A Virtual Writers Workshop
Winchelsea Primary School, Moriac Primary School
Stuart McCoombe, Erin Littlewood
This presentation was part of the 2011 DEECD Innovation Showcase on 13 May.
This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood
Development, Victoria.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I think we’ll get things underway. Thanks everyone for attending our
little presentation today. We’re quite excited about it, so we hope you will be
too or at the end. Again, welcome to the Innovation Showcase. There’s also
another showcase on tonight at the MCG when Geelong beat Collingwood
but we’ll talk about that a little bit later on. For this presentation I’m just going
to quickly go through my role. My name is Stuart McCoombe, a Digital
Learning Coach at Moriac and Winchelsea and this is Erin Littlewood who is
a 5/6 teacher, Ultranet Lead User amongst many other things - Numeracy
Leader as well at Winchelsea. So the way we’re going to just work this little
presentation today is I’m just going to go through my role as a Digital
Learning Coach. I believe there’s some interest in that and then we’re going
to get onto this very exciting Ultranet space, Writers Workshop space, which
we’re quite proud of and it’s working really well. Okay.
So my role as a Digital Learning Coach it’s actually a National Partnership
Funded position. It’s for 2 years. It’s in the Barwon South Network. It’s a
relatively new role. I know pretty much when I applied for the position and
was accepted luckily, I didn’t have a lot of idea of what it involved but it has
been a fantastic position to fulfil and try and help out Moriac and Winchelsea
Primary Schools. We also have one other Digital Learning Coach in the
Barwon South Network and that is school funded as well and I know that he’s
been doing wonderful things. Craig Cook is his name. He’s doing wonderful
things I believe it’s in Grovedale as well.
My position, as I said, as Digital Learning Coach began at the start of the
year 2011, this year obviously, and I believe this was pretty much due to the
wonderful support of my previous teaching team. I was at Torquay for 10
years and they allowed me just to explore digital learning initiatives, they
were willing to take on digital learning initiatives as well and I think it’s really
important to have that support to follow up if you want to go into the digital
learning area. You need that support just to show the initiatives and make
sure that everyone’s on board, so I know there’s a few of my old team
members here so I’ll just mention them.
I just remember I didn’t know what to expect as I said, so when I first was
driving down - Moriac and Winchelsea are two rural schools. I remember still
driving down the road not knowing what to expect. As I said Digital Learning
Coach role was very new. I remember I had some ideas going round in my
head. Okay. Fortunately, when I did attend both schools that was not the
case. We were actually very fortunate. When I did attend the two schools
they were differing staff obviously; issues, resources and different AIPs,
which I was to link in with. Obviously, as I found at both schools, some staff I
suppose were scared, unsure with digital learning and technology, reluctant
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and probably a little bit hesitant at first. Now that’s not saying that the whole
staff was - because as Erin demonstrates, and I’ll show you a bit of footage
later on, there was some really enthusiastic teachers there that were willing
to embrace digital learning into their programs.
My position as a Digital Learning Coach was pretty much to build on their
capacity and support the improvement for students, which is the underlying
factor there. That’s our main - my main role is to link it in with their
performance at school. Another role would be, for me, was encouraging
colleagues to have an active rather than passive involvement in the learning
process by instigating professional development sessions and these were
linked to digital learning and the school’s AIP. So pretty much what it was is I
would go in and show the teachers different programs and initiatives that I
was currently involved with and then it was the process is pretty much for
them to have an active involvement so it’s leaving challenges for them to go
and try and to work and then reflect upon these.
Also my role involves leading and supporting school staff with digital learning
initiatives and issues and conducting weekly meetings and observations in
regard to implementing the digital learning in both schools. Providing staff
with regular opportunities to view and integrate use of digital learning and
providing feedback as to how the programs are used and why they are
beneficial in the classroom and to student learning. I think this was an
important point because the ability to relate digital learning to the teachers’
programs and how it’s going to affect the students and raise their data levels
really did have an impact on the teachers and getting them onboard in the
digital learning processes. Providing staff with digital learning resources such
as the Ultranet, videos and lessons, Web 2.0 tools, website reviews and
resources that can be used, so as well as coaching and mentoring, because
a lot of the time I spend my time actually demonstrating some of the
programs that can be used and how they can be used in the classroom, it’s
also providing them with the opportunities and to see which ways digital
learning can lead to.
As I said, Erin’s fantastic at Winchelsea. At Moriac a young guy called Ben
Raidme is doing fantastic things there as well. One of the initiatives we both
have been working on is Digital Diaries where children reflect each week and
I think it’s important with the goal setting processes that a lot of schools are
going through now. I’ll just play a quick clip of what they do. They do this on
a weekly basis and it has developed through my time, which hasn’t been long
since the start of the year but the way that it has developed and what the kids
are getting out of it has been fantastic.
Video playing:
Student 1:
Hi, my name is Darcy and today we’re doing workshops and that is where
you have to go in a group where you [inaudible 6.51] in maths and I was in
multiplication and we’re doing multiplication sums where the answer was in
the [inaudible 7.00] and if I could do this activity again I would probably try
harder sums and see if I could get it done. I think I did pretty good, even
knowing I didn’t really like multiplication and my goal actually was to learn
how to do at least four or five complicated sums and I reckon I achieved that
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and [inaudible 7.37] sums like I said and yep. [Inaudible 7.42] workshops
and we’re doing it to improve multiplication stuff.
Speaker 1:
I’ll just pause that there. That’s just a quick example. All the kids go through
this reflection process. Ben’s actually set up a digital diary room where they
just go in automatically on a weekly basis, sometimes a daily basis and just
reflect using a flip camera and they upload it and they also are now doing –
I’ll try and find it here for you, reports on their weekly activities and I’ll give
you a quick rundown of those.
Video playing:
Student 2:
Straight away and welcome to was that yeah 7.
Speaker 1:
He’s called in We 7 Plays in 7 Days and the kids just reflect on their 7
favourite moments and what they’ve learnt during the week. So there’s just a
quick example of what Ben and a lot of the other teachers are doing on a
weekly basis so I think it shows just how powerful it is just for the kids to
reflect. And by the end of the year we hope for them to have digital portfolios
including everything that they’ve done throughout the year and it’ll definitely
help with their learning if they can continue to reflect in this way.
Again, what I’ve done this year is quickly align myself with literacy outcomes
at both schools. This was an area of focus, so I’ve just been supporting so
far literacy and Writers Workshop at both schools in the way that digital
learning can have an effect on those. I’ve been encouraging staff to reflect
on their teaching and learning, not just through verbal communication but
also through blogs. I’ve found that blogging actually, instead of sometimes
face to face meetings, you get a lot more - I suppose ‘real life’ thoughts and what they’re really thinking on the blogs because I’m not actually staring them
in the eye, so that’s been quite beneficial there as well. A few home truths and assessing the outcomes of the role of a Digital Learning Coach at this
stage has been linking digital learning with the literacy data and interviewing
process with the staff and ePotential survey and also I’m creating another
one on a Survey Monkey.
Onto the Ultranet, which you’ve all been waiting for. As you can tell, I don’t
mind waffling on about myself but - I’m sorry about that - but Writers
Workshop down at Winchelsea has been fantastic. It came about probably
originally because of the SIF process, which is Student Improvement Focus
that our Barwon South Network instigated - a support for school leaders - and
if you’ve got any questions about that, I think Robyn Jeffrey’s in the crowd
you can refer them to Robyn; she’s fantastic in answering those. Through
this process, we had the Ultranet Coach, Erin Weightman came down. Erin
came down to Winchelsea Primary and taught pretty much to support us in
creating the Writers Workshop and other Ultranet spaces. It was more to
facilitate and provide that support rather than just show us how to do it. She
just recognised, I suppose, the strengths of the staff like Erin and then we
created this space from there. Where we did it was at Winchelsea Primary
School - and the kids, the staff there have been really accommodating. What
we wanted to create was an exciting Ultranet space, not just I suppose with
links on it, we focussed on the learner and have a workable learning space
for them that they can use and to motivate the students with the Writers
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Workshop process that they started at Winchelsea, so I know that the kids
are excited, the staff are excited. To introduce Winchelsea Primary School
though; I couldn’t get away without our principal down there just welcoming
everyone
and
introducing
everyone
to
the
Winchelsea Primary School. I’d better put her on or she’ll shoot me. Yep.
Video playing:
Speaker 2:
Hi my name’s Karen Turner and I’m Principal at Winchelsea Primary School.
We are situated 35km from Geelong and 35km from Colac. We are classed
as a rural school with 133 students. Our SFO is .56 and we have quite a few
needy families here. The reason we have introduced a new program this
year which is Writers Workshop, along with other programs across the school
we have implemented, Writers Workshop was introduced because our data is
very low and we feel that our children are not performing in writing as we
would like them to and as we believe they are capable of. Writers Workshop
has been introduced from Prep through to Grade 6 and our 5/6 students this
year have been using the Ultranet as a tool to support the Writers Notebook.
We have - all of our students in Grade 4, 5 and 6 have their own Netbook at
school and our children from Prep through to Year 3 have a ratio of 1 to 2
Netbooks per student. We have a range - all classrooms have interactive
whiteboards, they have visualisers, they have flip cameras and still cameras
and they’re utilised in all subject areas. Just returning back to the Writers
Notebook, we have the ICT which is used to complement, it’s used as a tool
to engage the students initially and we’ve found that part of using the
Netbooks with the program has been absolutely sensational. The children
are wanting to write, they’re motivated and they’re engaged, so that was a
Number 1 so apart from that we have used a whole range of different
programs and Web 2.0 tools with the Ultranet and incorporated that in there,
including blogs that the children are currently working on.
I am sorry that I cannot be here today. I would have loved to have been here
to support my staff but unfortunately I do have another commitment. I see
the Ultranet as being a sensational tool for the children but also it does take
their learnings back home into - and they can talk to their parents at length
and show their parents the goals they’re working on, the skills that they’re
learning and what they are learning about so again, Ultranet - fantastic, it can
only get bigger, it can only get better. We intend at this stage with our 5/6
utilising them, their skills that they’ve learnt to take it further down the school.
Our 3/4’s will then very shortly be introduced to the Ultranet and doing similar
things to the Grade 5/6’s.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so that was just Karen just introducing Winchelsea Primary School and
that’s where Erin is, who as I said is an Ultranet Lead User and done some
fantastic work on the space so as we said, we’re really excited about this, so
hopefully you can all take something out of today and I’ll hand it over to Erin
who’s just going to explain the process.
Speaker 3:
Well, thank you, Stu. As you mentioned, I’ve been working in the Grade 5/6
area for the past 2 ½ years. I’ve been fortunate enough to be an Ultranet
Lead User and particularly this year is when we’ve really started to
incorporate using it with the students’ involvement. So this is the Grade 5/6
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literacy space, which we have created. I guess we chose to create a literacy
space to support and enhance our new writing program, the Writers
Workshop. So when you first open up to the space, we open up to our Home
page. What we’ve included on our Home page is our literacy blog, so in this
blog we can incorporate either area from reading or writing, so this blog is
designed to celebrate student achievements with their literacy and their
Writers Workshop. During this, the teachers and both students can make
comments on pieces of work, which we just upload along with the students’
photo. They can publish their piece here and once they’ve completed it we
can just continue to refer back to that for the students and if there’s
something that changes on a weekly basis.
Something else which we’ve included on our Home page is a Shelfari, which
is an online bookshelf that our students are able to add to and review books
that they’ve read. So this is a great resource for both reading and writing and
it’s continually being updated - so if we just move across - our whole class is
just continually updating books that they’ve read and adding reviews to that.
So we’ve found that that’s something that the students have really enjoyed
doing.
So now I’ll move along to the tabs. Our first tab we have is our Writers – I’ll
just get Stu to log back in.
Speaker 1:
Oh, the pressure’s on.
Speaker 3:
Come on, Stu.
Speaker 1:
The password is catspremiers2011 anyway if anyone’s interested. I think
we’re going to get there.
Speaker 3:
Okay we’re back.
Speaker 1:
We’re back. We’re back on.
Speaker 3:
So this is a collaborative space, anyway, just to let you know. All right, so
Writers Workshop is something which we’ve introduced to our school this
year. The reason why we introduced it is our students’ interest in writing was
extremely low and also our data showed that they were really low in writing.
So what we’ve come up with is a process to try and make the students more
interested in writing and to get them to become more independent writers, so
it starts off with them exploring a ‘seed’. This can be anything from a photo, a
train ticket, anything they like. They then use different strategies to explore it
so it might be graphic organisers, all sorts of different things they can use.
They then move into a drafting process. I’ll just go through this part quickly
because it’s more about how we’re using the space, but then the next part in
the process is to edit/revise, moving onto publishing their piece of work and
then finally the reflection, which also incorporates conferencing with their
teacher on a regular basis.
So what we’ve started, and I’ll just say now, this is a space which we’re just
starting to use in our classroom at the moment, so it’s something that we’re
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working on and we’ll be improving as we keep working with the kids. So what
we’ve got here is a publication in which the students can go to, to remind
themself each part of the process so we’ve used a Extra Normal, which is a
animated video to explain to the students if they’ve forgotten what they need
to do in the seed part of the process, they just go to the Extra Normal
animated video which we thought was a little bit more interesting than a video
of me explaining how to do it. So they do get very sick of my voice probably.
So we just thought that was something that the students might be a little bit
more interested in, might respond to. What we’ll then do is then move onto
making Captain Drafts. So he’ll go onto explain the draft process but we
haven’t done that yet because we’re wanting to have the students work with
us to actually create it so that they have ownership over the site as well; it’s
not just us creating it and giving it to them. It’s them creating it and using it
as well. So that will be the next process. So that was a great Web 2.0 tool
that we used to do that.
What I’ll move into next is our text types. So what we have here is the
different text types so all the students have this sheet at the moment except
we just have it up on the website, so that they can continually refer back to it
if they’ve lost it. We also have each of the text types over here which then go
into a link to teach the students about the each text type explicitly. So if I
click into the narrative link it then goes into a range of different things related
to a narrative, so here we have a little podcast which the students can play.
Video playing:
Speaker 4:
In the great green room there was a telephone and a letter.
Speaker 3:
So I won’t keep playing that but so the students can listen to the podcast,
scroll down and then they can complete the activities. So how do you know
that this is a narrative text type, explain how you can tell. So one of the
students through MySpace put their response – “I can tell this is a narrative
because it would be impossible for a cow to jump over the moon”. So it’s just
an activity that the students can continually go back to, reply to each other
and build on their knowledge. Over here we have the features of narrative
writing, so they can scroll through and have a look at different examples of
how they can write a narrative which is all just really about trying to make
them more independent learners instead of always having to come up to us.
And we find so regularly in writing we’re having to reteach exactly the same
concepts, so we’re trying to move away from having to do that all the time
and just say “Look it’s on the Ultranet, you need to move onto now, we’ve
learnt that concept so you need to go back and reflect on what we’ve learnt
and have a look yourself”.
If I just go back to our text type page, we also have links to the Jenny Ether
website. Just to save by having links to the websites on here, it just saves
the kids navigating. I know if I put my kids on the Internet and tell them to go
straight to a website, sometimes they get stuck on the way and they end up
in other areas. So if they’re on the Ultranet, this is the only place that they
can go to so they just click on that and that will take them into it to give them
some more prompts for their writing.
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Moving on is the Seeds page, which the seed part of the writing process is
what the kids seem to be enjoying the most because it’s where they can be
really independent and have as much choice as they like in their writing. So
over here we have graphic organisers so they can just click on the link and it
takes them straight to – I might cancel that – takes them straight to the
graphic organisers and as they use different graphic organisers that’s where
we’re going to encourage them to add it to - add a link to it so that then they
can share it with other students.
In our Wiki, we have two reasons for having our Wiki here. One reason is we
want them to share their interest, so if a student was writing about fishing,
they can add it as a sub page and it might have some ideas of seeds that
they could use about fishing, so they might have a picture of a fish or a
diagram of how to clean a fish, that sort of thing. But we also have some
activities which we’d like the students to complete, so National Geographic is
a great website for getting seeds, interesting pictures that the kids can
explore, so we have that in an iFrame here but if they click on one of the
activities, they can look at the picture and just the first simple activity is to get
the kids to write a caption. So we had some students write “Escaping to a
new life” and then we had this student replying back to that student there. So
they can just continue to reply to each other, add different comments so it’s
just really getting them to reply to each other and reflect on what they’re
doing.
Okay, ta. The next part is what we have in our Writers Workshop is the
success criteria, and in our school that’s something that we’ve really been
focussing on, trying to give the students examples of what they need to be
working towards in their VELS. So at our school we are making it – I might
just skip ahead over to something here first – we really want our students to
be aware of where they should be and where they currently are, so let’s have
a look at the photos page – goals and reflecting.
Speaker 1:
Goals, yep.
Speaker 3:
So we have a goals continuum up on our – when this comes – and on this
continuum each student knows exactly what VELS level they’re working at so
I’ll play through this.
Video playing
Speaker 3:
So it’s got all the different areas of writing. The VELS level is along the top
and then we’ve broken it down into kidspeak. So we assess/moderate a
piece of writing and then we use this to judge what VELS progression point
the student is at, and then that becomes their next goal for the future that
they need to work on. So it’s all independently done by the student, the part
of setting their new goal, putting their photo up. So that just goes hand in
hand with - what I was about to talk about was success criteria. If the
students come into this area and they know that they’re currently working at a
3, obviously it’s too much to ask someone working a 3 maybe to improve
right to a 4.25, but they can click on the area maybe they’re going to try and
achieve to reach 3.25, and they can click on that to find a success criteria for
that. Do we have a link to that?
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Speaker 1:
It’s just going to be linked.
Speaker 3:
Okay, it’s something that we’re looking to do in the future is when you click on
that VELS progression point it leads to an example of a piece of writing. So
we’ve been doing persuasive writing at the moment with NAPLAN, so the
students would be able to click on 3 and it would take to an example of a
writing which is at a level 3 for them, so we think that’s going to be something
which is particularly useful for the students that they can easily access that
themselves.
Finally, for the Writers Workshop area is our goals and reflecting part. Here it
gives the students lots of prompts to think about when they’re reflecting and
setting their goals - so “What we are going to do?” - and Stu’s going to go
through this in a moment is we’re encouraging the students to use Web 2.0
tools on the Ultranet to reflect on their goals and to set their goals, so do you
want to take over for this bit, Stu?
Speaker 1:
Dancing. Very quickly. Just a couple of Web 2.0 tools some of you may
have been given a sheet today with resources. All the Web 2.0 tools are on
them that we’ve used. Web 2.0 tools such as Voki we’ll see shortly some of
the students state their goals. VoiceThread, which I’ll also show you in a
moment is really powerful for reflection from the students. They’re able to
write on the screen using the mouse of course and circle different aspects of
their goals and then actually demonstrate it in their published work or their
drafts. So VoiceThread and Voki as well as Vimeo - you’ll see there are
three fantastic web tools to encourage students not only to reflect but
different ways of presenting their work apart from just in their books. We’ve
found at Winchelsea they’ve become excited about different ways of
publishing their work and reflecting on them as well; as well as using Voki to
set their goals so we’ll move on from there.
Speaker 3:
Students space is probably in here.
Speaker 1:
So we’ll move on now to - just quickly to the teacher zone and this is just
pretty much resources again for the teachers. Students can also access this
page so you can see it has teaching focuses for the next week. Once again
the writing block; helpful language over here for writing conferences. Again,
they’re all publication displays and couple of notebook spaces over here as
well. It also has a link to every child in their class in the 5/6 area actually at
Winchelsea. So if we click on Ebony there it will take us straight to her
student page which is here and I’ll had back to Erin. Did you want to explain
the student page? Beautiful and there’s Voki there.
Speaker 3:
Okay so Ebony set up a Voki to show what her goals were.
Student 1:
Hi my name is Ebony. My goals to be effective to improve reading skills for
clarity and confusion with minimal errors.
Speaker 3:
So it’s just something so simple but the kids go crazy for it and they’re much
more excited to do that than write it on a piece of laminated paper or piece of
paper to laminate. So what they then will be encouraged to do is to add
blogs about what they’re learning then go across and it’s very similar to the
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previous page where they have their seeds, and so one of Ebony’s seeds
was her garden.
Video playing
Speaker 3:
I’ll just stop that one there, so - from that, that’s her seed. She then goes on
to explore the seeds, so this is my seed from my garden and she might use a
graphic organiser as we showed before to explore that further. Then in a
Quick Note is where she’d come up with her three text types, so she could
write a procedure and what we would like to encourage the students to do is what would she write the procedure about? She might write a recount about
when she grew her first garden and then she might write a poem about the
vegetables in the garden. So we have a few different examples of seeds.
The toy box is a picture that Ebony did and she did a mind map about it.
Might come back to that one. I might come back to that. That’s a photo
babble of Ebony. She’d already done it in her book. We had taken a photo
of it, used Photo Babble so that Ebony – here we go.
Video playing:
Student 2:
This is my seed that I’ve done and my genre [inaudible 30.47] about how you
do it and procedure about how to make pudding in [inaudible 30.59] garden.
Speaker 3:
Okay, so that’s just another way that they can be talking about their writing.
Drafts and Feedback is where I’m going to hand it over to Stu. This is where
we use VoiceThread.
Speaker 1:
Okay, as I said before this is a Web 2.0 tool we’ve been using really
effectively at Winchelsea, so it allows the students – I’ll play it for you in a
moment. This is their writing criteria here that they can choose their goals
from, then they’re able to demonstrate their draft and they can actually keep
switching back and forth. I won’t quite go into the intricacies of VoiceThread
but you can see here the way it can be used effectively for student reflecting
and also for teachers to provide feedback on.
Video playing:
Student 3:
Hi, my name is Ebony and just today a procedural test. My first goal is that
‘Editing for reading skills and clarity’ and I have proven that right there and
also there and my second goal is “I use 80% of all punctuation used
accurately’ and I have proven that using capital letters at the start of
sentences and full stops at the end of sentences.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so as you can see they actually – as we said, the students actually
love being able to write and scribble on their own work and not destroy it and
also it gives them the opportunity to resort back and forward to the writing
criteria. Also over here is a spot – I’ll stop that now – to – sorry – it’s a spot
for teachers as well and students can provide feedback. It can be either just
typing a comment or they can also respond verbally using the microphone as
well, so it’s a great tool that we’ll continue using.
Speaker 3:
[inaudible 33.09]
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Speaker 1:
And that – sorry – okay, that is pretty much all we were going to show you
just today. Publishing and Celebration – this is going to be a page that’s still
being developed. We’re going to use Web 2.0 tools and we haven’t
developed this page yet because we’re going to leave it up to the students to
the way that they wish to publish their works. So there’s so many different
options using Web 2.0 Tools or taking photos of their work and putting it up,
so that’s going to be up to the students and My Links as well, this is going to
be where the 5/6’s will be creating their own Delicious account, which is like
an internet bookmarking site where students will be able to upload their own
internet sites that they’ve found on their writing seeds and it will keep them
there for future reference and future seeds that they may develop.
So to finish off, ‘Where to from here?’ probably is the question to ask. We’ve
found this to be really exciting. I know using the example of one of the boys
in the 5/6 area that we know well wasn’t interested in writing at the start of the
year, had no interest, couldn’t get a lot of publishing out of him at all, well
definitely with his writing, struggled for ideas - as soon as he, I suppose, saw
that he could bring in video, audio, different ways of publishing his work first
of all using - I think it was Movie Maker - also bringing videos in. He has
written some fantastic pieces already and his improvement hopefully will
show through – I know it will in the data but just him being able to bring in
videos of his dad hunting, photos of his dad hunting and there was some
interesting-looking pigs that Dad had actually got at the time. Him being able
to write about those things really made a difference for him and it’s been –
we’ve found - it’s been throughout the area just students now are excited
about it, they’re looking forward to their writing and presenting it in these
different ways, so at the moment it’s in the 5/6 area. We do hope to – we will
be integrating it throughout Winchelsea Primary School, so once we’ve got it
embedded in the 5/6 area we’ll move onto 3/4. It’s also going to be an ever
evolving program and the space will be, as well. We want students to have
an input into what they want to put on it and how they can present their work
because the whole aim of it is to be a collaborative page. So we’ve got a
couple of testimonies from kids as every good presentation should have that
we may show very quickly. It’s like one of those infomercials isn’t it? So in
closing - we’ll have questions just at the completion of these videos if we’ve
got time maybe.
Speaker 4:
The next session everyone doesn’t start until 11.55 so you do have time, you
don’t need to break off straight away. You can stay after this session.
Speaker 1:
That makes me feel better, I saw people leaving. So I’ll show you a couple
of, yeah, testimonies from the kids. These are just – they are asked a simple
question – what they’re enjoying about their writing, so there’s been no
prompts put up behind them or anything like that. No sticks poking them on
the side and then we’ll have some questions after. So just in closing - before
we put them on - we hope you did get something out of today. I’m sure
there’s some ideas and as we said we’re welcome to further ideas in the
future in developing spaces such as this and again it all relates back to the
student, the learner, and making sure that they’re accommodated, which will
result in the school’s data obviously also improving. We’ll quickly put on the
testimonies to show that it does actually work. We’ll get there eventually.
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Video playing:
Student 4:
I like it better on the Ultranet because it’s not as boring as just getting a pencil
and doing it in your book and - it’s actually it would be more fun to do it on a
computer than it would on a book.
Student 5:
I like on the Ultranet that in the movie it’s got more detail and you have to
think more because one point it could be in the city and then it could be in the
country, at the countryside but if you’ve got a teacher that just one blank
picture and with the teachers they could help you like more words and stuff
here.
Student 6:
It can give us a bit more interesting writing your seed because you can - by
hand because you might have more ideas and it’s a little bit quicker than
writing by hand.
Student 7:
I’m looking at what are we looking forward to abou,t yeah, it’s on – it’s the
seed and how we’re going to be doing the seeds on the Ultranet, and yeah.
Student 8:
What I’m looking forward to about the Ultranet is getting feedback from the
teachers and all the different seeds that we can make.
Speaker 1:
Okay that’s just a snapshot of some of the kids. As we said, the program the
page is still just starting out so a few have sampled it and are looking forward
to it, so that concludes our presentation again. I hope you got something out
of it and enjoyed it. If there’s any questions at all – if there’s any about how
you do the spaces and things it’s probably best to refer to your Ultranet Lead
users. They’ll show you how to create those publications and things but if
you do have any questions…
Question 1:
Hi. I’m just wondering is there a collaborative space we can join to share this
stuff with you?
Speaker 1:
On this one?
Question 1:
Yeah, on Writers Workshop.
Speaker 1:
Yeah definitely. You can join us on this. The one we’ve shown today is a
sample page, so you’ll be able to join that one if you’d like, and then add in
any input that you could as well. We also have in the Barwon South Network
a Digital Learning Team. I think it’s just starting out now, which is a fantastic
innovation as well, so that will be a site that you may join to get ideas such as
that and you can provide feedback via that way.
Question 1:
We search for it to get to this one?
Speaker 1:
If you just search for Winchelsea you’ll see it just says 5/6 sample page. I
think its Writers Workbook but yeah Winchelsea. I can spell.
Question 2:
It’s a free space to join up. The other children have got the kids in there
haven’t they?
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Speaker 1:
You can, yeah. There is a student page if you want to join up to that one.
That’s a sample page as well so you will be able to.
Question 2:
You don’t mind us joining that one?
Speaker 1:
No, that’s fine as well. Might get the opportunity to accept you today, but no feel free to join them because they are sample pages and you can either give
us ideas or show them at your respective schools. No other questions?
Speaker 3:
Anyone else?
Speaker 1:
That’s it? All right, that’s it. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
End of presentation.
For more information about the topics discussed in this podcast, please visit the Department
for Education and Early Childhood Development’s website education.vic.gov.au.
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