Ngutunui+M3



** Our Unit Planning Sheet. **

This sheet was developed as a result of our professional learning in Higher Order Thinking Skills by Eric Fragenheim.
==The staff now plan specifically to include higher order thinking skills based on Bloom's Taxonomy. The format of the unit planning sheet has made teachers == ==aware that many of the activities and tasks students did in the past fitted well into lower three levels and did not extend into the upper levels. == ==This template has enabled teachers to rethink their planning and provide opportunities for students to engage in activities and learning that will extend their thinking. ==



Unit Plan

Term 1

This term the focus was to establish a blog. This blog is to be used for the students to share their work, photos and other pieces of information with their family and wider school community. This is to be used alongside of the wiki, the wiki to continue to be used for learning resources and links. I set up the blog with the help of Barbara Reid at one of our ICT visits at the end of last year. I then put it aside until after Learning @ Schools conference in Rotorua. I attended a lot of great workshops here, I found the workshops on interactive learning opportunities such as using the active boards, blogging and the digital toolkit to be v ery beneficial and I can’t wait to try some of these with the class.

Week 4 At the conference I attended Allanah’s ‘Bling for your Blog’ workshop. Now armed with more ideas on how to use the blog, I introduced it to the class. The kids were very excited to see how easy it was to use and how they could now share and view their work at home with their families. We had a discussion on what is appropriate to share, our expectations on standard of work and how to make good supportive comments and how to ask good questions. Check our blog here [|Ngutunui Seniors Blog]

We set a goal to add something new to our blog every week.

Once we got some of our work on the blog we have then connected with some other schools in our cluster and outside of our cluster. The students are enjoying receiving comments on their work and also like responding to questions asked.

Term 1

This term the focus was to establish a blog. This blog is to be used for the students to share their work, photos and other pieces of information with their family and wider school community. This is to be used alongside of the wiki, the wiki to continue to be used for learning resources and links. I set up the blog with the help of Barbara Reid at one of our ICT visits at the end of last year. I then put it aside until after Learning @ Schools conference in Rotorua. I attended a lot of great workshops here, I found the workshops on interactive learning opportunities such as using the active boards, blogging and the digital toolkit to be very beneficial and I can’t wait to try some of these with the class.

Week 4 At the conference I attended Allanah’s ‘Bling for your Blog’ workshop. Now armed with more ideas on how to use the blog, I introduced it to the class. The kids were very excited to see how easy it was to use and how they could now share and view their work at home with their families. We had a discussion on what is appropriate to share, our expectations on standard of work and how to make good supportive comments and how to ask good questions. Check our blog here [|Ngutunui Seniors Blog]

We set a goal to add something new to our blog every week.

Once we got some of our work on the blog we have then connected with some other schools in our cluster and outside of our cluster. The students are enjoying receiving comments on their work and also like responding to questions asked.

Week 6 After the Christchurch Earthquake the students decided to have a dress up day for a gold coin donation to help raise some money for Christchurch. We then took the photos and made a Photo Peach slide show together. The students took the photos through the day and in the afternoon we worked together to create the slide show, including music. The students really enjoyed this process and the end result. [|Christchurch Earthquake]

Now the students are becoming more confident to choose to share their writing to a wider audience. [|See Renee's Writing on the blog.]

My class has a special needs student and I have begun to use apps on my iphone to engage him and to encourage him to talk (he is not very verbal). He enjoyed using Talking Tom and some other interactive apps on my phone. I decided to invest in an iPad to provide some interactive and easily accessible apps for students to use. All the student’s including special needs student really enjoy using the iPad for games, stories and using the internet. We have also used the ipad in small groups for co-operative writing using a document programme. Week 7 Our big focus this term was on our ‘Big Days Out’. We had a trip to Auckland to address some of our fear and to visit Butterfly Creek, Kelly Tarltons and Sky City. I armed the students with 2 cameras and I also had a camera. The students took turns at using the cameras to capture our experiences. The students took some great photos with the only trouble being that the batteries went flat regularly on one of the cameras. We got over 500 photos in total from the 2 day trip. The kids really enjoyed looking through these photos and took great pride in saying that “I took that photo”. We have shared some of these photos on the blog. They have been pleasantly surprised to be receiving comments and questions from other people about their experiences, even from people they do not know in Auckland. The students have each chosen a photo they liked and made a short comment to go with it. [|Ngutunui Seniors Blog]

Week 8 The RTLB loaned us some notebooks this term and I trialled them in my classroom. We used these notebooks to add to our blog, for co-operative writing and for searching the internet. We thought that these would be very handy in our classroom environment as they are more portable and take up less space. We found that as they were not networked to our system our usage of these were a bit limited. The students enjoyed working on these and would love to have these in their classroom.

The junior room was getting ready for a swimming display. The senior room took it upon themselves to be the photographers for the day. We had discussions about what makes a good photo and how we could make the photos look exciting. The students decided that the photos needed to show action. They should have some up close shots and to show some facial expressions. We also practiced using the zoom to make sure that the they could focus right in on the chosen subject. To ensure everybody got to take some photos in a short period of time, armed with 2 cameras the students took 5 photos then passed it on until everyone had a turn. We then gave these photos to the junior room as a record of their swimming display.

I decided I needed to also use the blog as a way to engage the students to share in responding to media or questions. I added a u-tube clip on fears and we viewed this as a class as it takes a while to download to do this individually. After we all watched the video clip the students in their writing time got an opportunity to respond to the video clip. [|Ngutunui Seniors Blog]

Week 9 Now that the blog is up and running we have realised that as a part of our regular programme we need to go in regularly to check for comments and questions on our work. I have also set blogging challenges at times where the students are to go and read their posts and check for comments, read other blog entries on our blog and to check out a blog from another school and are encouraged to leave a comment.

Great, I have now learnt how I can screen capture brainstorms from our Active board and upload these onto the blog also. Another cool way to share our class learning and experiences. [|Ngutunui Seniors Blog]

At a board meeting we shared our blogs with the board members. I added the value of using name labels so that parents can locate their own child’s entries by clicking on their name, this was a well liked feature and I can see that this will help with student led conferences in Term 3.

Term 2

Week 1 Ipad app challenge time. The students are trying to beat Mr S’s holiday top score on the app ‘Super 7’. It has become quite a challenge to become the new leader.

Week 2 Well the students were very quick to point out that we had not made an entry onto the blog last week as I was away sick for most of the week. Now that I have the blog running effectively and the students are finding it easy to add a new post and to make comments, I now need to go back to tidy up the wiki page.

Using Blooms

Junior Reflections