Wednesday 30 November 2011

ccGlobal Christmas Message

Welcome to my Blog. I'm new at this so please bear with me.

A little about me first, then I'll go into a project I've been working on in school with my class.

My Name is Andrew Allmark. I'm a Yr 5 teacher at St Augustine's College. I'm jumping into technology and loving what it can do for me as a teacher. I'm always (like we all are) looking for new ideas and ways to teach kids in the classroom. I'm into my sports (AFL, Cricket)  and music (Foo Fighters), big time, and I'm slowly taking up photography (need plenty of help here). Follow me on twitter @andallm.

What I've noticed this year is that the world, and teaching world, is becoming a smaller place and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype have played a big part in this. This has made it easier for teachers to collaborate around the world.

It's great to see that there are so many teachers all over the world looking to collaborate with one another and also do some lessons and activities together. My grade partner Liz (@lizarmenio twitter name) and I have being working closely with a school in Iowa, VanMeter. We have created an advert on encouraging people to come to Australia for them to view and comment on, and have also got the classes in different countries to write a Xmas book together using My Ebook (http://www.myebook.com)/

By doing this we have seen a new engagement and focus in the boys and an excitement in them doing their work that we just haven't seen before.

Liam Dunphy (@liamdunphy twitter name) decided to take the whole global classroom phenomenon one step further and created ccGlobal (http://ccglobal.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network). For December he and other teachers came up with the idea of getting students to send Christmas/holiday messages to each other using qr codes.

I took up on this idea with no idea what a qr code was or how to make one. After watching Liz go through the process and creating a great message with her class, it only inspired me further. I talked it over with the boys in my class and we decided to read to the world 'An Aussie Night Before Christmas' adapted by Yvonne Morrison.

The boys relished participating in this project and all thoroughly enjoyed themselves. All boys participated and wanted to be involved. They only had about 2 lines each but they practiced reading them, adding expression to the voice and making sure they made no errors.

My next task was to upload the video somewhere and create the qr code. Creating the qr code was easy, just go to http://www.qrstuff.com/. Uploading the video was the hard part. First, I tried Voice Thread but had trouble trying to view it with the qr reader. I then went to glogster (http://www.glogster.com/) and couldn't believe how simple it was to create a poster/blog. One other thing is that it turned out much more visually appealing than I could have ever imagined. Great results and will definitely use it again and introduce the students to it.

A big thanks to Liam and Liz for all there help.

Here's a link to the ccGlobal Message http://mrallmark.edu.glogster.com/5accglobalxmas and the QR code. Have a look and comment.

Oh and Merry Xmas to all and a Safe and enjoyable New Year.    

2 comments:

  1. Great post. Love the ccGlobal project.

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  2. Lucky boys to have 2 engaging and passionate teachers! Loved reading your views of the process!

    ReplyDelete