Classroom Tales

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for weeks- and since I’ve finished my assignments at the weekend (yay!) I’ve now finally got time!

In the last few days of my first teaching practice in ‘school B’ (with my year 5 class) I had the amazing opportunity to work collaboratively with Suzanne Bartels (@missbartel on twitter)  grade 5 class from Chilawick, BC, Canada!

This collaboration came about pretty much by accident  Suzanne messaged me on twitter asking if she could have a look at some of the primary pad work I’d been doing with my class.  When Suzanne logged on, I was also on the pads, so I started chatting with her (and her class!) and we quickly saw the potential of a collaborative project!

Within a week (as I was nearing the end of my first stint in the school) we had set up a project, and we were both really excited about the prospects.  My class teacher had kindly agreed to give me all of our topic time (which was meant to be Greece) for the next week to spend on the project- just another example of the schools flexible approach to me and my ideas!

Since Suzanne’s class live less than an hour away from Vancouver, we saw a natural link to work together on the Winter Olympics- plus it vaguely could be stretched to cover some of the Greece input (obviously regarding the history of the olympic games etc).  Suzanne’s class were obviously the ‘experts’ on the winter olympics (and had been doing lots of great sounding work on it!) I really wanted to enable my class to tap into their knowledge and learn more about the olympics, Canada, etc…

All our collab’ took place via PrimaryPad, and due to the time difference (8 hours) there wasn’t actually a time when we were both in school at the same time- but we soon got round that!

We started of our collaborative work with a ‘word challenge as  I had already caused some confusion to Suzanne’s class when I told them that it was ‘tea time’    (apparently they all imagined us retreating to a room and drinking tea!)- On the Friday, Suzanne’s class came up with a list of Canadian words for my class to guess the meaning of, and on the Monday after I had introduced the project (to lots of amazed faces from the children- I hadn’t seen them so excited before!) we set about trying to work out what the words were! (the word list, and our dreadfully wrong answers are here if anyone wants a look!)- this was a great introduction to the project, and demonstrated quite quickly to the children the different cultures etc- even though both countries speak the same language!

We then set Suzanne’s class our own word challenge (which was fun, trying to get the children to think of words they use that people from other countries or even other parts of the UK won’t know) which they answered during their class time on Monday (this list is here) – I’m pleased to say that my class got a few more Canadian words right than Suzanne’s class did with the english words (not that it was a competition or anything )

I then spent a lesson introducing my class to the winter olympic games and the different sports that take place- we used some great video from the official olympics websites and generally had a informative time learning about all the interesting sports- and finding out how few medals the UK generally win!

Later on in the day, I allocated my students into groups, and got them to log onto a designated primary pad, introduce themselves and write 5 questions about the olympics and 5 questions about Canada for students in Suzanne’s class to answer.  This proved to be a useful excercise in writing effective questions etc and some great questions were posed.

Suzzanes class then logged on and answered the questions ready for us to review the next day, and also posed some questions to us- about England and also about the history of the olympic games and London 2012.

The next day, we spent time in the UK exploring the history of the olympic games, using a variety of resources, including the wonderful and informative (as ever) brainpop video on the topic.  This was a great learning experience for the children, as they had a real reason to  learn the information (to answer their Canadian friends questions) and they were all very attentive.  We then logged onto Primary pad and the children set about answering the questions that had been posed to them, using the knowledge they had gained earlier and information they had researched on the internet (which provided a great practice opportunity for their online research skills!).

Despite the above being really great, and the children learning a lot out of it, in my opinion the ‘best’ part of the colloab’  took place outside of UK school time.  I gave my children the opportunity to talk in real time to their canadian friends- they were told to log onto a primary pad at a specific time, and then Suzzanes class came online during one of their lessons, and we allocated out our students to different pads so they could talk to each other (closely watched my myself and Suzanne of course!).

This was simply amazing to watch- at 6:45pm, I had 20 out of 28 of my class logging online, and talking in a mature and totally sensible way, to people over 6,000 miles away.  I was really proud of them, and the students were simply buzzing from it. We had quite a good number of parents also online with their children, and from talking to them they were also suitably amazed by what was happening!  My class couldn’t stop talking about it the next day, and here are their (unedited) response to 2 questions that were posed on a priamrypad for them to answer after they had finished talking:-

The One thing I enjoyed most about talking to Canada was:-))

getting to know what their hobbies are (they all seem to like sport.)

i like like c hes kind and very keen about sport  c hes kind and likes alo alot of alot of alot of alot of sport too..

so do i  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i liked having a chat i liked having a chat two .

Made a friend and had a nice chat

getting to know what sport they liked

Talking to them

making friends with them

the one thing that was great was i learnt lots!!!

lots of interesting hobbies and different sports.

The Most interesting thing I learnt was:-

getting to know what their hobbies are.(K won a gold medal for dance.)some people live in Chilliwack BC(same) i was going to say that to e

they have wiis

to get to know what there favourite animals are.

hobbies they have<daniel>

i know they live in vancover

what the weather is like in canada

well aparently it was really mild!!!and they have had no snow!!!!

they have lots of mountains,rivers and streams

i just liked  talking to them it was fun

This whole project really demonstrated to me the huge benefits that can be gained by doing something that is a bit ‘different’ and how flexibility is key to enable these things to happen.   I’m really pleased I’ve had the opportunity to arrange something like this when I’m a student teacher!

Last week, I received a link to the following video which he had made with Suzanne,   and I have to admit watching it caused on of those ‘so this is why I am training to be a teacher’ moments- it was so lovely and really made my day hopefully you’ll see why, and the difference primarypad can make in the video below:-)  (I espeically like the bit from 2:20 ish when I’m teaching him how to use Emoticons )

Thankyou to everyone who posted kind words on my job hunting post- you really reassured me – I was having one of those ‘argghhhhh’ days on Friday