as in that time I got married, so now I am Marnie Rosser - but have so many things with Marnie Thomas that I think it is easier to have a split personality for awhile!

With all the wedding hype my ICT innovations had to take a back seat. I didn't think that would make such a difference but let me tell you - I find teaching so boring if I don't get innovative and allow myself to be passionate about it. So it is good to be back on board and jumping back into the creative seat again.

This term our school is studying the concept of Enterprise and the Year 3 team is doing this within the context of Let's Get Inventin' - yes, like the TV show. I am going to turn these kids into mad scientists creating and recreating their inventions.

Today we started with our prior knowledge define map and recorded thinking using Voicethread. I often find Voicethread unreliable with voice recording, perhaps due to internet traffic or something - with the voice recording not recording any or all of what the child is saying. Today was a day like this and even the kids were rolling their eyes over it. I got around this today by typing the children's definitions on rather than making voice comments for those who the recording option failed for. It was lucky the children had pre written their thinking down as otherwise it would have been lost.

BUT - the fantastic news is I noticed a new option to upload an audio comment so my problems are solved. Now we can record offline and upload to voicethread - slightly more laborious but much more reliable. I can't wait to try it out with the kids.

Click here to view our Innovation definition voicethread from today - lots of great misconceptions to refute with the kids!

Assessment Overhaul?

Does anyone out there actually know with any certainty what we actually HAVE to assess in schools today? I am not wondering about the formative side of assessment as that is self explanatory.

But then there is the summative assessment that seems to be a continually growing mountain in some schools. The new curriculum says one thing but then it is said ERO expects other things and everyone within school also has their personal band wagon and opinion on what they think needs to be done.

At my school we have been lucky to have Professional Development with some prominent educational theorists over the past few years. We seem to hear all the extremes - from assessing everything you can possibly think of, to throw it all out and just be enthusiastic with the kids. No wonder it gets so confusing!!

I realise the purpose of Professional Development with theorists is to make us think and critique what we do, with the hope of purposeful teaching and assessing and perhaps some abandonment in the future, but how many schools is this a reality for?

What are you doing in your school? I would love to know. Do you assess inquiry skills, thinking skills, knowledge, all of the above?? How?

Feedback

I just have to share these blog comments which made me laugh at the imitation of my comments but also feel proud of the 6 year old child who spent time crafting this feedback for her peers. These comments were left on our class writing blog by one of the children in the class - she was working very hard and did it all in under half an hour. I did wonder why she spent all afternoon asking when I was going to moderate the comments - now I know she was so proud of what she had written! You will need to click on the photo to be able to read what she has said.

Comparing and Contrasting Planets

Today I had my class self assess and peer assess their statements about the compare and contrast maps they had made about 2 chosen planets. I had thought that after the children had self assessed it would be important for me to assess their statements as well to help teach them which level of SOLO Taxonomy they are working at but in hindsight I think I am wrong.
When I made my comments and shared them with the class I could see some hopeful faces looking very disappointed when I said they were not as high on the taxonomy as they had thought they were. It has made me wonder what the point is of me telling them what I think when they are capable of deciding for themselves and also assessing each others levels of thinking.
Anyway I have stopped leaving my comments and I am trying to puzzle through a better way to attack this. Maybe I should be leaving a comment with 2 stars and a wish to give the child some direction on how they could improve instead. Surely this would be more helpful for them and this is what I would do for any other piece of work that I was giving feedback on.