Last weeks Reading Activity was based on reading for information and our Social Subjects focus of Space (see our display for evidence of your work 🙂 ). This week I would like you to hop back into your novels… but more specifically your authors. FIND OUT MORE AND COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING.
Can you share your findings in the comments box below so we can all access your work?
If you finish early can you take the following quiz….
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/children/have-some-fun/quizzes/15 – I’d be interested to hear your feedback here too.
Do you follow us on twitter, if not, please do! Here you will find daily updates on children’s learning and ‘What’s On’ across the school.
We are… @williamstonps
This week it’s National Digital Learning Week. We continue to explore the benefits digital learning and teaching can bring to every level of the learner journey across the school. In addition to this we are keen to share these through our BLOG and Twitter and would love to hear your thoughts on these too.
L.I.: to identify and select ‘interesting’ words within a variety of passages.Â
P6… how are your new novels? While I hear some of you read I would like you to find *FIVE* interesting words (remember what makes them interesting? – unknown words, ambitious vocabulary, specialist or topic words, words you would like to use in YOUR WRITING etc.).
Please note your WORD CHOICE – DEFINITION – SYNONYMS in the comments box….
An example… no problem! < See Comments Box for Mrs Gray’s example>
TOOLS TO USE: Devices/dictionaries/thesauri/peers/help boxes
Within Curriculum for Excellence, the technologies curriculum area relates particularly to contexts that provide scope for developing technological skills, knowledge, understanding and attributes. At Williamston we are striving to do this through creative, practical and work-related activities. In order to meet our own high expectations this year we have been using AAL (Anywhere, Anytime Learning Network) a protected wireless system available to some schools in West Lothian. What does this mean for your child and their learning?
Every class has a small number of devices (ipads/Samsung nexus/kindles) to allow children to experience the variety of technologies on offer.
AAL is used in classes to make learning more flexible and applicable to real life, e.g. if they wanted to extend their learning as they had an unanswered question during an activity, they could personally go research the area quickly and efficiently, using a device and AAL. This type of learning enhances their own and others learning.
AAL and devices have been used in some classes to communicate with other schools through our Glow Meet platform. This has allowed discussions and debates with children across schools.
The use of Apps. in lessons and activities is currently being explored by all teachers in their professional development time. While some have been successfully trialled, we hope to make more progress with this next year in order to fully embrace the technologies available to us.
In addition to this P6 and P7 classes have been adopting the WL initiative BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). This has allowed children the option of bringing their own device into school to use when directed by their teachers. In these classes the use of technologies has been:
Accessing and using email accounts in the world of learning
Using Glow and email platforms for Homework Tasks
Exploring use of Apps. to support learning
Researching, collating and communicating information in creative ways
This opportunity has been further enhanced by the enthusiasm of our parent and carer community and the responsible nature of our learners. As well as speaking locally as events, pupils from Williamston are being recognised at a national level for their work with BYOD. We can’t wait to see where this will take us next year…!
BYOD… opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.
On Friday P6 entered into the realms of sheer and absolute creativity, and, perhaps even without knowing…
In our ‘Digital Technologies Across the Curriculum’ (D-TAC? We’re trying to think of a name!) session we were looking at emailing. We all ‘assumed’ we knew how to do it. 85% of use already have personal email accounts. So we know how to email right? NOT QUITE YET…we discovered!
Key Skills we learnt about EMAIL IN GLOW:
1. Know your login/password (And if it is your device – click ‘save for future’, little box, saves time!).
2. Click on Microsoft Outlook 365 tab. Wow it looks different to my other email account!
3. Find out my own email address… ‘My Profile’
4. Add contacts through ‘People’ – this makes it easier to see my friends, add groups, email quickly.
5. Send an email to Mrs Gray. Wow we filled her inbox, didn’t we P6?
6. Found out what ‘CC’ stands for/means in emailing. Yeah, we had seen it before, did we know what it meant? Nope. It means ‘Carbon Copy’, like if you want other people to see what you’re emailing but it’s not exactly for them. Pretty good idea, right?
7. We all got excited about changing our profile picture, and then had to be even more creative. All our devices were very different. Everything appeared very different on all of our screens. Let’s start real exploration – we found out how to change/create lots of stuff through doing this!
FEEDBACK FROM MRS GRAY…
~ P6 trust yourselves and each other more, remember I am no expert either. Let’s ask each other, before we ask me, if we are unsure about something.
FEED-FORWARD FROM MRS GRAY…
~ What now? Shall we set up an email group? Shall we use email within a lesson/activity (peer assessment method?). You will have better ideas than me…
SO P6… let’s have some FEEDBACK/FEED-FORWARD IN THE COMMENTS…
P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs…
Just as the title says… a small group of us in P6 worked hard this morning to teach Mrs Gray how to use Minecraft (well!). Her prior knowledge was zero, so we are starting by just setting her simple tasks. Today we showed her how to use ‘Creative’ world and build a house.
Primary 6 have been trialing ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) to school last term to further enhance learning experiences and opportunities.
Just some of the things we have been able to do because of BYOD to transform our learning (these wouldn’t have been able to happen without BYOD so we in P6 consider this transformational!) are…
– Personalise our ‘World News’ time by each being able to look at a variety of news websites, blogs and online resources (we could even choose news stories which linked to our own interests and didn’t have to do this as a class – there were no limits!). Some of us even took this home and continue to read news stories regularly…
– Invite more ‘support’ tools into our art lessons by using ‘line drawing’ features in Google to help us when drawing, creating, inventing ARTISTIC MASTERPIECES.
– Use technology in a much more flexible way, for instance, if we had a research point or a ‘Hmmmm, what was that…?’ moment, we could quickly look it up, saving time and ensuring our learning stayed on track. In addition to this, it feels more like real-time, real-life learning… afterall … that’s what it is like out there!
– Take the LEAD in OUR LEARNING. Some of our learning activities were open ended, such as our ‘Victorian Thinkers Keys’, which allowed us to use our devices creatively and find and explore our own tasks or answers.
– Link up to play Minecraft in large groups and, for the first time EVER, share multiple games (during Golden Time – we all LOVE THIS!).
There are so many more things we want to do with BYOD… but hey… we are just at the start of our journey. So… what do you think about BYOD?
