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toc =Welcome to the Reporoa Valley Schools wiki!=

You must be ready to be inspired by our cluster teachers!

Instant Chat with your cluster colleagues through this wiki!
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Julie from Mihi inspired this idea of instant messaging through this cluster space! She wondered if it might be possible, she thought it would be great and guess what -it's possible, so you can make it great. Just add your name in the space above and while you have this site open "gabbly" will look for others who are online and their names will appear on the right hand side of the "gabbly" box above. You can change your identity name if you need to. This instant chat is designed for easy connection between users of a website and does not require as much set up as "skype". If you are a wikispace user you can embed this gabbly widget by going to edit, clicking on the embed widget button, and selecting "gabbly" and you are done! Have a go! Thanks Julie for the inspiration.

Juniors School Teachers Big Day Out
media type="custom" key="1534743"media type="custom" key="1536549" Pam from Bellevue highly recommends this site for buying your technologies [|www.ascent.co.nz] A valuable resource she recommend is a USB Digital voice recorder such as the one pictured below. These range in price from around $70 to $300. The price increases based on the number of hours of recording the device can store, its hard drive space and quality of the casing. Pam found this tool invaluable for portable audio recording with a quality higher than most mics plugged directly into the computer.

SOLO Taxonomy - from the Regional Meeting Term 2
I am happy to say, I was quite wrong. I realised that I had been exposed to SOLO before, about two years ago, but having become familiar with Gardner, Blooms and co - SOLO seemed to be easier to understand. Having moved a distance along the road to inquiry learning since last looking at SOLO, it was much easier to understand and see its relevance.
 * On Tuesday I went to a Home Group meeting at Ohaupo School. This was a gathering of teachers, principals, and facilitators in the Waikato/Bay of Plenty region. This was a workshop on SOLO Taxonomy - Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes -. I had looked on the net beforehand to see what this approach to learning was about and to be honest didn't feel very enthusiastic! It looked to be about as useful as putting on a third pair of pyjamas on a hot night!!! What with Booms, Garner, De Bono - I felt that another one would just make for confusion!

I came away with a number of favourable impressions:

Rather than describe the whole thing, I will include the connection to the wiki space which contains all the material which was used in the workshop presentation. I will just add a few of the useful tips which I picked up - for using SOLO in the classroom. These ideas come from classroom teachers I hope find them of value for planning, and classroom practice.
 * It seems to be user friendly for children.
 * It is possible to see where it fits into the picture with other approaches, so it is not either or, but another useful tool for encouraging children to be aware of their learning and what they need to do to advance it.


 * A teacher from Te Uku school went away from a SOLO workshop and made an A3 version of the diagram which represents the learning progressions - you will recognise it when you flick through the wiki space - starts with a dot and then vertical stripes - She has it up in her classroom and uses it to help children to see where they are in their learning and where to next. She simply points to the chart and asks "Where do you think you are now?" and "What do you need to do to get to the next stage?"


 * Another teacher had a chart with the different steps involved in creating better sentences. There was a velco strip underneath the strip and the children had a passport size photo of themselves which they could stick onto the chart and move as they improved their skills in writing sentences.

One hint that I picked up during our group work - it seemed easier to often go to the end stage and work backwards when thinking about planning and assessment criteria and how they related to Solo Taxonomy. One activity that we did, was a bit confusing ... we all had different ideas about what we had to do and how we were supposed to go about it!!! We learned how important it was to have well thought out learning intentions first!! I will leave this here and just add the wiki space for you to go to. Hope you find it useful! Juliet Allan - Reporoa Primary. Wiki is: http://waikatobop-ictpd.wikispaces.com PS I hope this address works ... If not go to Regional and home group Meeting then regional meeting wiki space. The address is on there too and really well worth looking at ... loads of resources!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cheers Juliet

Visiting Our Cluster Classrooms
Last Wednesday I visited Lesley's classroom at Horohoro Primary to learn about using podcasting with juniors. I was amazed at how comfortable the children were using many icts in their daily programme. I was shown how to make a podcast by a student (about 7yrs). I could certainly see how useful podcasting would be for improving the oral language skills of the children in my own class. I left Horohoro with lists of super websites and You Tube video ideas. Thank you Lesley for spending your valuable time showing me how ict is working in your room. It has been motivating (and I'm now hooked on You Tube!) Thanks to Rochelle for organising this visit for me. Diane W.

This is very inspring Diane. Joseph from Ngakuru Thanks Lesley, hope we can inspire you some day soon. Margaret

Thanks for your comments Diane. I really enjoyed having you in the class! The last sharing session we all had as a cluster was lots of fun and I am using quite a few of the ideas gained. I definitely get a lot out of our workshops etc. Kidpix is an exciting tool for our juniors. We found maps recently in the __backgrounds__ and the children inserted a short video of themselves saying their addresses. This was a fun way to meet our main oral language goal for this term. The children personalized their pages by adding colours, their names, labels for the main islands of NZ etc. and a photo of themselves. Lesley (Horohoro)

=Breaking News - the cheapest interactive whiteboard=

Interesting to think about the financial output vs the educational purpose of this concept media type="custom" key="755601"

Term One's Cluster Update
[|RVS Term 1 Update.pdf]

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