Mystery Skype Training Wheels

Mystery Skype Training Wheels

When I first came across the idea of Mystery Skype, I thought it would be a fun experience.  I didn’t truly appreciate what a fantastic learning experience it would be too!  We did our first two Mystery Skypes during this year’s Skypeathon.  To get started with Skype for the Classroom, you need to be a member of the Microsoft Education Community.

Use the free Mystery Skype OneNote from the website – it’s got great resources, and I could tweak them to my colourful, tabled heart’s content.

A few pointers that we picked up over the last two weeks of getting ready for our first Mystery Skype…

  1. Play class vs teacher to help learners develop questions.
  2. Play small team vs small team to build confidence (we did two-on-two).
  3. Be clear about the different roles, and assign them early – this gave learners a chance to conduct research, print off resources and build team skills (lists of roles are included in the free Mystery Skype OneNote – seriously – download it!)
  4. If possible, arrange to Skype with another class in the same school – to check the equipment.
  5. Just dive in and do it already!
Learners experimenting with how to block out regions in response to answers.

I was so nervous when we connected with another school for the first time!  But, it was amazing.  The buzz in the room was electric, and everyone played their parts beautifully.  The excitement as we got closer to discovering the other school’s location was wonderful.  Everyone was so involved and engaged!

Found you!

I tried out Mystery Skype as part of Skypeathon – a fun, end of year experience for my learners.  But, I will be including it as part of my Geography, Mathematics and English curriculums next year.  We covered;

  • Northern and southern hemispheres
  • Continents
  • States and capitals of Australia
  • Major landforms and landmarks of Australia
  • Oceans of the world
  • Time zones
  • Compass directions
  • Flow charts
  • Problem solving
  • Teamwork
  • ICT skills
Love how my students used flow charts to help them to plan initial questions.

We also learnt lovely snippets of information about the Mystery Locations – such as the Taj Mahal is in India, it doesn’t get very hot in New Zealand, ideas for asking different styles of clues and how to use visual and oral slips from Mystery Skypers to help us on our way.

You should have seen the ‘ooooo’ faces of the kids when our Mystery Skyper from India greeted us with, “Good morning!”  It was 2pm our time!

The list goes on!   There are a whole range of different Skype for the Classroom experiences available, including incursions and meetings with experts.  I’m looking forward to trying them all out in 2018.  My students are already asking me if we can have a class slumber party so we can Skype a country that’s normally asleep when we’re awake.  I can’t wait!

https://education.microsoft.com/skype-in-the-classroom/overview

 

OneNote: Tables, tables, everywhere!

OneNote: Tables, tables, everywhere!

OneNote has transformed the way in which I operate my classroom, but tables have transformed the way in which I use OneNote. Below are my top reasons why you should incorporate more tables into your OneNotes.

  1. Tables are quick and easy to create.

In the OneNote ribbon, click on the ‘Insert’ tab and then select the size table that you need.  More columns and rows can easily be added under the ‘Table’ tab.

You’ll notice that my tables have alternating colours in them – this is to make scanning easier for learners with tracking difficulties – they don’t lose their place when they have clear colours to guide them.

  1. Tables are logical and become familiar to students – which means easy to use.

My learners enjoy consistency and knowing what the expectations are. They like knowing where to find information, and where to put answers. This is especially important for learners with extra needs. More about catering to learners with additional needs can be found in my blog post here. https://educationblog.microsoft.com/2017/09/5-easy-adaptations-learners-extra-needs/

  1. Tables make finding student responses (or lack of them) simple to identify.

I used to have to sift through information to find student responses. I experimented with having students highlight their answers with the highlighting tool or using a different colour font, but they often forgot. Marking was inefficient and painful. Once I switched to using tables with places for answers, I streamlined marking. Also, students can quickly and easily see where they are up to, and find it easy to come back to missed questions later.

Adding an extra column, inserting checkboxes and naming the column ‘Complete’ or ‘Finished’ takes just a few seconds, but gives learners a whole lot of satisfaction as they complete sections.  To read about more uses for checkboxes, read here. https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/06/05/the-humble-checkbox/?eu=true

  1. Tables break items into manageable chunks.

Some of the learners in my Village have planning difficulties. This means that they can struggle to break a large task or assignment into smaller, more manageable chunks (or parts for you non-Aussies). When I break tasks down for students regularly, they are eventually able to do this for themselves. Learners also feel less overwhelmed, and are more likely to be able to start their work, rather then just sitting and staring blankly at an empty screen.

  1. Tables prevent sync errors in the collaboration space.

The collaboration space is one of the best features of OneNote, but syncing errors did my head in initially. Students get very excited when they see other learners sharing their ideas in real time, but this can quickly turn to dismay when multiple pages begin to appear. I solved this problem with… You guessed it! Tables!

Assigning each learner or group of learners to a row or a box means that everyone can collaborate at the same time, but students don’t try and write in the same space, which creates sync errors. Not to mention, it makes everything look so much more organised and easy to read!

Here’s a recent piece of work created by one of my learners.  Look at how she’s colour coded her table to match her graph.  It makes my heart sing!

 

So there you have it! Quick, simple, saves time, and logical. Tables should be the best friend of every OneNote Educator!

 

Living Kaurna and Warriparinga Wetlands Excursion

Living Kaurna and Warriparinga Wetlands Excursion

This week, we took our 4/5 Village to the Warriparinga Wetlands for a Living Kaurna tour and workshop.  Here’s the website info Living Kaurna Cultural Centre.  For those of you not local to the Adelaide region, the Kaurna people are the traditional Indigenous owners of the Adelaide plains.

We organised the tour as part of our work that we’re doing this term on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si – On Care of our Common Home.

We integrated this learning with the history and culture of the Kaurna people, poetry and photography.  It was absolutely brilliant!  The weather was a bit drizzly, but nobody melted and it wasn’t cold.  Our tour guide was brilliant – his passion and knowledge of his culture was contagious, and even some of our more reluctant learners were enthralled.  

As well as the guided tour, we had a booklet of activities for the students to do, and we took along iPad minis for photography purposes.  My favourite activity by far (aside from the actualtour) was the colour-chip photography.  Learners worked in pairs to find natural items that matched their colour chips as closely as possible, and then photographed them together.  The next day, they uploaded their photos into their OneNotes, and then used the colour-chip names as inspiration in their poetry.

A great day out, and we can recommend it to anyone in the Southern Adelaide region.

 

Green Screen Magic

Green Screen Magic

 

We got to play (I mean do serious curriculum) with a green screen! For four whole weeks, we borrowed a green screen kit from the wonderful Learning and Technologies Team at Catholic Ed.

So. Much. Fun. 

As soon as it was set up, I got goosebumps.  Oh, the places we’ll go!

In my usual over-ambitious way, I scheduled time for ALL of the students to have a go (in small groups, in 15 minute allotments!) Each of the three Villages was responsible for designing and planning their own green-screen activity, and then our Year 4/5s, my co-teacher and I facilitated the production of iMovies.

The Year 4/5s have finished theirs already, and they’ve done a pretty amazing job, considering that we were all green screen-newbies.  I simply downloaded the iMovie green screen help sheet and inserted it into the Content Library of the Class OneNotes, and let them loose.  We were doing procedure writing at the same time, so I figured this gave them some extra experience at following a procedure!  Over the next few weeks, the Year 4/5s will work with small groups of younger students to help them produce their own videos.  We’ll upload them onto Stream for everyone in the school to view.

These are the projects that the Villages worked on…

4/5 Village – created a child-friendly news program (based on Behind the News)

  • Report/ script writing
  • Drama (role plays)
  • Quizzes (usually created and distributed on Forms)
  • Media

2/3 Village – created a cooking show

  • Procedure writing/ script writing
  • Drama
  • Media

R/1 Village – created a Space facts video

  • science
  • drama
  • script writing

Now, I’m off to petition our dedicated Parents and Friends Committee for our very own green screen kit.  Wish me luck!

The Humble Checkbox

The Humble Checkbox

 

Ok, so I have a blog.  Now what?  I know, I’ll share the blog post that I wrote for OneNote Education.  Here it is, The Humble Checkbox.  I use OneNote daily in my classroom (which we call a Village, but that’s a whole different post).  I use it for planning, teaching and assessing.  The little checkbox brings me a LOT of organisational happiness.  Hopefully, it’ll bring you some too!

 

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