just pondering

photo © 2010 Sharon Mollerus | more info (via: Wylio)

I have come to accept that I will be very nervous the weekend before the new school year and have a whole horde of butterflies on the first morning. I’ve learned to live with it!

This first week of the 2011 school year has gone tremendously quickly! I’m exhausted, and very glad it’s Friday, but, at the same time, I’m on a bit of a high.

I’ve had a terrific week with my Year 6/7 class. 9 of the students are year 7s who were in my class last year as Year 6s, whilst the other 20 have come from other classes. They have been an absolute pleasure. They’ve shown:

• beautiful manners
• a positive attitude to learning new things
• excitement for trying out new technology
• a sense of fun and humour
• caring and consideration for others in the class
• an interest in connecting with others

We’ve already:

• Started Quadblogging
• Talked about connecting with classes in New Zealand & USA – both electronically and via snailmail
• Discussed their interests to link to our inquiry
• Discussed starting their own blogs – they’ve made their avatars
• Looked at working in edmodo – all students have already joined our class group
• Made Wordles for the front of their portfolios
• Started applications for leadership positions
• Met our buddy class of Year 1s

I’ve had such a good start to the year that I actually didn’t want to take my coordinator day yesterday! How lucky am I that I have a job that I enjoy going to every day? The same can’t be said by everybody, I know.

I’m looking forward to a an interesting and exciting year with this class.

All of the students in my class have a personal blog. As with anything else some have taken to blogging with great enthusiasm, others less so. However, they have all learned an amazing repertoire of skills since they’ve been blogging.They’ve added counters, clustrmaps, flags of visitors, vokis, and various other widgets. They’ve started to enhance their blogs with slideshows, and photos of their work. Now they’re adding images so, of course, it was time to revisit the idea of copyright and creative commons.

I bookmarked a number of sites in our class delicious account and proceeded to try to demonstrate how to search for appropriate images and what to do once they’d found one they wanted to use. However, before I’d even had time to open my browser I was regaled with cries of “Pam, that site is blocked!”, “I can’t get into the compfight site!”…. Right! So, no panic, let’s just unblock those sites and away we go! No, not as simple as that. The filtering system unblocked the actual site, but the pictures wouldn’t load as they’re all housed on different sites!! That had to be be up there as one of the most frustrating lessons I’ve had for a long while.

I knew that some of my students would go home and have a try on their own, and I was right. The next day two of them came to me saying that they’d had a go but got a bit stuck. So, here was a dilemma – how could I help them when I couldn’t demonstrate properly? Kathleen McGeady to the rescue! Kathleen has recently written a blog post on teaching about creative commons – to her Year 2 students! Not only that she provided a link to a document explaining how to find the pictures and how to upload and attribute them.

Thanks Kathleen, I can now give the link to this document to my students and feel confident that they will be able to successfully upload pictures to their blog and attribute them correctly.