Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Slowly does it!

Stage 3 accessed the wireless network today - yipee! A huge thank you to Bernard, our brilliant technical guru, for patiently re-setting each netbook so we could access the wireless network. The first stop was the Smartkiddies Mathematics site - http://www.smartkiddies.com.au/. This is a great site where teachers can select a variety of tasks from all strands of the mathematics syllabus and tailor those activities to meet the needs of each student individually. The second stop was to check out the SBS Gold site (http://www.sbs.com.au/gold/) where the students researched and, then selected, a bushranger from the time of the gold rushes in Australia. Working with a partner, one student has taken on the part of the bushranger while their partner has the task of representing them in our 'Stage 3 Court of Law'. Were these men villains or, were they heroes? All will be decided next week when court is in session and Stage 3 pass judgement! Cases will be documented using Google Documents. All in all, a big day in Stage 3. Cyberspace watch out..... we're on our way!

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Getting there

Well, Stage 3 are slowly but surely navigating their way through our class wiki and set of class blogs (check out kidblog.org for a great tool that allows you to set up blogs for your class). 11 out of 30 class members have signed in and left comments - the downside to that has been that they started using the wiki like a social network site such as facebook but a quickly posted message from Yours Truly has momentarily stopped that. A couple of them liked the voki I posted and decided to sign up and create their own - great initiative, however, they posted their respective vokis within the opening cover page of the wiki! To get around that I've added a 'Fun Stuff' page so they can post that type of application - I'm a bit of a control freak about layouts (my issue not the theirs). The big test will be to see how many use their blogs to respond to the Bloom's Taxonomy and Multiple Intelligences tasks set for homework between now and the end of the term. It's onwards and upwards - even if we can't do this type of thing in class.