Minecraft St Joseph's Oamaru

The second part of the children investigating learning environments was for them to accurately map what we already had.  They had a go at doing that in term 3 but it didn't look right.  This time, as part of our maths, they children have accurately measured the school and used a scale for their maps.  Some have done it on paper, some investigated 3D modelling software but most chose to do it with Minecraft and the results are surprisingly accurate.

The next step will be to talk about improvements for learning.

Visit to Myross Bush School

Our senior learning team visited Myross Bush School in Invercargill in week 2.  We were interested in their school because they have a "traditional" school building but they have not let single-cell classrooms hold them back.  We were very grateful to them for the visit and we saw lots of interesting things.  Overall we have some very similar things happening, such as using SOLO, BYOD, and Google Docs.  We were really interested to observe how they use spaces for team teaching with one space used primarily for workshops and the other as an independent working space with a supporting teacher.  The key to making all of this work is having transparent learning progressions for students to use and a variety of robust (and dependable) means of students to evidence their learning.

One thing I'm going to change is I thought we would need to use a Google site for planning and lesson guidance as I've been doing with my class.  However, I can now see that all of that could happen as Google docs - good because can personalise them and share them with students very easily through Teacher Dashboard.  Then Google docs can be inserted into a site which will be publically available.  It means that most of the planning work can be in docs rather than a site which everyone says they prefer.  The blogs will link in to an overall Google site so they can still be a prominent point of sharing.

Myross Bush School - similar learning environment to our school (very nice sandpits and adventure playgrounds) and using their spaces creatively to engage students in active learning, through team teaching.

A Day in the Life of a BYOD Classroom