Oxford Primary Blog

RSCON3 Feedback

Reform Symposium 3 Conference was one of the most amazing educational weekends of my life. The sheer thrill of listening to so many wonderful presenters and keynotes, all passionate about their jobs, was brilliant. It re-energised me considerably, and made me feel so proud to be an educator. If you click on the Google Docs link here, you can access the recordings to all of the wonderful talks for Days 1, 2 & 3. Happy listening!

ELTChat held a session on the Reform Symposium and Vicky Loras wrote a fantastic summary called "How Will You Follow Up on RSCON 3?"

You can find a whole list of fab RSCON3 resources on this RSCON3 Scoop.it curation site!

My presentation on "Fun with Comics and Cartoons" went very well, and you can "read" a Youblisher e-book of the contents below:

If you like, and you have approximately 30 minutes to spare, you can listen to the whole video recording of my talk via the Blackboard Collaborate platform here. If you listen carefully, you will note that I mention you!! You can also view some of the fabulous comics you created in class amongst the slides. Thanks so much for helping me with my research and experimentation during the time I taught you!!

Here is a little ToonDo cartoon I have created, which sums up my thoughts of this educational weekend perfectly.

By JanetBianchini | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

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The Future is Technology Integration

It was a real pleasure teaching you all and thank you so much for your positive feedback, kind messages and flowers :-) I do hope you all got something out of the course during the 2 weeks. As you can imagine, it is quite a tricky feat to please 24 teachers with differing interests and needs!! I think I did ok all in all, and I am very happy with what I taught you, but I guess I am always striving to do better!!

Creating this brand new Posterous blog was a great challenge for me. I'm thrilled with the way it has turned into a summary for you of things we covered in the classes in the 10 days of the course. I reckon I spent approximately 20 hours (burning the midnight oil) or so during the 2 weeks on updating the posts and also learning how to do things on it. I am still learning and not getting things right, however, and so I am determined to carry on until I become more proficient.

This Posterous blog created in Oxford is also my e-portfolio, a Personal Learning Journal and outlines my personal development over these 2 weeks as a teacher. It is also a record of the technology tools which were introduced. I personally feel that nowadays as teachers we need to get much more involved with technology integration in the classroom and move away from our "comfort zone".

Did I do too much technology integration? Did I do too little? Personally speaking, I would have liked to do much more technology in my sessions, but I recognised that not everyone was keen on it. Yes, I agree that taking technology integration onboard is a rather scary prospect, but it is a necessary one for the future.

View the fab RSCON3 slideshare presentation below by Aviva Dunsiger, a Grade 1/2 teacher in the USA. Using Web 2.0 Tools in the Classroom is very inspiring. She is definitely a "change agent" and a role model for aspiring teachers of technology.

Rscon3 presentation

If you are interested you can read this very insightful article by Nik Peachey, called ELT and the Crisis in Education: Technology in the Classroom. It provides great food for thought and I'd advise you to read all the comments as well. The future of teaching will most definitely involve technology and it is rapidly moving into the field of Mobile Technology.

Here is an excellent post by Nicky Hockly on Mobile Learning: 6 Key m-learning resources. By taking little steps at a time, slowly but surely, I hope you will begin to maybe start trying to experiment with some of the tools I have introduced. That will be a huge achievement, and you will gain more confidence in using some of these ideas with your classes.

View the slide presentation below by Steve Wheeler. It also provides great food for thought.

The Future of Learning

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

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Day 10: QUIZLET and Dancing!

QUIZLET
We learned some new words emerging in the English language and viewed how we could memorize them by creating flashcards with an interactive Web 2.0 tool called Quizlet. You can click on the link below.

We also practised making a Quizlet activity with images. I will add a link to that shortly.

http://quizlet.com/_1z38g

Can you connect the following words in the wordle? Do you remember the meaning of these new words?

(download)

Have you taken to learning these words like a ................ to ......................??? A big clue lies in the image below:-)

Thanks to Renate for finishing off the lessons by teaching us how to dance the "Lucky Seven" dance, which we all thoroughly enjoyed! It was a fantastic way to unwind and let our hair down after a truly intensive 2 weeks of learning. Well done everyone!

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Day 9: Phrasal Verbs

We started off the lesson with a warmer using The Ultimate Word Search Maker. You can click on this link here to find the 6 animals hidden in the puzzle.

We also looked at a site called Icon Scrabble which makes short banners of up to 18 characters using icons which link directly to internet sites. I think you can no longer save your image onto your computer, but you can link to it directly as I have done here.

In the past I have been able to save the image generated onto my computer as a jpeg and that was great, because it didn't link to other sites!

Instead, you can create banners on Image Chef such as the one below. Simply type in the words and press "Preview" . You can then save the image onto your computer, or else copy a code to add to your blog or wiki. It's easy peasy, lemony squeezy!!

We studied a lot of phrasal verbs today! I showed a Slideshare presentation called Fun with Phrasal Verbs and here it is below:

Fun With Phrasal Verbs

We looked at new words in the English language and here is a Youblisher book that Janet has published on the subject of new words. Click on the image to enlarge the e-booklet! You can also print the pages if you like. This presentation is an updated version of the one I added to my Day 9 post.

Language in Motion:Teaching with the Flow

Today I also mentioned an example of how you can convert a few pages of Word documents into a pdf and then upload them to Youblisher to create an e-booklet. You will need to register with Youblisher in order to create your very own e-books and become an instant e-author!! You can then keep all your lovely e-booklets on the site and you can embed them on to a blog or wiki or simply email them to a friend.

Below you can see an e-book of The Cat That Got The Cream. This was a homework lesson I created during the fabulous free e-course called "Creating Creative Reading Activities" which I did with SEETA. This stands for South Eastern Europe Teachers Association.

We also looked at Big Huge Labs, a nice image-editing site. Here is a movie poster of Oxford! It will be a nice souvenir of your stay in Oxford! Try to create a movie poster yourself. It is very easy with this simple tool!

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Day 8: New Words and Dvolver Movies

Here is a Dvolver movie that Primary Group B created in class today. The subject was "New Words in the English Language".

Learn how to use Dvolver by following this video tutorial here.

You can see another blog post on Dvolver written by Nik Peachy here.

We also viewed the following presentation and did a few activities connected to new words in the English language.

We looked at Word Spy as a useful resource for learning about new words in the English language. We viewed the Macmillan BuzzWord site.

Language in Motion: teaching with the flow 2010

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Day 7: Tuesday July 26th 2011

A Prepositional Owl

This talking owl is practising the use of prepositions! Primary Group A learned how to create this fun feature by using Fodey.com. You can even create talking tomatoes and talking flowers, amongst other interesting things!

Marvel Super Heroes

The class then created a comic with the Marvel Super Hero Squad comic creator. Again, the main focus was a review of prepositions. Pairs created mini dialogues in their notebooks and after that, we had fun choosing what to write in the comics! You can save your comic to your computer as a pdf or else you can take a screenshot of it and then save it as a .jpeg. It is a shame there is no embed code for your comic. However, you can easily print the comics straight from your computer.

Annalisa sent me a lovely comic that she created on her computer called "Fire", and you can see it here below:

If you are interested in using Super Hero Comics with your students, you can view this great post by Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers blog. It is called "Create your own Super Hero Comic".

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Reform Symposium Free E-Conference Information

In a few days, nearly 8000 educators from over 40 different countries are expected to attend a free 3 day virtual conference, The Reform Symposium, #RSCON3. This free award-nominated e-conference is going to take place on July 29-31st, 2011. Participants can attend this online conference from the comfort of their homes or anywhere that has Internet access. This amazing conference provides educators new or currently active on social networks the opportunity to connect with educators and professionals in the field of education worldwide. With over 12 Keynotes, 80 presenters, and 3 keynote panel discussions you are bound to be inspired!

View the schedule to plan which presentations you will attend!
Download the flyer to share with your school!
Watch this Youtube video of January 2011's conference!
See if your school will count this as continuing education credit!
Consider hosting a viewing party!

We would like to thank the incredible organizers- Shelly Terrell, Kelly Tenkely, Chris Rogers, Lisa Dabbs, Melissa Tran, Clive Elsmore, Mark Barnes, Ian Chia, Cecilia Lemos, Jerry Blumengarten, and Kyle Pace- and Steve Hargadon of Classroom 2.0 and The Future of Education online communities for making this incredible conference possible.

We hope you can join us for this incredible professional development experience!

JANET'S PRESENTATION ON USING COMICS AND CARTOONS

Here is a short Youtube video outlining the theme of my presentation on Using Comics and Cartoons in Your Lessons, which you can attend via your computer on Saturday 30th July. If you can't make any of the sessions because you are travelling home, not to worry! All the sessions will be recorded, so you can view them in the comfort of your own home! Click on the list of the presenters here.

Many of the RSCON3 presenters have uploaded snippets of their presentations onto the special dedicated Youtube channel here.

View this video trailer of David Warr's Language Garden RSCON3 presentation. It looks like a very interesting one indeed!

You can also view this short presentation by Brad Patterson. I love the vintage effect of the video!

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Day 6: Monday July 25th 2011

ANIMOTO

A "Test" Animoto slideshow was created with Primary Group B today and here it is embedded below:

You can also view the same Animoto which I have added to my Youtube channel with one simple click!

Learn how to create a free 30 second Animoto slideshow video with music by following Russell Stannard's video tutorial on Teacher Training Videos.

Here is another Animoto video with text added to it:

We also created a Bookr in class with the title "Last Weekend". Please refer to the tutorials on this link here to view how to create a Bookr.

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DAY 5: Friday July 22nd 2011

MAKE BELIEFS COMIX

Today in class we created a Makebeliefs comic to practise collocations with "HAVE". You can find out more about collocations from the Macmillan Collocation Dictionary website here. Click on the comic to make it bigger.