Planning My Classroom Learning Wall: Learning and Thinking Together

Previously I have posted about our School contract and online charter, which use the principle of 3 Bees, "be responsible, be respectful, be safe" to support students understanding of why we have these guidelines. In class we unpick what each principle means to us, and work together to form our classroom learning contracts from these, discussing what they might look like in action, sometimes using digital images and captions to model these processes and routines in action, providing students with visual frames of reference and models of what we think desirable classroom behaviours and actions look like.

As a staff we recently began discussing how we could develop these using the bees as characters to help students link learning behaviours to targets for curricular learning, support self and peer assessment and help develop autonomy and ownership over personal and group learning paths. I thought I'd post today this draft centrepiece for my classroom learning wall, and current thoughts around how I'd like this to work in my classroom. Its a bit tatty at the moment as it is lying on my study floor. Each child is represented in the display as a "bee." The honeycomb in the centre is where we will be displaying our learning to learn and speaking and listening targets for class and group work. These will be unpicked with the class to help identify the smaller steps that describe the learning path we need to follow towards them. Personal targets I am thinking could also be displayed here as "keys to learning," "honeypots," or individual student "flowers." This still needs some thought and discussion with the students though to enble ownership and so the display does not become too contrived.

Anyway expanding the metaphor, and building on colleague sugesstions, since bees tend to work cooperatively within a hive, each hive here represents a student home team or group. I would like the students to extend work we have already begun to develop greater ownership and responsibility for reviewing and evaluating their progress together towards and within these targets, and am currently pondering how we might extend use of tools like comic life, digital imaging, audio recording and our class blog to enable and encourage this.

I was struck the other day by Wordle, and how the visual representations of text had helped me see ideas differently, am considering thispart of the mix to promote talk around learning. I am pondering how the creation of weekly or monthly text files to gather thoughts and ideas during review, might be useful in encouraging and supporting learning about learning. Asking students to use one word to sum up their groups feelings about how they worked together, their learning tasks and outcomes, or to record student descriptions of what they have learned or now understand from a particular activity could be really powerful for later discussion and as evidence of progression in the use of process skills. Student repetition would be really valuable in this case highlighting through the "cloud" commonalities in their ideas and thinking. Perhaps these could also help to support development and use of the vocabulary we need to describe features of learning and thinking together in tasks. They might also be great to display on our learning wall, visually representing aspects of our learning journey, forming starting points for discussion as we develop our grow our common language of learning. They could also be an interesting way to post to our class blog as a starting point to mediate discussions with parents and other stakeholders in our learning community about what has been going on in school.

I also want to link the use of this classroom tool with how we further develop and embed learning within and beyond school through the use of online community tools. A nice tool to use with this would be Honeycomb, for obvious metaphorical reasons, but a new look at home school learning that sees these virtual places as flexible places to extend ongoing classroom projects and activities collaboratively will be an interesting place to start in developing a modelled framework for use of our VLE as we approach the huge changes due to our school in January 2009.

This is only a starting point and a bit of a ramble, but I would value any thoughts or contributions you might have.

Mapping Landmarks; Digitising the Anologue

Wanted to share a nice activity that we worked on in class today. Our theme is based around being a Bristolian, and last week we identified some of the student's and our favourite places in the city, charting these and creating a simple postcard.

Using the landmarks the students had identified, we compiled a collection of labeled digital photographs, printing them out to use with a tourist map in this group challenge. The following learning story, was compiled in Microsoft Photostory, and uploaded to Google video for sharing.

Story Telling Legends

In a recent post I charted my thoughts as I worked through planning my use of multimodal texts and resources to support a writing unit around Myths and Legends. The four weeks of this extended language unit have passed and my class are now eagerly publishing their work. The outcomes as I hinted are their own takes on a local legend about the Stanton Drew Stone Circle.

Drawing on a picturebook originally created by a group of year 4 students, we began a week long big write drafting our text in sections, working firstly on the beginning and then the end, before returning to write the bit they all really wanted to get stuck into, the appearance of the demon fiddler. My intention was to draw on an extended process of talking for writing, role play and experience and exploration of a range of multimodal text types, to help develop their sense of authorship. Working from a strong opening and close, I wanted to contextualise and strengthen their central section of the narrative, an area where previously they have fallen fowl to dialogue based narrative. In order to challenge and encourage use of adventurous vocabulary students were also given an older audience to write for.

Engaging with the text in this way meant as a group the students needed to apply their thinking to how their narrative would develop and flow, as they worked to link the opening and closing sections of their story. Seeing themselves through the eyes of their reader (listener), creating a context for their role of author as designer.

The story itself was a fantastic choice as it turns out, really excited them, firing their imagination and inspiring some fabulous language use. Having rehearsed their narratives for writing, within the drafting process using what we have come to call "podcast voices" on completion, they have asked to publish their stories as a part of their class podcast.

This week working in pairs, the students have been helping each other rehearse their performances. Working through this process has supported further refining and revision of their texts as oral rehearsal and playback highlighted elements that needed to be changed to enable sense making. The students have also taken on roles within the recording process, one acting as director and engineer recording the story while the other performs it, before swapping over on completion of the process.

Colleagues who have observed the students using Podium our chosen recording tool, during this process, have commented on how exciting it has been to see the children engaged in

• discussing, reviewing and polishing their oral presentation,
• situational learning, refining something of which they were already rightly proud,
  
• using and applying a growing understanding of purpose and audience to ground their engagement in meaning making
  

After all this excitement I wanted to share these legendary performances. I have begun gradually publishing these stories with the students on our podcast station. Any comments or thoughts you have would be great to share with the students. Remarks can be left here, on our Podcast Station, or on our class blog. I look forward to hearing from you.

Learning Stories and Comic Life

I eventually got round to buying a copy of Comic Life for PC, from the good folk at TAG Learning on my recent visit to BETT, and having installed it on my laptop, am all geared up to use it as part of my Assessment For Learning toolbox.

In school we keep classroom scrapbooks, where we have begun to use digital photographs alongside written or scribed records of "snippets" from student talk to help tell learning stories. "Narratives of Learning" have been a key feature in my research work, forming the basis for data analysis, as well as acting as a vehicle to share my work with others. Classrooms are multimodal places, and context is key to using "data forms" we collect there. I have come to see learning and teaching events as acts of shared meaning making, where language is the primary mediating tool. Working with young children the ways in we share meanings and negotiate common understanding is usually through tool mediated talk and activity. Despite our knowledge that talk and effective questioning is often more revealing about the processes that students engage in when learning, than the material they record, we still seem to have a strong drive to ensure that what the students do is logged, even if as a dated sentence. What is missing from this as from previous methods of recording progress, tick lists and charts, is frequently the process that lead to the outcome, and the success of the child however small. The joy, the excitement, the disappointment, the shock so readily visible in the faces and gestures of the student, or the gusto and energy that students apply to the tasks they "do," followed perhaps by the surprise or pride in something believed to be so difficult suddenly achievable. Somehow all of this magic, the moments that bring joy not only to the class but that in my opinion, make classroom teaching so worthwhile and exciting, are rarely so transparent or the richness of the experience we shared evident when we look through our exercise books.

I have been incredibly excited by our Class Podcasts and Blog that have begun to inject a student voice literally into the recording system. Context driven activities with a sense of purpose and audience, that have begun to help both my students and myself engage with self review and evaluation, and are beginning through collaborative action to support a growing digital record of the "long Conversation" we have as teachers and learners. I am increasingly aware however that these objects, do not fit into the world of outcome driven assessment. What of the process behind these, the journey and the long conversation hidden behind and that lead to them. Well perhaps tools such as Comic Life can begin to offer me some scaffolding for this.

In PE this term we have been developing "passing and receiving" skills through the playing and designing of simple invasion games, and this week the students have been working in small groups to create their own, with the development in our next session of jigsawing to share our games with each other. The genuine learning experiences that have lead to this would be lost witho0ut the means to log or record them. Armed with digital camera, I had initially thought about creating a PowerPoint Learning story, and then as previously, using PowerPoint for Mac to change these into a video format to share with others. Instead I have opted to use Comic Life, with the students to create comic strips that tell the story behind their game and how it is played. My Numeracy Group require a great deal of practical work and consolidation, and their activities too are often transient mediated by recordings on Dry wipe whiteboards, through talk and the apparatus they use. These experiences are no less important to them as learners, than the need to show progress through written recording. As can be seen in previous posts, these processes too I have been frequently logged using digital Photographs and PowerPoint. I have pondered today, on how the practice of foundation stage colleagues might help me to log these events and processes. Using "post it" notes to record children's talk as we work, that can later be used to annotate digital photographs in Comic Life through the addition of speech and thought bubbles.

Comic Life affords a number of means of publication for the strips developed. They can either be printed out on completion, for inclusion in our scrapbook, or exported to html, for inclusion in our website community pages, adding another means of sharing our activity with carers. On interesting format, that I haven't had a go with yet, is the ability to export as movie. This will be something to play with later.

Welcome to My Classroom: Images from a Learning Walk

My blog is primarily about ICT and Learning, but I am a classroom teacher, and not every hour of my working day is spent using the computer. To prove it here are some photos from my classroom. Last week we had some colleagues visit us from our local secondary school for a learning walk. During their visit they were encouraged to leave messages for us in the form of post it notes about features they liked, or thought would be useful in ther own classrooms. In class as well as our blog, we keep a scrapbook, of things that happen and exciting moments in our learning. I took some photographs of some of the areas of our classroom that my visiting colleagues liked and mentioned, to include in this and share with the students. To show I am not an entirely virtual teacher I thought I would also also share them here with you.


The students were not in for the visit, but this photograph shows something else that our colleagues really liked, the plants that every group have to look after in the middle of their group tables.

This is our target board, the kites are our numeracy targets, the balloons our literacy targets. As we begin to show evidence of these in our work, the kites and balloons begin to rise towards them.

Maths mountain, at the summit is our end of unit objective, and from the base of the mountain upwards the targets we are trying to hit on the way. We have a character who climbs the mountain with us and we use them to help us review our position on the mountain during plenary and opening sessions of our numeracy hour. This structure is helping not only the students but me to plot, track and find our way through the units of work we engage with. It is also helping me to structure my planning and focus my thinking about progression through our work on a weekly basis.

This is one of several Tudor displays in class. It is about Henry VIII and his Six Wives. The concertina books were highlighted as nice features, 3 d elements that drew our visitors in. They tell the story of how king Henry liked to spend his day. The black tights centre right are left over from a previous science display, that I haven't gotten round to taking down. We set the children a challenge to devise a fair test, to see which material would be stretchiest, as Henry was getting older he was getting too large for his tights, his hosiers worried about their heads needed to decide on a material that might fit over his ample frame. Which material could they use to make tights for the king, that would stretch to fit.

This is our learning tree, the leaves have on them things that the students have found interesting or exciting things they have learned, we use them for review, as well as for recording things we would like to celebrate about others as learners or good community members. Around the trunk are our Tudor Me's, framed self portraits, dressed in the tudor style. We have also published these to our communtiy pages on the school website. The thing I was really excited about was how much our visitors wanted tt celebrate the use of ICT by my students, they enjoyed the digital displays available from the school website, and the student voice we were able to bring into the classroom, even though they were visiting afterschool through use of the year group podcast site and Interactive Whiteboard.