Tala+-+Wilford

hi everybody!!!!!
=my name is Tala Malaki and im a first year teacher at Wilford School Petone. i teach a class of about 29 students- a mix of year 3 and 4. Im intrestead in making ict fun for myself and my students. Im a creative/arty person so im looking forward to learning how i can link art with ict. i am also wanting to do a page thingy -ma -gig so my students can get games and acess to fun things to do via the net..=

Goal: this year my goal is to use cit more in my classroom, as a new teacher it is really easy to forget about ict and just use the other periods to do catch up, i myself am able to work my way around a computer really well but teaching it is a different story!!

3 June: I have set up a wikispace for my class and truth be told i think it is really great!. Each kid has their own page and on their page is games which are catered to skills which the child needs to improve on. (maths,writing,reading and spelling) I find that my students really love using it and their learning which makes it even better. I've also put on a link where parents can check notices, as well as upload homework sheets. I just recently added a rainy days link which has games that students can play on a rainy day as they are not alloweed on the web in our school with out the teacher being present. This way my students can still have fun and i know that they are not looking up anything that their not suppose to. my next step will be to get students bloging on there. Great to see how you have progressed with ICT- it sounds like you have a big goal wiith the blogging- have a look at [|21classes] as a start. It is not as functional as some others- but you may not want all the fancy bells 'n whistles as you start out! Really good to see some examples of other classes blogging as this will give you some ideas- try: http://www.room18tis.learnerblogs.org/ Where you will see a list of blogs to visit on the left of the webpage. Nigel@Korokoro

7.8.08 so update... i started my blogs with my class thanks to Nigels hint to use 21 classes which i found to be really great and easy. I teach year 3s and 4 and i thought that this blogging thing was not going to go well but my kids proved me wrong once again. I just started teaching them in small groups of 12 how to sign up and how to write things up and reaction from students was really postive. I thought that it would be best just to start off with writing something simple about themselves and just getting students to comment on what their peers had wriiten about themselves and we basically focused on that for two weeks. This week we have started putting up work (which students were really proud of) on the blogs and students commenting on that. so far it has gone really good and i am pleased that i took the leap of teaching my students to blog because now i can't get them to stop writing.

Good to hear the blogging has gone well- keep on building those skills- try adding slideshares or voice threads. Nigel