Beginning of term 2 Inquiry Update

This term, I hope find out about the characteristics of mathematical thinking which my students are displaying. I hope to do this through using screencasts. At the end of last term, I was able to listen back to some really interesting screencasts which my students had created. Through these screencasts, I was able to clearly see gaps in student knowledge when it came to explaining their mathematical thinking. I was drawn to the fact that a lot of this information I was able to gather from the screencasts would not have been possible (or would have been much more difficult) when just looking at students' written responses to mathematical problems.

This term, I hope to use screencasts as another dimension for students to share their mathematical reasoning, and as an assessment tool to student learning. This may look like:

- Creating a rubric which students fill out after completing each screencast, in regards to their mathematical thinking/ explanations.

- Using screencasts to explain what they have already done to solve a mathematical problem.

- Using screencasts while they solve a mathematical problem.

- Exploring language used by students in their oral mathematical explanation.

Holiday blogging

On the last day of term 1, most students went home for a break from school. So did we! However, a number of students in team 4 continued to share visible learning online throughout the two weeks of the holidays.

I have seen the great results of the holiday blogging programme, run by Rachel Williamson at the University of Auckland. However, these holidays were different. Other than a number of creative tasks suggested by one of the year 6 teachers, there was no organised blogging programme, and no one tasked with the job of ensuring students were receiving comments on their blogs. This meant that any student who blogged was motivating themselves to create and share the blog posts.

Another thing which we noticed was that not only were these students writing quality blog posts which were interesting, creative, and informative, they were also leaving quality comments on other students' blogs and replying to quality comments left on their blogs, creating an online discussion about their DLO.

Zaeeda posted 41 blog posts over the holiday period. I enjoyed seeing her 'Daily Animal News' posts which she shared daily. On each of these blog posts, she would draw her own images of a chosen animal, write a narrative story about this animal, and then create a short comic strip. Zaeeda also shared some interesting holiday events with her blog viewers. 

Jahzara posted 25 blog posts over the holiday period. I was amazed with the creativity of Jahzara along with two of her friends from room's 6/7/8. These students created collaborative google presentations during the first week of the holiday. They each contributed to the presentations from afar. Like Zaeeda, Jahzara also shared some interesting holiday blog posts throughout the two weeks.

The students of team 4 made me extremely proud over the holidays. The energy and motivation evident from the students who blogged over the holidays was exciting and extremely positive. See our blog post about our holiday bloggers on our Room 10 class blog.