In Our Own time

When we give kids a challenge and some ownership they love it.
They learn as well. Having offered students a chance to come in at lunchtime and work with Lego robotics we have about ten committed students. 


They turn up consistently and work on this.


They are experiencing flow.

One of the ideas I am working on with this group is that
this is not a race and to acknowledge their own achievements.


The Temptation is to "borrow code" from others a little further ahead. 


With our own efforts well get there and when we do we'll understand more than borrowers.
With our own interests and challenges we are more likely to see this through.


Another quote to support this is "be a maker not a taker"

What Mckenzie had to say about Robotics and their Robot Storm.

Storm "So far we have built our robot. We are currently wireing and putting on our sensors. We downloaded the program we needed to use to program our storm robot.Our robot is basically made out of lego,  I like building Storm because it is a great challenge to achieve."

Finally Have a look at this clip that comes without sound.

5 seconds only. What it show is grandparents looking at the kids playing with robotics. I don't think the future is all about robotics but the looks on the faces of grandparents shows how different their learning and lives were.

Restore contacts - Gmail Help

I kindly offered to send a friend a group of contacts in Google. I unfortunately sent her my whole contact list of 1291 rather than a group of 18.

Restore contacts

If you make changes to your contacts that you want to undo, you can restore your full contacts list to an earlier saved version. This allows you to undo changes like:

• Recovering contacts that have been accidentally deleted
• Restoring contacts after an unsuccessful sync
• Undoing a recent import
• Undoing a recent merge

To restore your contacts to a previous version, just follow these steps:

1. Click Contacts.
2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
3. Choose the time you'd like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you'd like to return to where you started.
4. Click Restore. You'll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

To undo a restoration:

• When the operation completes, a notification bar will appear that gives you the opportunity to immediately undo the restore. This notification bar will disappear if you leave Contacts or make edits to your contacts.
• If the notification bar is no longer there, you can always re-run the Restore Contacts tool to take you back to where you started. Just set the tool to take you to the time just before you started the whole process.

The 24 hour rule for Chat contacts:
When you delete a contact in Contacts, it will also get deleted from your Chat list. After the contact is deleted, Chat still remembers the invitation status for that contact for another 24 hours. So if you restore a deleted contact within 24 hours, it will be fully restored in Chat. But if you restore a deleted contact after 24 hours, you'll need to re-invite that person to your Chat list.

Restore contacts - Gmail Help

Set Gmail as Your Browser's Default Email Client with a Simple Hack

Set Gmail as Your Browser's Default Email Client with a Simple Hack

Took me a couple of goes but this from Lifehacker is easy. One important note, do this from a gmail window, and then when you click the link, that has to be in the same browser (or shut all windows and reopen) as you just applied the "try this" link.

Personalised and Formative

There are a lot of places on the web that will help students build Number knowledge and basic facts recollection.


Sites like Xtra Math offer a few keen advantages.

• It is intelligent enough to help develop what students don’t know; personalising their learning
• It focuses on what basic math facts students can recall, not what they can calculate. Three seconds is a carefully selected compromise that is long enough that a relatively slow typist can enter a recalled answer, and short enough so that most finger-counted responses are not erroneously considered fluent. If you increase the interval then you are no longer measuring fluency.
• It is able to manage a class of students calling each in turn to participate.
• It is able to help in the communication with parents and provide formative information for parents
• It has class email updates
• It comes at no cost although donations are welcome

Have established this now and will begin adding students soon 

Here is the teacher overview video if you want a look.

Getting Started with XtraMath -- for Teachers from XtraMath on Vimeo.

Digital Stickers

This idea of digital stickers was first introduced to me last year by Jacqui Sharp http://literacyandict.wikispaces.com/Weemees. Jacqui had a number of great ideas for the 21st Century Classroom.

I used this with a group of year 4 students some who were motivated by collecting a sticker or two that was individual and appeared in their digital work. Read Emma's work which Was given the Magic imagination sticker. Add stickers or ideas to a collection here in an open google doc . How to do it is copied from a support document after Emma's wonderful story

Emma's Happy Place

My happy place is free with rivers, streams and it always has a great big rainbow. It’s my favorite place because I can go in it whenever I want. The people in my happy place are tiny and they only eat  vegetables.Only on Monday they eat ground beef.They eat vegetables    because they don’t like eating animals.The only animals in my happy place are kittens, puppies, butterflies, rainbow birds and unicorns. The grass never turns brown. In the middle of my happy place, there is a big river that has clear, blue, sparkling water that is fresh enough to drink straight away.There are no houses in my happy place so the people sleep under trees. The trees look like huge umbrellas. I never share my happy place with anybody! In my happy place, I feel free because it’s out in the open. The only time it rains is on Thursday and Saturday. My happy place has 1 more day than the real world. Its called Flowerday.My happy place is in my head. :D

 

One of the new features of Google docs is the web clipboard which allows users to copy to a web clipboard and then paste into a Google doc, spreadsheet presentation etc. I have been using this to make digital stickers for students writing.

The web clipboard menu in google docs

There are a few specific cases in which the best way to copy and paste is using the web clipboard menu. When you copy a selection using this menu, the content that you copy is stored and associated with your Google Account. That means that you can copy more than one selection and then choose which one to paste later; it also allows you to copy something on one computer and then paste it on another. To copy a selection using the web clipboard menu, follow these steps:

1. Select what you'd like to copy.
2. Click the Web clipboard menu that appears in the toolbar of your doc.


3. Click Copy selection to web clipboard.
4. In the destination document, click the web clipboard menu; you'll see the selection that you previously copied. If you copied multiple things, you'll see a list of the items that you've recently copied.
5. Place the cursor where you want to paste the content.
6. Click the Web clipboard menu.
7. Select what you want to paste. Depending on your selection, you'll see different formats that you can choose from to paste what you've copied (for example, HTML or plain text).
8. Select a format.

Drawings

You can use the web clipboard to copy shapes from drawings and paste shapes into drawings embedded in Google spreadsheets, documents and presentations, or to copy and paste a drawing from a doc into the standalone drawing editor.

Click the web clipboard icon and select Copy shapes to web clipboard. Then, open the doc that you want to paste the drawing into. Click the web clipboard icon and select the drawing that you want to paste from the menu.

Presentations

You can't use the web clipboard to copy and paste standard text and images in Google Docs presentations yet. You can select entire shapes on a single slide and if the shape is a text shape, the text will be copied to the server clipboard.

Charts

You can use the web clipboard to copy and paste charts from a spreadsheet into a document or drawing.

Here are some more of the stickers.

Trying made easy

I often have people without a google account wanting to know how google apps work. I spotted  this on the google docs blog, a demo site where you don't have to login or register. nice. Presentation - Google Docs

Blogs from schools in Hamilton

Class	Blog address	Year Level
Room 14 Hamilton East School	http://room14-hes.blogspot.com/	Year 3 & 4
Room 15 Hamilton East School	http://room15hes.blogspot.com/	Year 2 & 3
Room 16 Hamilton East School	http://room16hes.blogspot.com/	Year 2
Room 13 Hamilton East School	http://room13hes.blogspot.com/	Year 3 & 4
Room 10 Hamilton East School	http://room10hes.blogspot.com/	Year 5 & 6
Room 11 Hamilton East School	http://room11hes.blogspot.com/	Year 5 & 6
Room 12 Hamilton East School	http://room12hes.blogspot.com/	Year 5 & 6
Room 5 Hamilton East School	http://room5hes.blogspot.com/	New Entrants
Room 4 Hamilton East School	http://room4hes.blogspot.com/	Year 1
Room 1 Hamilton East School	http://room1hes.blogspot.com/	Year 1 & 2
Room 2 Hamilton East School	http://room2hes.blogspot.com/	Year 1 & 2
Room 8 Hamilton East School	http://room8hes.blogspot.com/	New Entrants
Room 7 Vardon School	http://room7vardonschool.blogspot.com/	Year 3 & 4
Room 8 Melville Intermediate	http://melvilleroom8.blogspot.com/	Year 7 & 8
Room 9 Glenview Primary School	http://glenviewgo.com/	Year 1 & 2
Room 3 St Andrew’s Middle School	http://sams.ultranet.school.nz/ClassSpace/53/	Year 7 & 8
Room 7 Frankton School	http://room7frankton.blogspot.com/	Year 3 & 4