Week 2 Visitations to schools this week.  A real privilege to be invited into teachers classrooms and to speak with them and their students.  We can get involved in our own world of our school and class and think that everyone works as we do.  Not so.  Not that one is better than the other just different and we can all learn from each other.  Was very interesting to see how different schools use technology in their classrooms. One school focused mainly on using their blogs to share their writing while we use our blogs across all curriculun areas.  The students in the two schools I visited this week were very articulate and were able to speak about how their homepage/blog helps them with their learning.  Students all enjoyed having people comment on their work and thought that some comments made them think a bit more about their learning.  Students in both schools knew how to make a quality comment and usually asked a question when commenting.  However the thing that struck me was that the students enjoyed all comments even the ones that said " Wow your writing was great"  I thought that comments like that were a waste of time.  Most students still liked them because they said 'It showed that someone was reading their work and thought it was good'  I must therefore not underestimate the power of an authenic audience.  The students did expect more from their teacher,though, and liked comments that made them think about their next goal /learning step. They also enjoyed comments from people they knew like their buddy blogger or class mates especially the younger students years 2,3,and 4 because they could respond to their comments about their work and also comment on their work and they knew who the people were.  

I asked some students whether they would like to do all their work on a computer and they all said no.  Their reasons were

·         they still liked to write in their books

·         they liked to do maths with equipment

·         liked to work with other people

·         liked to talk to the teacher straight away about their work rather than wait to read a comment

Interesting!

After talking to the students it was evident that while we assume this generation are 'computer savvy' many, if not most,do not have many of the skills required to complete tasks such as downloading photos,embedding videos etc.  Many were not confident and often their teacher or a class mate did it for them.  They wanted time to practise and 'do it heaps of times so that it stuck in my brain'  

More visitations this week to two country schools.  Looking forward to this