Work during 2016
Over the last term my team and I have been working towards developing learning blogs with our students.
I created a year 8 blog which now acts like the old traditional white board. Students now have access to learning 24/7 and from anywhere in the world. Parents and whanau members can also go onto our blog and look at the work students are doing, help students at home and check on the progress students have made via students own learning blogs.
We have also utilize the use of google classroom when sharing practise activities, reading material, assignments when students are needing their own individual copies.
The beauty of working this way is that it allows the teacher to become more of a facilitator of learning by freeing up time to work with individual students, students can work together using shared google doc (and they don't even need to be in the same place to do this) and with time it is my hope that the students become self directed learners as they also have instant access to information they are interested in.
One of the negative aspects of working online and this is the only negative that I see at this time is that students are often very distracted by gaming, facebook, youtube and social networking.
Hapara student dashboard is being trialed at the moment and might help in providing greater on task behaviour.
One of the other ways to combat this issue is to include some of these sites into the teaching programme. ie social networking, youtube, facebook. which I often do in maths and inquiry.
Below is a link to our blog. You will also noticed is that it also links to our student blogs. Please feel free to look through them and make some positive comments on their work. Our students love reading positive comments about their work.
http://tarawerayear8.blogspot.co.nz/
This is a story of my teaching practise. It has my thoughts, feelings, beliefs about teaching and evidence of my professional practise.
